The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 24

"Hungary is not inconsequential to us. Which is why we want you to postpone any uprising until the groundwork has been laid; until Khrushchev, who has a tendency toward dovishness in these matters, has consolidated his hold on the Politburo hawks."

"How long?"

"Somewhere between a year and eighteen months."

Ulrik repeated this in Hungarian to make sure he had understood it correctly. "Igen," Elizabet told him. "Between a year and eighteen months."

"Remenytelen!" sneered the young man. Elizabet translated for Ebby. "Ulrik says the word hopeless."

"It is not hopeless," Ebby said. "It is a matter of prudence and patience. The American government is not interested in being drawn into a war with the Soviets-"

"I will say you what Trotsky said to the Russians before the 1917 revolution," Arpad declared, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Ebby's. "'You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you."' Matyas muttered something and Arpad nodded in agreement. "Matyas says we can neither start nor stop an uprising against the Communists, and I hold the same view. Whatever will happen will happen with or without us, and with or without you. We live in a country sick with what we call esengofrasz-" Arpad looked at Elizabet for a translation. "Doorbell fever," she said.

"Yes, yes. Doorbell fever. Everyone waits for AVH agents to ring his bell at midnight and take him away for questioning or torture. I myself have been arrested five times in my life, twice by the fascists who brought Hungary into the world war on the side of the Germans, three times by the Communists who seized power with the help of the Red Army after the war. I have spent eleven years and four months of my life in prisons-that is fifteen years less than Sade and six years more than Dostoyevsky. I have lived for months at a time in airless subterranean cells crawling with rats in the fortress prison of Vac north of Budapest. Over one particularly bitter winter I tamed several of the rats; they used to come out to visit me in the evening and I would warm my fingers against their bodies. I was tortured in the same prison-in the same cell-by the Hungarian fascists before the war and the Communists after. The difference between the two ideologies is instructive. The fascists tortured you to make you confess to crimes you really committed. The Communists torture you to make you confess to imagined crimes; they want you to sign a confession they have already written-admitting to contacts with fascist elements of foreign countries, admitting to plots to a.s.sa.s.sinate the Communist leaders, admitting to putting ground gla.s.s in the supply of farina to cause economic sabotage." Sinking back into his chair, Arpad sucked air through his nostrils to calm himself. "Once, to avoid more torture, I confessed to pa.s.sing state secrets to the chief of American intelligence in Vienna named Edgar Allen Poe. For this crime I was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but I was quietly pardoned when someone in the superstructure recognized the name of Poe."

Waving a hand in scorn, Ulrik spoke at length to Arpad in Hungarian. Arpad nodded several times in agreement. "He would have me say to you that your Radio Free Europe has spoken endlessly in its broadcasts to us about rolling back Communism," he told Ebby.

"Radio Free Europe is not an organ of the United States government," Ebby insisted. "Its an independent enterprise staffed by emigres from the Communist countries. Its broadcasts don't necessarily represent official American policy-"

If you please, who pays for Radio Free Europe?" Arpad demanded.

The question reduced Ebby to silence. Drumming a knuckle on the table top, Ulrik spoke again in Hungarian. Arpad nodded in vehement agreement. "He says the moment of truth approaches. He says you must be ready to a.s.sist an uprising, if one occurs, materially and morally. He says that if y0u can keep the Russians from intervening, only that, nothing more, Communism in Hungary will be swept onto the dust-heap of history."

Here the young student spoke for a moment to the others with a certain shyness. Smiling, Arpad reached across the table and gave him a mock punch in the shoulder. Elizabet said from the couch, "Matyas quotes the Bertold Brecht poem on the brief uprising of the East Germans against the Communist regime in 1953. "

Closing his eyes, collecting his thoughts, tilting back his large Arpad recited four lines in English: Would it not be simpler If the government If the government Dissolved the people Dissolved the people And elected another? And elected another?

Out of the corner of his eye Ebby caught a glimpse of Elizabet curl into a contorted position on the couch, her legs tucked under her, one arm flung back over the back of the couch. He could feel her eyes on him. "Noone in the American camp doubts your determination to rid yourselves the Stalinist dictators.h.i.+p," he told Arpad. "But you must, in our view, place realities above romanticism. The realities are stark and speak for themselves. Two Soviet tank units, the second and the seventeenth Mechanized Divisions, are stationed forty miles from Budapest; they could be in the capitol in an hour's time. We have abundant evidence that the Soviets are not blind to the explosiveness of the situation here. They clearly have contingency plans to rush reserves into the country in the event of unrest. I can tell you that we have information that they are in the process of a.s.sembling large mobile reserves on the Ukrainian side of the Hungarian frontier. I can also tell you that they are constructing floating pontoon bridges across the Tisza River so that these reserves can reach Hungary at a moments notice."

Arpad and Elizabet exchanged dark looks; Ebbys information apparently came as a surprise to them. Elizabet quickly translated what Ebby had said for the others. "The Soviet General Konev," Ebby went on, "who led Russia ground forces in the capture of Berlin and is considered to be one of their best tacticians, is the operational commander of the Soviet reserves. The Soviet General Zhukov, the current Minister of Defense, is pus.h.i.+ng Khrushchev and the Politburo to be ready to intervene in Hungary for strategic reasons: the Russians are secretly constructing intermediate range ballistic missiles which eventually must be based in Hungary if they are to menace NATO's south flank in Italy and Greece."

With Elizabet translating phrase by phrase, Ulrik, who worked as a political a.n.a.lyst in a government ministry, conceded they hadn't known about the pontoon bridges, but he challenged Ebby's a.s.sessment that Khrushcw would send Soviet armor across the Tisza if there were to be an uprising. The Kremlin," Ulrik argued, "has its hands full with its own domestic worries.

Arpad produced a cloth pouch from the pocket of his corduroys. "Which is why," he agreed as he absently started to roll a cigarette, "the Russians accepted Austrian neutrality in 1955; which is why Khrushchev publicly recognized Yugoslavia as a country on the road to Socialism; this despite it being outside the Soviet bloc. In Poland, the threat of popular unrest has led to the Communist reformer Gomulka being released from prison. There is a good chance he will be named first Secretary of the Polish Communist Party any day now." He deftly licked the cigarette paper closed with his tongue, twisted the tip with his fingertips, tapped the cigarette on the table to pack down the tobacco and, thrusting it between his lips, began searching his pockets for a match. "Even the hawks on Khrushchev's Politburo seem resigned to living with the situation in Poland," he added. He found a match and, igniting it with a thick thumbnail, held the flame to the twisted end of the cigarette. Smoke billowed from his nostrils. "Why should Hungarian reformers cringe at the menace of Soviet tanks when the Polish reformers have succeeded?" he asked rhetorically.

"Because the situation in Hungary is different from the situation in Poland," Ebby argued. "The Polish reformers are clearly Communists who don't plan to sweep away Communism or take Poland out of the Soviet bloc."

"We'd be fools to settle for half a loaf," Matyas exploded.

"You have put your finger on the heart of the problem," Ebby grimly suggested.

When Elizabet translated Ebby's remark, Matyas angrily sc.r.a.ped back his chair and came around the table to flop onto the couch next to her. The two, whispering in Hungarian, got into a lively argument. It was obvious that Elizabet was trying to convince him of something but was having little success.

At the table, Arpad stared past Ebby at a calendar on the wall for a long moment. When he finally turned back to his visitor, his eyes appeared to be burning with fever. "You come to us with your Western logic and your Western realities," he began, "but neither takes into account the desperateness of our situation, nor the quirk of Hungarian character that will drive us to battle against overwhelming odds. We have been at war more or less constantly since my namesake, the Hungarian chieftain Arpad, led the Magyar hors.e.m.e.n out of the Urals twelve hundred years ago to eventually conquer, and later defend, the great Hungarian steppe. For Hungarians, the fact that a situation is hopeless only makes it more interesting."

Ebby decided not to mince words. "I was sent here to make certain that you calculate the risks correctly. If you decide to encourage an armed uprising, you should do so knowing that the West will not be drawn in to save you from Konev's tanks ma.s.sing on the frontier."

The three men around the table exchanged faint smiles and Ebby understood that he had failed in his mission. "I and my friends thank you for coming, at great personal risk, to Budapest," Arpad said. "I will give you a message to take back to America. The Athenian historian Thucydides, speaking twenty-four hundred years ago about the terrible conflict between Athena and Sparta, wrote that three things push men to war-honor, fear and self-interest. If we go to war, for Hungarians it will be a matter of honor and fear. We cling to the view that the American leaders, motivated by self-interest, will then calculate the advantages to helping us."

The conversation around the gla.s.s-covered table rambled on into early evening. From behind the thick curtains came the muted jingle of ambulance bells or the mournful shriek of a distant police siren. As a sooty twilight blanketed the city, Elizabet disappeared into the kitchen and turned up twenty minutes later carrying a tray filled with steaming bowls of marrow soup and thick slices of dark bread. Arpad quoted two lines from the legendary Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi, who had been killed fighting the Russians in 1849: Fine food, fine wine, both sweet and dry, A Magyar n.o.bleman am I.

Lifting his bowl in both palms, he gulped down the soup, then lugged a heavy German watch from the coin pocket of his trousers. He'd been asked to read poems to a group at the Technological University, he told Ebby. The students there were considered to be among the most defiant in Budapest. If it would interest him, Ebby was welcome to come along. Elizabet could translate some of what was said.

Ebby eagerly accepted; if he wanted to get a feeling for the mood of the students, a poetry reading was as good a place as any to start.

Arpad dialed a phone number and mumbled something to the comrades surveying the street from another apartment. Then, with Arpad leading the way, Ebby, Elizabet, and the others filed down a narrow corridor to a bedroom in the back of the apartment. Matyas and Ulrik pushed aside a large armoire, revealing a narrow rug-covered break in the brick wall of the building that opened into a storage room in a vacant apartment in the adjoining building. The two young men remained behind to shoulder the armoire hack into place and block the secret pa.s.sage as Arpad, Elizabet, and Ebby entered the adjoining apartment and let themselves out of its back door, then descended five flights to a cellar door that gave onto a completely different street than the one Ebby and Elizabet had arrived on hours earlier. Making slow progress on foot through the meandering dimly lit side streets of Buda, avoiding the main thoroughfares, the three crossed Karinthy Frigyes Road and moments later entered the sprawling Technical School through a bas.e.m.e.nt coal delivery ramp. A young student with a mop of curly hair was waiting for them inside. He led them through the furnace room to an employees' canteen crammed with students sitting on rows of benches or standing along the walls. There must have been a hundred and fifty of them crowded into the narrow room. They greeted the poet with an ovation, tapping their feet on the cement in unison and chanting his name: "Ar-pad, Ar-pad, Ar-pad."

At the head of the room, Arpad blew into the microphone to make sure it was alive, then flung his head back. '"Without father without mother,'" he declaimed. "'Without G.o.d or homeland either without crib or coffin-cover without kisses or a lover.'"

The students recognized the poem and roared their approval. Elizabet pressed her lips to Ebby's ear. "Those are lines from a poem byAttila Jozsef," she told him. "He wrote around the turn of the century... his subject was crazy Hungarian individualism..."

"Your friend Arpad broke the mold," Ebby said into her ear. Elizabet turned on him. "He is not my friend, he is my lover. The two are worlds apart." The admission broke a logjam and disjointed phrases spilled through the breach. "You are right about Arpad... he is one crazy Hungarian... a chaos of emotions... a glutton for words and the s.p.a.ces between them... addicted to the pandemonium and pain he stirs in the women who love him." (Her use of the plural women was not lost on Ebby.) She looked away, her fingers kneading her lower lip, then came back at him, ner dark eyes fierce with resentment. "He is the poet-surgeon who distracts you from old wounds by opening new ones."

The students quieted down and Arpad, reciting in a droning matter-of-fact manner, launched into a long poem. "This is the one that made him famous," Elizabet whispered to Ebby. "It's called 'Ertelmisegi'-whicti is Hungarian for 'Intellectual.' Arpad wound up spending three years in a prison because of this poem. By the time he was released, it has been pa.s.sed from hand to hand until half the country seemed to know it by heart. Arpad describes how he tried to slip across the frontier into Austria when the Communists came to power in 1947; he was betrayed by his peasant-guide and given an eight-minute summary trial and jailed at the notorious prison Vac where the dead are not buried but thrown to the vultures. When he was finally set free, at the age of twenty-nine, he discovered that his internal pa.s.sport had been stamped with a red E for 'Ertelmisegi,' which meant he could no longer teach at a university." She concentrated on the poem for a moment. "In this part he describes how he worked as a mason, a carpenter, a plumber, a dish washer, a truck driver, even a dance instructor when he could no longer find literary magazines willing to publish his essays or poems."

The students crowded into the canteen appeared spellbound, leaning forward on the benches, hanging on the poet's words. When he stumbled over a phrase voices would call out the missing words and Arpad, laughing, would plunge on. "Here," Elizabet whispered, "he explains that in the prison of Vac the half of him that is Jewish-Arpad's mother was a Bulgarian Jew- transformed itself into an angel. He explains that Jews have a tradition that angels have no articulation in their knees-they can't bend them to someone. He explains that this inability to kneel can be a fatal handicap in a"Communist country."

The poem ended with what Arpad styled a postlude. Raising his arms over his head, he cried: "Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

The students, each with one fist raised in pledge, leapt to their feet and began stamping the ground as they repeated the refrain. "Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

Elizabet, caught up in the general excitement, shouted the translation into Ebby's ear. "Let the Magyars alone!" Then she joined the Hungarians in the battle cry. "Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

As the bells in the Paulist monastery on Gellert Hill struck eleven, one of the AVH man in the blue Skoda spotted a male figure on the walkway of the Szabadsag Bridge. For a moment a pa.s.sing trolley car hid him. When the figure reappeared the AVH man, peering through binoculars, was able to make a positive identification. The vacuum tubes in the transceiver were warm so he flicked on the microphone. "Szervusz, szervusz, mobile twenty-seven. I announce quarry in sight on the Szabadsag walkway. Execute operational plan ZARVA. I repeat: execute operational plan ZARVA."

Clawing his way out of an aching lethargy, Ebby toyed with the comfortable fiction that the whole thing had been a bad dream-the scream of brakes, the men who materialized from the shadows of the girders to fling him into the back of a car, the darkened warehouse looming ahead on the Pest bank of the Danube, the endless corridor along which he was half-dragged, the spotlights that burned into his eyes even when they were shut, the questions hurled at him from the darkness, the precise blows to his stomach that spilled the air out of his lungs. But the ringing in his ears, the leathery dryness in his mouth, the throb in his rib cage, the knot of fear in the pit of his stomach brought him back to a harder reality. Flat on his back on a wooden plank, he tried to will his eyes open. After what seemed like an eternity he managed to raise the one eyelid that was not swollen shut. The sun appeared high overhead but, curiously, didn't seem to warm him. The sight of the sun transported him back to his stepfather's seventeen-foot Herreshoff, sailing close hauled off Pen.o.bscot Bay in Maine. He had been testing the boat to see how far it could heel without capsizing when a sudden squall had caused the wind to veer and the boom, coming over without warning, had caught Ebby in the back of the head. When he came to, he was lying on the deck in the c.o.c.kpit with the orb of the sun swinging like a pendulum high over the mast. Stretched out now on the plank, it dawned on Ebby that the light over his head wasn't the sun but a naked bulb suspended from the ceiling at the end of an electric cord. With an effort he managed to drag himself into a sitting position on the plank, his back against the cement wall. Gradually things drifted into a kind of two-dimensional focus. He was in a large cell with a small barred slit of a window high in the wall, which meant it was a bas.e.m.e.nt cell. In one corner there was a wooden bucket that reeked from urine and vomit. The door to the cell was made of wood crisscrossed with rusted metal belts. Through a slot high in the door, an unblinking eye observed him. It irritated him that he couldn't tell whether it was a left eye or a right eye.

He concentrated on composing pertinent questions. He didn't bother with the answers; a.s.suming they existed, they could come later. How long had he been in custody?

Had he said anything during the interrogation to compromise his story?

Would the Americans at the Gellert notice he was missing? Would they inform the emba.s.sy? At what point would the emba.s.sy cable Was.h.i.+ngton? Would Arpad discover he had been arrested? Could he do anything about it if he did?

And, of course, the crucial question: Why had the Hungarians arrested him? Had the AVH infiltrated the Hungarian Resistance Movement? Did they know the CIA had sent someone into Budapest to contact Arpad? Did they know that he was that someone?

Formulating the questions exhausted Ebby and he drifted off, his chin nodding onto his chest, into a shallow and fitful sleep.

The squealing of hinges startled him awake. Two men and a ma.s.sive woman who could have pa.s.sed for a j.a.panese sumo wrestler appeared on the threshold of the cell, the men dressed in crisp blue uniforms, the woman wearing a sweat suit and a long white butcher's smock with what looked like dried blood stains on it. Grinning, the woman shambled over to the wooden plank and, grasping Ebby's jaw, jerked his head up to the light and deftly pressed back the eyelid of his unswollen eye with the ball of her thumb. Then she took his pulse. She kept her coal-black eyes on the second hand of a wrist.w.a.tch she pulled from the pocket of her smock, then grunted something in Hungarian to the two policemen. They pulled Ebby to his feet and half-dragged, half-walked him down a long corridor to a room filled with spotlights aimed at the stool bolted to the floor in the middle of it. Ebby was deposited on the stool. A voice he remembered from the previous interrogation came out of the darkness. "Be so kind as to state your full name."

Ebby ma.s.saged his jaw bone.

"You already know my name."

"State your full name, if you please." Ebby sighed.

"Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt."

"What is your rank?"

"I don't have a rank. I am an attorney with-"

"Please, please, Mr. Ebbitt. Last night you mistook us for imbeciles. It was my hope that with reflection you would realize the futility of your predicament and collaborate with us, if only to save yourself from the sanctions that await you if you defy us. You have not practiced law since 199*"! You are an employee of the American Central Intelligence Agency, a member of the Soviet Russia Division in Mr. Frank Wisner's Directorate of Operations. Since the early 1950s you have worked in the CIA's station at Frankfurt in Western Germany running emigre agents, with great persistence but a notable lack of success, into Poland and Soviet Russia and Albania. Your immediate superior when you arrived at Frankfurt was Anthony Spink. When he was transferred back to Was.h.i.+ngton in 1954, you yourself became head of the agent-running operation."

Ebby's mind raced so rapidly he had trouble keeping up with the fragments of thoughts flitting through his brain. Clearly he had been betrayed, and by someone who knew him personally or had access to his Central Registry file. Which seemed to rule out the possibility that he had been betrayed by an informer in the Hungarian Resistance Movement. Shading his open eye with a palm, he squinted into the beams of light. He thought he could make out the feet of half a dozen or so men standing around the room. They all wore trousers with deep cuffs and shoes that were black and s.h.i.+ning like mirrors. "I must tell you," Ebby said, his voice rasping from the back of a sore throat, "that you are confusing me with someone else. I was with the OSS during the war, that's true. After the war I finished my law studies and went to work for Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard and Irvine at number two Wall-"

Ebby could make out one set of black shoes ambling toward him from the rim of darkness in a kind of deliberate duck-walk. An instant later, a heavy man dressed in a baggy civilian suit blotted out several of the spotlights and a short, sharp blow landed in Ebby's peritoneal cavity, knocking the wind out of his lungs, dispatching an electric current of pain down to the tips of his toes. Rough hands hauled him off the floor and set him back on the stool, where he sat, doubled over, his arms hugging his stomach.

Again the soothing voice came out of the darkness. "Kindly state your full name."

Ebby's breath came in ragged gasps. "Elliott... Winstrom... Ebbitt."

"Perhaps now you will tell us your rank."

It seemed like such an inconsequential question. Why was he making such a fuss? He would tell them his name and rank and pay grade and they would let him curl up on the wooden plank in the damp cell that smelled of urine and vomit. He would open his good eye and peer up at the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling and remember the sun swinging back and forth like a pendulum high over the mast; he would feel the calming lift and tide of the Atlantic ground swell under the deck, he would taste the salt of sea breeze on his lips. "My rank-"

Suddenly he caught a glimpse of his ex-wife's flinty eyes boring into him. He could hear Eleonora's throaty voice laced with exasperation: "Whatever you do," she said, "you'll never catch up to your father unless someone stands you in front of a firing squad."

"My father has nothing to do with this," Ebby cried out. Even as he uttered these words, he understood that his father had everything to do with it.

"Why do you speak of your father?" the soothing voice inquired from the murkiness beyond the spotlights. "We are not psychoa.n.a.lysts-we only want to know your rank. Nothing more."

Ebby forced words one by one through his parched lips. "You... can... go... to... h.e.l.l."

The baggy civilian suit started toward him again but the soothing voice barked a word in Hungarian and the heavy man melted back into the shadows. The spotlights went out and the entire room was plunged into inky blackness. Two hands wrenched Ebby off the stool by his armpits, propelled him across the room to a wall and propped him upright. A heavy curtain in front of his face parted, revealing a thick pane of gla.s.s and a spotlit room beyond it. There was a stool bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, and a ghostly porcelain figure on the stool. Ebby blinked his open eye hard. With the languidness of underwater motion the figure swam into focus.

The guide from the museum, the wife of a Hungarian named Nemeth, the lover of the poet Arpad Zeik, sat hunched on the stool. She was naked except for a pair of dirty faded-pink bloomers that sagged over one hip because of a torn elastic waistband. One arm was raised across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The fingers of her other hand played with a chipped front tooth. The dark figures of men standing around the room were obviously questioning her, although no sound reached Ebby through the thick gla.s.s. Elizabet fended off the questions with a nervous shake of her head. One of the figures came up behind her and, grabbing her elbows, pinned her arms behind her back. Then the ma.s.sive woman wearing the long white butcher's smock lumbered up to her. She was brandis.h.i.+ng a pair of pliers. Ebby tried to turn away but strong hands pinned his head to the gla.s.s.

Elizabet s swollen lips howled for a release from the pain as the woman mutilated the nipple of a breast.

Ebby started to retch but all that came up from the back of his throat was phlegm.

"My name," Ebby announced after two men had dragged him back to the stool, "is Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt. I am an officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. My pay grade is GS-15.'

Barely concealing his sense of triumph, the interrogator asked from the darkness, "What was your mission in Budapest? What message did you bring to the counterrevolutionist Arpad Zeik?"

The spotlights caused tears to trickle from the corner of Ebby's open eye. Blotting them with the back of a hand, he detected another voice murmuring in his brain. It belonged to Mr. Andrews, the one-armed instructor back at the Company's training school. "Its not the pain but the fear that breaks you." He heard Mr. Andrews repeat the warning over and over, like a needle stuck in a grove. "Not the pain but the fear! Not the pain but the fear!"

The words reverberating through his brain grew fainter and Ebby, frantic to hang on to them, reached deep into himself. To his everlasting mystification, he discovered he wasn't afraid of the pain, the dying, the nothingness beyond death; he was afraid of being afraid.

The discovery exhilarated him-and liberated him.

Had his father experienced this exhilarating revelation the day he was lashed to the goal post of a soccer field? Was that the explanation for the smile on his lips when the Germans bayoneted him to death because they were short of ammunition?

Ebby felt as if a great malignant knot had been extracted from his gut.

"The message, if you please?" the voice prompted him from the darkness. "I want to remind you that you do not have diplomatic immunity."

Again Ebby forced words through his lips. "f.u.c.k... you... pal."

4.

WAs.h.i.+NGTON, DC, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1956.

THE MOOD IN THE CORRIDORS OF c.o.c.kROACH ALLEY WAS SUBDUED. Junior officers milled around the coffee-and-doughnut wagons, talking in undertones. There was a crisis brewing. Details were scarce. One of the Company's people somewhere in the field appeared to be in jeopardy. Leo Kritzky, whose recent promotion to the post of deputy to the head of the Soviet Russia Division in the Directorate for Operations had coincided with the birth of twin daughters, knew more than most. The DCI, Allen Dulles, who had been woken at three in the morning by the duty officer reading an "Eyes-Only" CRITIC from the CIA station chief in Budapest, brought key people in on Sunday for an early morning war council. Leo, standing in for his boss who was away on sick leave, attended it. Leaning back into the soft leather of his Eames chair, his eyegla.s.ses turned opaque by the sun streaming through a window, Dulles brought everyone up to speed: E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, on a mission to Budapest under deep cover (and without diplomatic immunity), had failed to turn up at his hotel the previous evening. A check of hospitals and city police precincts had drawn a blank. The Hungarian AVH, which as a matter of routine monitored visiting Americans, was playing dumb: yes, they were aware that a New York attorney named Ebbitt had joined the State Department negotiating team at the Gellert Hotel; no, they didn't have any information on his whereabouts; it went without saying, they would look into the matter and get back to the Americans if they learned anything.

"The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are lying through their teeth," Dulles told the men gathered in his s.p.a.cious corner office. "If for some reason Ebbitt went to ground of his own accord, first thing he'd do would be to send us word- when he left Was.h.i.+ngton he committed to memory the whereabouts of Hungarian cutout equipped with a radio and ciphers. Christ, we even had emergency procedures to exfiltrate him out of Hungary if his cover was blown."

Half an hour into the meeting the DD/0, Frank Wisner, came on the squawk box from London, his first stopover on a tour of European stations, remind everyone that the Hungarian AVH were the step children of the Soviet KGB. "Bear in mind the relations.h.i.+p," he advised from across the Atlantic in his inimitable drawl. "If the KGB sneezes, it's the AVH that catches cold."

"The Wiz may be on to something," Bill Colby allowed when the squawk box went dead. "We won't get to first base with the AVH. On the other hand the KGB has a vested interest in preserving the unspoken modus vivendi between our intelligence services."

The department heads kicked around ideas for another twenty minutes. The State Department would be encouraged to file a formal complaint with the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, though none of the people who had pulled up chairs around Dulles's desk held out hope that this would produce results. A channel would be opened, via the Hungarian cutout, to determine if Ebby had actually met with this Arpad Zeik fellow and other members of the Resistance Movement. A sometime-a.s.set in the AVH would be contacted through his handler in Austria but this would take time; if the Hungarians had snagged Ebbitt, the a.s.set might have gotten wind of it. Leo, still junior enough in the presence of the DCI and the various department heads to raise a finger when he wanted to say something, felt Dulles's hard gaze lock onto him when he came up with the idea of putting the Sorcerer on the case; he could meet in Berlin with his KGB counterpart and point out the disadvantages to both sides if they allowed their client services to take scalps, Leo suggested. One of the a.n.a.lysts wondered aloud whether an approach to the Russians on behalf of Ebbitt would undermine whatever chance he had of sticking to the cover story about being a New York attorney.

Leo shook his head thoughtfully. "If they've seized Ebbitt," he said, "it's because they've penetrated his cover story. The problem now is to extricate him alive and in one piece."

Behind a cloud of pipe smoke, Dulles nodded slowly. "I don't recall your name," he told Leo.

'Kritzky. I'm standing in for-" He named the head of the Soviet Russia Division.

"I like the idea ofTorriti explaining the facts of life to the Russian," Dulles announced, eyeing Leo over the top of his gla.s.ses. "Coming from Sorcerer, the menace of reciprocity would carry weight with the Russian. Torriti doesn't play games." Dulles hiked a cuff and glanced at his wrist watch. "It's early afternoon in Berlin. He might be able to get something off the ground today. Write that up, Kritzky. I'll sign off on it."

Torriti's corpulent body had slowed down over the years but not his brain. The deciphered version of Dulles's "Action Immediate" reached his sight when he was slumped over it, snoring off a hangover from a bottle of monastery-aged Irish whiskey he'd finally gotten around to cracking open. It had been a gift from the Rabbi to celebrate the Jewish New Year. ("May 5717 bring you fame, fortune and a defector from the Politburo," he had written on the tongue-in-cheek note that accompanied the bottle. "Barring that, may you at least live to see 5718.") Shaking himself out of a stupor, fitting on a pair of spectacles that he had begun to use to read printed matter, the Sorcerer digested Dulles's orders, then bawled through the half open door to Miss Sipp, "Get ahold of McAuliffe-tell him to get his b.u.t.t down here p.r.o.nto."