The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 2

Torriti had gone on the wagon for the exfiltration, which probably was a bad idea inasmuch as the lack of booze left him edgier than usual. He skulked through the small room of the safe house over the cinema the way a lion prowls a cage, plunging round and round so obsessively that Jack became giddy watching him. At the oriel window the Fallen Angel kept an eye on Sweet Jesus walking his muzzled lap dog in endless ovals in the street below. Every now and then he'd remove his watch cap and scratch at the bald spot on the top of his head, which meant he hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Russian defector, hide nor hair of his wife or eleven year old son either. Silwan II's radio, set on the floor against one wall, the antenna strung across the room like a laundry line, burst into life and the voice of the Watcher in the back row of the cinema could be heard whispering: "Der Film ist fertig... in eight minutes. Where is somebody?"

"My nose is twitching to beat the band," the Sorcerer growled as he pulled up short in front of the clock over the mantle. "Something's not right. Russians, in my experience, always come late for meetings and early for defections." The pounding pulse of the imperturbable cuckoo ticking off the seconds was suddenly more than Torriti could stomach. s.n.a.t.c.hing his pearlhandled revolver from the shoulder holster, he grasped it by the long barrel and slammed the grip into the clock, decapitating the cuckoo, shattering the mechanism. "At least it's quiet enough to think straight," he announced, preempting the question Jack would have posed if he had worked up the nerve.

They had made their way into the Soviet Sector of East Berlin in the usual way: Torriti and Jack lying p.r.o.ne in the false compartment under the roof of a small Studebaker truck that had pa.s.sed through a little-used checkpoint on one of its regular runs delivering sacks of bone meal fertilizer; Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel, dressed as German workers, mingling with the river of people returning through the Friedrichstra.s.se Station after a day of digging sewage trenches in the western part of the city. Sweet Jesus had had a close call when one of the smartly dressed East German Volkspolizei patrolling beyond the turnstiles demanded his workplace pa.s.s and then thumbed through its pages to make sure it bore the appropriate stamps. Sweet Jesus, who once worked as a cook for an SS unit in Rumania during the war and spoke flawless German, had mumbled the right answers to the Volkspolizei's brittle questions and was sent on his way.

Now the plumbing for the exfiltration was in place. The defector Vishnevsky and his wife would be smuggled out in the fertilizer truck, which was waiting for them in an unlighted alleyway around the corner from the cinema; the driver, a Polish national rumored to have a German wife in West Berlin and a Russian mistress in the eastern part of the city, had often returned from one of his fertilizer runs well after midnight, provoking ribald quips from the German frontier guards. An agent of the French Service de Doc.u.mentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), carrying a diplomatic pa.s.sport identifying him as an a.s.sistant cultural attache, was scheduled to pa.s.s close to the cinema at midnight on his way back from a dinner at the Soviet emba.s.sy. Allied diplomats refused to recognize the authority of the East German police and never stopped for pa.s.sport controls. His Citroen, with diplomatic license plates and a small French flag flying from one of its teardrop fenders, would spirit the Sorcerer and Jack past the border guards back into West Berlin. The two Rumanians would go to ground in East Berlin and return to the west in the morning when the workers began to cross over for the day. Which left Vishnevsky's eleven-year-old son: the Sorcerer had arranged for the boy to be smuggled across by a Dutch Egyptologist who had come into East Germany, accompanied by his wife, to date artifacts in an East Berlin museum. The Dutch couple would cross back into West Berlin on a forged family pa.s.sport with a blurred photo taken when the boy was supposed to have been five years younger, and a visa for the Dutch father, his wife and 10-year-old boy stamped into its very frayed pages. The Sorcerer had been through this drill half a dozen times; the sleepy East German Volkspolizei manning the checkpoints had always waved the family through with a perfunctory glance at the pa.s.sport photo. Once over the border, the three Russians would be whisked to the Tempelhof airport in West Berlin and flown in a US Air Force cargo plane to the defector reception center in Frankfurt, Germany, and from there on to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

But the success of the exfiltration hinged on Vishnevsky and his family shaking off their Watchers-there were KGB people at Karlshorst who did nothing but keep track of the other KGB people-and making their way to the safe house over the cinema. Torriti resumed his prowl, stopping once every orbit to peer over the Fallen Angel s shoulder at the street.

Another burst of static came from the radio on the floor. "Film ist zu Ende. All must leave. Gute Nacht to you. Please for G.o.d's sake remember to deposit the Geld in my account."

In the street below figures bundled into long overcoats hurried away from the cinema. Sweet Jesus, stamping his feet under a vapor lamp, glanced up at the faint light in the oriel window under the eaves and hiked his shoulders in an apprehensive shrug. Jack pulled the antenna down and started packing it away in the radio's carrying case. "How long do you figure on waiting, Harvey?" he asked.

The Sorcerer, sweating from alcohol deprivation, turned on Jack. "We wait until I decide to stop waiting," he snapped.

The Irishman in Jack stood his ground. "He was supposed to get here before the film ended." And he added quietly, "If he hasn't shown up by now chances are he's not going to show. If he hasn't been blown we can reschedule the exfiltration for another night."

The Fallen Angel said anxiously, "If the Russian was blown, the safe house maybe was blown. Which leaves us up the creek filled with s.h.i.+t, chief."

Torriti screwed up his face until his eyes were reduced to slits. He knew they were right; not only was the Russian not going to turn up but it had become imprudent for them to hang in there. "Okay, we give him five minutes and we head for home," he said.

Time pa.s.sed with excruciating slowness, or so it seemed to Jack as he kept his eyes fixed on the second hand of his Bulova. At the window, Silwan II, rolling his head from side to side, humming an ancient Rumanian liturgical chant under his breath, surveyed the street. Suddenly he pressed his forehead against the pane and grabbed his stomach. "Holy Mother of G.o.d," he rasped, "Sweet Jesus went and picked up the dog."

"d.a.m.nation," cried Jack, who knew what the signal meant.

The Sorcerer, freezing in mid-prowl, decided he badly needed a swig of medicinal whiskey to clear the cobwebs from his head. "Into every life a little rain must fall," he groaned.

The Fallen Angel called, "Oh, yeah, here they come-one, two, oh s.h.i.+t, seven, wait, eight Volkspolizei wagons have turned into the street. Sweet Jesus is disappearing himself around the corner."

"Time for us to disappear ourselves around a corner, too," Torriti announced. He grabbed his rumpled overcoat off the back of a chair. Jack crammed the radio into its satchel and the three of them, with Jack in the lead and the Sorcerer puffing along behind him, ducked through the door and started up the narrow stairs. It was the route they would have taken if the Russian defectors had turned up. From three floors below came the clamor of rifle b.u.t.ts pounding on the heavy double doors of the cinema, then m.u.f.fled shouts in German as the Volkspolizei-accompanied by a handful of KGB agents-spread out through the building.

At the top of the stairs Jack unbolted the steel door and pushed it open with his shoulder. A gust of wintry night air slammed into his face, bringing tears to his eyes. Overhead a half moon filled the rooftop with shadows. Below, in the toilet off the cinema, heavy boots kicked in the false door at the back of the broom closet and started lumbering up the narrow stairs. Once Jack and Torriti were on the roof, the Fallen Angel eased the door closed and quietly slid home the two bolts on it. The Sorcerer, breathing heavily from the exertion, managed to spit out, "That'll slow the f.u.c.kers down." The three made their way diagonally across the slippery s.h.i.+ngles. Silwan II helped the Sorcerer over a low wall and led the way across the next roof to a line of brick chimneys, then swung a leg over the side of a wall and scrambled down the wooden ladder he had planted there when the Sorcerer had laid in the plumbing for the exfiltration. When his turn came Jack started down the ladder, then jumped the rest of the way to the roof below. The Sorcerer, gingerly stabbing the air with his foot to locate the next rung, climbed down after them.

The three of them squatted for a moment, listening to the icy wind whistling over the rooftops. With the adrenalin flowing and a pulse pounding in his ear, Jack asked himself if he was frightened; he was quite pleased to discover mat he wasn't. From somewhere below came guttural explicatives in German. Then a door leading to the roof was flung open and two silvery silhouettes appeared. The beams from two flashlights swept across the chimneys and illuminated the wooden ladder. One of the silhouettes grunted something in Russian. From a pocket the Fallen Angel produced an old 9 mm Beretta he had once stripped from the body of an Italian fascist whose throat he'd slit near Patras in Greece. A subsonic handgun suited to in-fighting, the Beretta was fitted with a stubby silencer on the end of the barrel. Torriti scratched Silwan II on the back of the neck and, pressing his lips to his ear, whispered, "Only shoot the one in uniform."

Bracing his right wrist in his left hand, the Fallen Angel drew a bead on the taller of the two figures and pulled back on the hairpin trigger. Jack heard a quick hiss, as if air had been let out of a tire. One of the two flashlights clattered to the roof. The figure who had been holding it seemed to melt into the shadow of the ground. Breathing heavily, the other man thrust his two arms, one holding the flashlight, the other a pistol, high over his head. "I know it is you, Torriti," he called in a husky voice. "Not to shoot. I am KGB."

Jack's blood was up. "Jesus H. Christ, shoot the f.u.c.ker!"

The Sorcerer pressed Silwan II s gun arm down. "Germans are fair game but KGB is another story. We don't shoot them, they don't shoot us." To the Russian he called, "Drop your weapon."

The Russian, a burly figure wearing a civilian overcoat and a fedora, must have known what was coming because he turned around and carefully set his flashlight and handgun on the ground. Straightening, he removed his fedora and waited.

Moving on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, the Fallen Angel crossed the roof and stepped up behind the Russian and brought the b.u.t.t of the Beretta sharply down across his skull over an ear-hard enough to give him splitting headaches for the rest of his life but not hard enough to kill him. The Rumanian deftly caught the Russian under the armpits and lowered him to the roof.

Moments later the three of them were clambering down the dimly lit staircase of the apartment building, then darting through a corridor reeking of urine and out a back door to an alley filled with garbage cans piled one on top of another. Hidden behind the garbage cans was the fertilizer truck. Without a word the Fallen Angel vanished down the alley into the darkness. Torriti and Jack climbed up into the compartment under the false roof of the vehicle and pulled the trap-ladder closed after them. The engine coughed softly into life and the truck, running on parking lights, eased out of the alley and headed through the silent back streets of East Berlin toward a Pankow crossing point and the French sector of the divided city beyond it.

Even the old hands at Berlin Base had never seen the Sorcerer so worked up. "I don't f.u.c.king believe it," he railed, his hoa.r.s.e cries echoing through the underground corridors, "the KGB f.u.c.ker on the roof even knew my name" Torriti slopped some whiskey into a gla.s.s, tossed it into the back of his throat and gargled before swallowing. The sting of the booze calmed him down. "Okay," he instructed his Night Owl, "walk me through it real slow-like."

Miss Sipp, sitting on the couch, crossed her legs and began citing chapter and verse from the raw operations log clipped to the message board. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard over t.i.to Gobbi's 78-rpm interpretation of Scarpia. It was an indication of Torriti's mental state that he didn't seem to catch a glimpse of the erotic frontier where the top of her stocking fastened to the strap of a garter belt.

"Item number one," began Miss Sipp, her voice vibrating with suppressed musicality. (She had actually signed on as Torriti's Night Owl in order to pay for singing lessons at the Berlin Opera, which ended when her teacher informed her that she had almost as much talent as his rooster.) "The listening post at Berlin Base noticed an increase in radio traffic between Moscow and Karlshorst, and vice versa, eighty-five minutes before the defector and his family were due to show up at the safe house."

"b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were getting their marching orders from Uncle Joe," the Sorcerer snarled.

"Item number two: The sister of the cleaning woman who works at the hotel near Karlshorst called her contact in West Berlin, who called us to say the Russians were running around like chickens without a head, i.e., something was up."

"What time was that?" Jack, leaning against a wall, wanted to know.

"D-hour minus sixty minutes, give or take."

"The f.u.c.kers knew there was going to be a defection," figured the Sorcerer, talking more to himself than to the eight people who had crowded into his office for the wake-like postmortem. "But they didn't get ahold of that information until late in the game."

"Maybe Vishnevsky lost his nerve," Jack suggested. "Maybe he was perspiring so much he drew attention to himself."

The Sorcerer batted the possibility away with the back of his hand. "He was a tough cookie, sport. He didn't come that far to fink out at the last moment."

"Maybe he told his wife and she lost her nerve."

Torriti's brow wrinkled in concentration. Then he shook his head once. "He'd thought it all through. Remember when he asked me if I had a microphone running? He was testing me. He would have tested his wife before he brought her in on the defection. If he thought she'd lose her nerve he would have skipped without her. As for the kid, all he had to know was that they were going to see a late movie."

"There's another angle," Jack said. "The wife may or may not have gone to bed with the rezident-either way she was probably afraid of him, not to mention ashamed of the trouble she'd brought down on her husband after he confronted the rezident. All of which could have given her enough motivation to defect with Vishnevsky."

"There's smoke coming out your ears, sport," Torriti said, but it was easy to see he was pleased with his Apprentice. The Sorcerer closed his eyes and raised his nose in the direction of Miss Sipp. She glanced down at the log sheet balanced on her knees.

"Oh dear, where was I? Ah. Item number three: The Rabbi reported in from the German-Jewish Cultural Center to say that East Germany's Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung troops were mustering next to vehicles parked in the courtyard behind the school in the Pankow district. That was D-hour minus thirty-five minutes."

"The time frame would seem to suggest that the Russians were the ones who were tipped off, as opposed to the Germans."

All heads turned toward the speaker, a relative newcomer to Berlin Base, E. Winstrom Ebbitt II. A big, broad-shouldered New York attorney who had seen action with the OSS during the last months of the war, Ebby, as his friends called him, had recently signed on with the Company and had been posted to Berlin to run emigre agents into the "denied areas" of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He had spent the entire night in the base's radio shack, waiting for two of his "Joes" who had parachuted into Poland to come on the air. Curious to hear about the aborted defection, he'd drifted into the Sorcerer's office when he learned there would be an early morning wake. "My guess is the Russians probably brought their Germans in at the last moment," Ebby added, "because they don't trust them any more than we trust our Germans."

The Sorcerer fixed a malevolent eye on the young man with long wavy hair and fancy wide suspenders sitting atop one of the office safes and toying with a red thermite canister. "Elementary deduction, my dear Watson," Torriti said mockingly. "Careful that doohickey doesn't blow up in your puss. By the way, did you get ahold of the lambs you sent to the slaughter?"

"Afraid I haven't, Harvey. They missed the time slot. There's another one tomorrow night."

"Like I said, it's the G.o.dd.a.m.n Goths who are winning the G.o.dd.a.m.n war." Torriti turned his attention back to Miss Sipp.

"Item number four: Gehlen's night duty officer at Pullach rang us on the red phone to say that one of their agents in the Soviet zone who is good at 'Augenerkundung'-the Night Owl raised her eyes and translated for the benefit of those in the room who didn't speak German-"that means 'eye spying'; the Augenerkundung had just spotted wagons filled with Volkspolizei throwing up roadblocks across the approaches to the Soviet air base at Eberswalde. Minutes later-just about the time the defector was supposed to present his warm body at your safe house, Mr. Torriti-the Augenerkundung spotted a convoy ofTatra limousines pulling on to the runway from a little used entrance in the chainlink fence. Sandwiched in the middle of the convoy was a brown military ambulance. Dozens of civilians-KGB heavies, judging by the cut of their trousers, so said the Watcher-spilled out of the Tatras. Two stretchers with bodies strapped onto them were taken out of the ambulance and carried up a ramp into the plane parked, with its engines revving, at the end of the runway." Miss Sipp looked up and said with a bright smile, "That means Vishnevsky and his wife were still alive at this point. I mean"-her smile faded, her voice faltered-"if they were deceased they wouldn't have needed to strap them onto stretchers, would they have?"

"That still leaves the kid unaccounted for," noted Jack.

"If you'd let me finish," the Night Owl said huffily, "I'll give you the kid, too." She turned back toward the Sorcerer and recrossed her legs; this time the gesture provoked a flicker of interest from his restless eyes. "A boy-the Watcher estimated he was somewhere between ten and fifteen years of age; he said it was difficult to tell because of all the clothing the child was wearing-was pulled from one of the Tatras and, accompanied by two heavies, one holding him under each armpit, led up the ramp onto the plane. The boy was sobbing and crying out 'papa' in Russian, which led Gehlen's duty officer to conclude that the two people strapped onto the stretchers must have been Russians."

The Sorcerer palm came down on his desk in admiration. "f.u.c.king Gehlen gives good value for the bucks we provide. Just think of it, he had a Watcher close enough to hear the boy call out for his papa. Probably has one of the f.u.c.king Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung storm troopers on his payroll. We f.u.c.king pay through the nose, how come we don't get Watchers of this quality?"

"Gehlen was supposed to have planted one of his Fremde Heere Ost agents in Stalin's inner circle during the war," remarked the Berlin Base archivist, a former Yale librarian named Rosemarie Kitchen.

"Lot of good it did him," quipped Ebby, which got a t.i.tter around the room.

"I don't f.u.c.king see what there is to laugh about," Torriti exploded. His eyes, suddenly blazing, were fixed on Ebby. "The frigging Russians were tipped off-the KGB p.r.i.c.ks know when and where and who. Vishnevsky's got a rendezvous with a bullet fired at point blank range into the nape of his neck, and that bothers me, okay? It bothers me that he counted on me to get him out and I didn't do it. It bothers me that I almost didn't get myself and Jack and the two Silwans out neither. All of which means we're being jerked off by a f.u.c.king mole. How come almost all the agents we drop into Czechoslovakia or Rumania wind up in front of firing squads? How come the emigres we slip into Poland don't radio back to say they're having a nice vacation, PS regards to Uncle Harvey? How come the f.u.c.king KGB seems to know what we're doing before we know what we're doing?"

Torriti breathed deeply through his nostrils; to the people crowded into the room it came across like a bugle call to action. "Okay, here's what we do. For starters I want the names of everyone, from f.u.c.king Bedell Smith on down, in Was.h.i.+ngton and in Berlin Base, who knew we were going to pull out a defector who claimed he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6. I want the names of the secretaries who typed the f.u.c.king messages, I want the names of the code clerks who enciphered or deciphered them, I want the names of the housekeepers who burned the f.u.c.king typewriter ribbons."

Miss Sipp, scrawling shorthand across the lined pages of the night order book, looked up, her eyes watery with fatigue. "What kind of priority should I put on this, Mr. Torriti? It's seven hours earlier in DC. They're fast asleep there."

"Ticket it Flash," snapped the Sorcerer. "Wake the f.u.c.kers up."

Holding fort at table number 41, seated facing a large mirror on the back wall so that he could keep track of the other customers in La Nicoise, his watering hole on Wisconsin Avenue in upper Georgetown, Mother polished off the Harper bourbon and, catching the waiter's eye, signaled that he was ready to switch to double martinis. Adrian, no slouch when it came to lunchtime lubricants, clinked gla.s.ses with him when the first ones were set on the table. "Those were the d-d-days," he told the visiting fireman from London, a junior minister who had just gotten the Company to foot the bill for turning Malta into an Albania ops staging base. "We all used to climb up to the roof of the Rose Garden, whiskeys in our p-p-paws, to watch the German doodlebugs coming in. Christ, if one of them had come down in Ryder Street it would have wiped out half our spooks."

"From a distance the V-1's sounded like sewing machines," Angleton recalled. "There was a moment of utter silence before they started down. Then came the explosion. If it landed close enough you'd feel the building quake."

"It was the silence I detested most," Adrian said emotionally. "To this day I can't stand utter silence. Which I suppose is why I talk so d.a.m.n much."

"All that before my time, I'm afraid," the visiting fireman muttered. "Rough war, was it?" He pushed back a very starched cuff and glanced quickly at a very expensive watch that kept track of the phase of the moon. Leaning toward Adrian, he inquired, "Oughtn't we to order?"

Adrian ignored the question. "Nights were b-b-best," he prattled on. "Remember how our searchlights would stab at the sky stalking the Hun bombers? When they locked onto one it looked like a giant b.l.o.o.d.y moth pinned in the beam."

"I say, isn't that your Mr. Hoover who's just come in? Who's the chap with him?"

Adrian peered over the top of his National Health spectacles. "Search me."

Angleton studied the newcomer in the mirror. "It's Senator Kefauver," he said. He raised three fingers for another round of drinks. "I had a bachelor flat at Craven Hill near Paddington," he reminded Adrian. "Hardly ever went there. Spent most nights on a cot in my cubbyhole."

"He was nose to the grindstone even then," Adrian told the visiting fireman. "Couldn't pry him away. Poke your head in any hour day or night, he'd be puzzling over those b.l.o.o.d.y file cards of his, trying to solve the riddle."

"Know what they say about all work and no play," the visiting fireman observed brightly.

Adrian c.o.c.ked his head. "Quite frankly, I don't," he said. "What do they say?"

"Well, I'm actually not quite sure myself-something about Jack turning into a dull chap. Some such thing."

"Jack who?" Mother asked with a bewildered frown.

"Did I say Jack?" the fireman inquired with a fl.u.s.tered half-smile. "Oh dear, I suppose any Jack will do."

"Christ, Jimbo, I thought I'd split my trousers when you asked him who Jack was," Adrian said after the visiting fireman, his cuff worn from glancing at his wrist.w.a.tch, was put out of his misery and allowed to head to Foggy Bottom for an important four o'clock meeting.

They were sampling a Calvados that the sommelier had laid in especially for Angleton. After a moment Mother excused himself and darted from the restaurant to call his secretary from the tailor's shop next door; he didn't want to risk talking on one of the restaurant's phones for fear it might have been tapped by the Russians. On his way back to the table he was waylaid by Monsieur Andrieux, the Was.h.i.+ngton station chief for the French SDECE, who sprang to his feet and pumped Mother's hand as he funneled secrets into his ear. It was several minutes before Angleton could pry his fingers free and make his way to table 41. Sliding onto the chair, holding up the Calvados gla.s.s for a refill, he murmured to Adrian, "French've been treating me like a big wheel ever since they pinned a Legion d'Honneur on my chest."

"Frogs are a race apart," Adrian crabbed as he jammed the back of his hand against his mouth to stifle a belch. "Heard one of their senior spooks vet an op we were proposing to run against the French Communists-he allowed as how it would probably work in practice but he doubted it would work in theory. Sorry about my junior minister, Jimbo. They say he's very good at what he does. Not sure what he does, actually. Someone had to give him grub. Now that he's gone we can talk shop. Any news from Berlin?"

Mother studied his friend across the table. "You're not going to like it."

"Try me."

"Amicitia nostra dissoluta est. 'Our friends.h.i.+p is dissolved.' I am on to you and your KGB friends!"

The Brit, who knew a joke when he heard one, chortled with pleasure as he identified the quotation. "Nero's telegram to Seneca when he decided time had come for his tutor to commit hari-kari. Christ, Jimbo, only surprised I was able to p-p-pull the wool over your eyes this long. Seriously, what happened to your Russian coming across in Berlin?"

"The Sorcerer woke me up late last night with a cable marked Flash- been going back and forth with him since. Vishnevsky never showed up. The KGB did. Things turned nasty. Torriti hung around longer than he should have-had to shoot one of the Germans and hit a Russian over the head to get himself out of a tight corner. Vishnevsky and his wife, drugged probably, were hauled back to Moscow to face the music. Kid, too."

"Christ, what went wrong?"

"You tell me."

"What about Vishnevskys serial's? What about the mole in MI6?"

For answer, one of Mother's nicotine-stained fingers went round and round the rim of the snifter until a melancholy moan emerged from the gla.s.s.

After a moment Adrian said thoughtfully, "Hard cheese, this. I'd better p-p-pa.s.s Vishnevsky's serials on to C-there's not enough to dine out on but he can work up an appet.i.te. Do I have it right, Jimbo? The Russian chaps debriefed someone from MI6 in Stockholm last summer, in Zurich the winter before. There were two blown operations that could finger him-one involved an agent, the other a microphone in The Hague-"

"I haven't unsealed your lips," Angleton reminded his friend.

"He'll take my guts for garters if he gets wind I knew and didn't tell him."

"He won't hear it from me."

"What's to be gained waiting?"

"If Vishnevsky wasn't feeding us drivel, if there is a mole in MI6, it could be anybody, up to and including C himself."

"I would have thought C was above and beyond." The Brit shrugged. "I hope to Christ you know what you're doing."

A waiter brought over a silver salver with their bill folded on it. Adrian reached for the check but Angleton was quicker. "Queen got the last one," he said. "Let me get this."

Angleton's luncheon partner, Harold Adrian Russell Philby-Kim to his colleagues in MI6, Adrian to a handful of old Ryder Street pals like Angleton-managed a faint smiled. "First Malta. Now lunch. Seems as if we're fated to live off Yankee largess."