CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  He awoke slowly, aching all over, his head throbbing. He was sitting in a recliner seat in a small, luxurious executive jet, a blanket over him, a fluffy pillow behind his head. The windows were black; the noise and vibration indicated that they were in flight. The cabin was empty except for two other passengers. A fortyish man in a navy-blue flight-attendant’s uniform, blond crew cut, dozed in shadows at the rear of the cabin. And seated in a wide leather seat across the aisle from Bryson was Waller, reading a leather-bound volume under a small, bright circle of light.

  “Nu, vot eti vot, tovarishch Rosovsky, dobri vecher,” Bryson said in Russian. “Shto vyi chitayete?” His speech was slurred; he felt drugged.

  Waller looked up, gave a slight smile. “I really haven’t spoken that beastly language in decades, Nicky. I’m sure I’m quite rusty.” He closed his book. “But in answer to your question, I’m rereading Dostoyevsky. The Brothers K. Just to confirm my recollection that he’s really quite a bad writer. Lurid plotting, heavy-handed moralizing, and prose out of The Police Gazette.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere over France by now, I imagine.”

  “If you used chemicals on me, I hope you got whatever you wanted.”

  “Ah, Nick,” Waller exhaled, “I’m sure you believe you have no reason to trust me, but the only chemical you received was a painkiller of some kind. Fortunately there’s a half-decent, well-equipped emergency clinic for travelers at Chek Lap Kok. But that’s a nasty little bullet wound you sustained. Apparently your second in a matter of weeks, the last being a superficial graze wound in the left shoulder. You always were a quick healer, but you’re starting to get a little long in the tooth, you know. It’s really a young man’s game, like American football. I told you that when I pulled you out five years ago.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  Waller shrugged, settled back in his seat. “We have our sources, both electronic and human. As you well know.”

  “Pretty audacious to use a U.S. military chopper in foreign airspace.”

  “Not especially. Unless you really believe Harry Dunne’s fabrications about our being some sort of rogue elephant.”

  “You’re claiming it’s not true?”

  “I’m not claiming anything, Nick.”

  “You’ve already admitted you’re Russian-born. Gennady Rosovsky, born in Vladivostok. Trained as a GRU sleeper penetration agent, a paminyatchik, by the Soviet Union’s top spymasters, specialists in the English language, American culture and way of life, right? And a chess prodigy. Yuri Tarnapolsky confirmed all this for me. Even in your youth you had a reputation—some called you the Sorcerer.”

  “You flatter me.”

  Bryson gazed at his old mentor, who was now stretching his legs, his hands interlaced behind his neck. Waller—that was how he knew him, inasmuch as he did know him—looked supremely comfortable.

  “Somewhere in the back of my mind,” Waller went on, “I always knew there was the remote, theoretical chance that my GRU file might somehow, someday, make its way out of a safe in cold storage to U.S. intelligence. The way a long-buried corpse might wash up from its grave in a flood. But who’d ever have predicted it, really? Not even us. Everyone mocks the CIA for not anticipating the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, and I’m hardly no defender of theirs, but I always thought that unfair—even Gorbachev didn’t see it coming, for God’s sake.”

  “Aren’t you dodging the great unasked question here?”

  “Why not ask it?”

  “Are you a paminyatchik, a GRU sleeper, or not?”

  “‘Am I now or have I ever been,’ to paraphrase the buffoon Senator McCarthy? I was; I am not. Is that unambiguous enough?”

  “Unambiguous, but vague.”

  “I defected in place.”

  “To our side.”

  “Naturally. I was an illegal here seeking to make it legal.”

  “When?”

  “Nineteen fifty-six. I had arrived in 1949 as a boy of fourteen, when legends were plentiful and not thoroughly vetted. By the midfifties I saw the light and terminated my ties to Moscow. By then I’d seen, and heard, enough of Comrade Stalin to shatter whatever youthful illusions I’d once had about the radiant future of a communist world. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, I wasn’t alone in realizing the idiocies, the follies, the essential flabbiness of the CIA. That was when I and Jim Angleton and a few others founded the Directorate.”

  Bryson shook his head, mulling. “A GRU sleeper defects in place, there are consequences. His handlers in Moscow will be greatly displeased, retaliation threatened and inevitably carried out. Yet you’re maintaining that your true identity remained cloaked for decades. I find it hard to believe.”

  “Completely understandable. But do you imagine I simply sent them a Dear Ivan letter—‘Oh, and you can stop sending those paychecks, because I’m switching sides’? Not bloody likely. I took some care with it, as you can imagine. My controller was a greedy bastard and not a little careless. He liked to live well and supported his habit by double-dipping and feeding from the expense-account trough a little too often.”

  “Translation: he embezzled.”

  “Indeed. In those days, that was grounds for either the gulag or a bullet in the neck in the Lubyanka courtyard. And with what I knew, and could pretend to know, I forced him to write me off the books. I disappear, he stays alive, everyone goes home happy.”

  “Then Harry Dunne’s story wasn’t a fabrication, was it?”

  “Not one hundred percent, no. An ingenious pastiche of truths and half-truths and outright falsehoods. Like the very best lies.”

  “What part of it isn’t true?”

  “What did he tell you?”

  Bryson’s heart began to pound slowly. His adrenaline surged, combating whatever narcotic was in his bloodstream. “That the Directorate was founded in the early 1960s by a small cell of fanatics at the GRU, or maybe VKR, brilliant strategists known as the Shakhmatisti, the chess players. Inspired by the classic Russian deception operation, the Trust, from the twenties. A penetration operation on American soil, the most brazen intelligence ruse of the twentieth century, far eclipsing the ambitions of the Trust. Controlled by a tight inner circle of directors, the Consortium, with all officers and staff outside that circle deluded into the belief that they were working for a maximum-security American intelligence unit—and constrained by zealous compartmentalization and gradated code-word secrecy from revealing anything, to anyone, about their work.”

  Waller smiled, his eyes closed.

  “And according to Dunne, the true origins of the Directorate in Moscow would never have been discovered were it not for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Which resulted in the dissemination of a few stray documents inadvertently revealing code-name operations that didn’t fit into known KGB or GRU structures; a contact name here and there; then the entirety confirmed by midlevel defectors.”

  Waller’s grin broadened. He opened his eyes. “You almost have me convinced, Nick. Alas, Harry Dunne is in the wrong line of work. He should have written fiction; he has a wild imagination. His tale is at once outlandish and quite persuasive.”

  “What part of it is fiction?”

  “Where do I begin?” Waller sighed petulantly.

  “How about with the goddamned truth?” exploded Bryson, unable to tolerate his coyness any longer. “If you even know it anymore! How about starting with my parents?”

  “What about them?”

  “I spoke with Felicia Munroe, Ted! My parents were murdered by you goddamned fanatics! To put me under the direct control of Pete Munroe, to bring me into the Directorate.”

  “By murdering your parents? Come on, Nicky!”

  “You’re denying that Pete Munroe was secretly Russian-born, like you? Felicia as good as confirmed for me Harry Dunne’s version of the ‘accident’ that ended their lives.”

  “Which was what, precisely?”

  “That my ‘Uncle Pete’ did it—that he was wracked with guilt afterward.”

  “The poor old woman is senile, Nicky. Who’s to say what the hell she meant?”

  “You’re not going to dismiss it that easily, Ted. She said that Pete talked Russian in his sleep. Dunne said that Pete Munroe’s actual name was Pyotr Aksyonov.”

  “He’s right.”

  “Oh Jesus!”

  “He was Russian-born, Nick. I recruited him. Fanatically anticommunist. His family disappeared in the purges of the nineteen-thirties. But he didn’t kill your parents.”

  “Then who did?”

  “They weren’t killed, for God’s sake. Listen to me.” Waller studied the circular pool of light on his tray-table. “There are things I never told you, for reasons of compartmentalization—things I thought it better for you not to know—but I’m sure you already know the basic contours. The Directorate is, and was, a supranational agency established by a small cadre of enlightened members of U.S. and British intelligence, as well as a few high-level Soviet defectors whose bona fides were beyond reproach, yours truly included.”

  “When?”

  “In nineteen-sixty-two, shortly after the Bay of Pigs debacle. We were determined to see that such a disgrace never happened again. It was my idea initially, if you’ll allow me a brief immodesty, but my dear friend James Jesus Angleton of the CIA was my earliest and most vociferous supporter. He felt, as did I, that American intelligence was being eviscerated by amateurs and bumblers—the so-called Old Boys, really a bunch of overprivileged Ivy League frat boys—patriotic perhaps, but laughably arrogant, convinced they knew what they were doing. A Wall Street clique who basically ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin out of a simple failure of nerve. A bunch of elitist corporate lawyers who lacked the cojones to do things the way they had to be done, who lacked the necessary ruthlessness. Who didn’t understand Moscow as I did.

  “Remember, not long after the Bay of Pigs, a KGB officer named Anatoly Golitsyn defected and laid it all out for Angleton in a series of debriefings—how the CIA was riddled with moles—penetrated, corrupted, to its very core. And the less said about the British, with Kim Philby and his ilk, the better. Well, that about did it for Angleton. He not only provided the Directorate’s initial black-box funding and set up the covert funding channels, but he also approved the basic, cellular organizational structure. He helped me devise the box-within-a-box strategy, the decentralization and internal segmentation, as a way of maintaining maximum secrecy. He emphasized the necessity of keeping our very existence unknown from all but the heads of the governments we served. Only by cloaking its very existence could this new organization hope to escape the mire of penetration, disinformation, and politics to which spy agencies on both sides of the Cold War had been held hostage.”

  “You don’t expect me to believe that Harry Dunne was so far off base, so misinformed about the Directorate’s true origins.”

  “Absolutely not. He wasn’t misinformed. Harry Dunne was a man on a mission. He constructed a straw man. An argumentum ad logicam, a brilliant caricature, plausible-sounding and laced with shards of the truth. An imaginary garden filled with real toads, as it were.”

  “To what end?”

  “To point you toward us, urge you to go after us and, if possible, destroy us.”

  “To what end?”

  Waller sighed in exasperation, but before he could speak, Bryson went on: “Are you going to sit there and deny that you tried to have me terminated?”

  Waller shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “There are others I might try to deceive, Nicky. You are far too clever.”

  “In the parking garage in Washington, after I went to K Street and found headquarters gone. You were behind that.”

  “Yes, that was our hire. It’s not easy to find top-notch talent these days. Why did it not surprise me that you bested the fellow?”

  But Bryson, not so easily mollified, stared at him. furiously. “You ordered a sanction on me because you were afraid I’d expose the truth!”

  “Actually, no. We were alarmed by your behavior. All external signs seemed to indicate that you’d gone bad, that you’d joined forces with Harry Dunne and had turned against your old employers. Who can fathom the human heart? Were you embittered by your early termination? Did Dunne turn your head with his lies? We couldn’t know, and so we had to take protective measures. You knew far too much about us. Even despite all the compartmentalization, you knew far too much. Yes, a beyond-salvage order went out.”

  “Christ!”

  “Yet all the while I remained skeptical. I know you better than perhaps anyone, and I was unwilling to accept the dossier, the analysts’ assessments, at least without further corroboration. So I deployed one of our finest new recruits to cover you on Calacanis’s ship, monitor your activities until I could be sure one way or the other. I handpicked her to watch you, check up on you, report back.”

  “Layla.”

  Waller nodded once.

  “She was assigned as a limpet?”

  “Correct.”

  “That’s horseshit!” Bryson shouted. “She was far more than a goddamned limpet. She tried to kill me in Brussels!”

  Bryson watched Waller’s face for telltale signs of deception, but of course it was unreadable. “She acted on her own, in contravention to my orders. I’m not denying that, Nick. But you have to consider the chronology.”

  “This is pathetic. You’re weaving back and forth, backing and filling, desperately trying to cover the holes in your story!”

  “Listen to me, please. At least give that much to the man who saved your life. Part of her charge was to watch out for you too, Nick. To presume innocence on your part unless and until we learned otherwise. When she saw that you were about to be ambushed on Calacanis’s ship, she warned you off.”

  “Then how do you explain Brussels?”

  “A regrettable impulse on her part. Her intention was essentially a protective one. To protect the Directorate and our mission. When she learned you were about to meet with Richard Lanchester in order to blow apart the Directorate, she tried to talk you out of it. And when you persisted, she panicked; she took matters into her own hands. She assumed there simply wasn’t time to contact me for instructions; she had to move at once. It was a bad decision, a miscalculation. It was unfortunate, and impulsive, and she tends to be impulsive. No one is perfect. She’s a fine operative, one of the best to come out of Tel Aviv, and she’s beautiful. A rare combination. One tends to overlook the faults. She’s doing fine, incidentally. Thank you for asking.”

  Bryson ignored the sarcasm. “Let me get this straight: you’re saying she wasn’t tasked with killing me?”

  “As I said, her mission was observation and reporting, protection where needed, not termination. But at Santiago de Compostela it became evident that termination orders had been taken out against you by others. Calacanis had been killed, his security forces decimated; it seemed unlikely to have originated with him, given the rapid sequence of events. I deduced that you were being exploited as a cat’s paw; the question was, by whom?”

  “Ted, I saw some of the agents arrayed against me—I recognized them! A blond operative, a dispatch agent from Khartoum. The peasant brothers from Cividale I used in the Vector operation. These were Directorate hires!”

  “No, Nick. The killers at Santiago de Compostela were freelancers who sell their talent to the highest bidders, not exclusively for us—and they’d been hired to do the job at Santiago precisely because they knew your face. Presumably they were told you were a sellout, that you might give up their names. Self-survival is a powerful incentive.”

  “That and a two-million-dollar bounty on my head.”

  “Indeed. I mean, for heaven’s sakes, you were traveling around the world using an old Directorate legend. I could have rolled you up in a second. Did you seriously assume we didn’t have ‘John T. Coleridge’ in our database?”

  “Then who hired them?”

  “The possibilities are numerous. You had put out so many feelers by then; you spoke to old KGB sources to verify my true identity. You think they don’t talk? Or sell information, to be exact, the mercenary bastards?”

  “You’re not going to argue it was CIA, I hope. Harry Dunne obviously wasn’t sending me out to do his dirty work while at the same time ordering me killed.”

  “Granted. But presumably a team was monitoring the situation on the Spanish Armada, and when the vessel was destroyed, a decision was made that you were a hostile.”

  “A decision made by whom? Dunne kept the whole operation off the books, no records maintained, only my ‘Jonas Barrett’ alias recorded in the Security data banks.”

  “Expenses, perhaps.”

  “Buried, encrypted. All requisitions DDCI-need-to-know Priority.”

  “The place leaks like a sieve, you know that. Always has. That’s why we exist.”

  “Richard Lanchester agreed to see me as soon as I mentioned your true name. He made it clear he knew about the Directorate’s origins— as outlined by Harry Dunne. Are you saying Lanchester was lying too?”

  “He’s a brilliant man, but he’s vain, and vain men are easily gulled. Dunne might have debriefed him as artfully as he did you.”

  “He wanted me to probe further.”

  “Naturally. As would you, if you were in his position. He must have been a frightened man.”

  Bryson’s head was spinning; he was overcome by vertigo. Too many pieces didn’t fit! Too much remained unexplained, inconsistent. “Prospero — Jan Vansina—kept asking me whether Elena ‘knew’ something. What was he talking about?”

  “I’m afraid some suspicion fell on Elena at the same time we were wondering about your defection to the enemy. Vansina needed to determine whether she was complicit. I maintained that you’d been false-flagged, and of course I was proven correct.”

  “And what about the roster of operations you devised or controlled— Sri Lanka, Peru, Libya, Iraq? Dunne said that they were all secretly designed to defeat American interests abroad—but under such a deep cloak of secrecy that even the participants didn’t see the chess moves because we were too close to the board.”