Winner Lose All Page 31

  Both in the field and out, Ed Scanlon developed the reputation as Dulles’s smart, loyal, and utterly ruthless hatchet man who invariably was handed the agency’s dirtiest jobs. That made him a most valuable commodity in Washington in 1959. He always had the director’s ear for a word or a quick whisper, causing CIA insiders to refer to him as “the black priest,” “the confessor,” or “Dulles’s Jesuit,” but only when both men were well out of earshot. Dressed in an impeccably tailored pinstripe suit and carrying a thin, hand-tooled Italian leather briefcase, he could easily be mistaken for a big-ticket corporate CEO, a bank president, or a Capitol Hill lawyer but not if you looked into his eyes. They were ice-cold and analytical, reminding some of a butcher in his meat locker appraising a fresh side of beef. There was also that business about his left hand, which rarely left his pants or jacket pocket. What could one expect from a man who had survived for months inside the belly of the Nazi beast? Few men in the world could understand that experience, much less live through it. As he often quipped, that was how the best steel is made — in a hot fire and beaten on by a large hammer.

  Unfortunately for Ed Scanlon, it was now less than four weeks until Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s big visit to the United States, the first time a Soviet or Russian head of state had ever visited. The KGB, the Russian Embassy, the US Secret Service, the FBI, and even the D.C. Capital Police were now arguing and tripping over each other’s security plans, and there were details remaining that could only be hammered out “at the very top,” as they say. For President Eisenhower, that meant Allen Dulles. For Dulles that meant Ed Scanlon, his trusted right arm. For Ed Scanlon, that meant going to Moscow.

  “Look, Eddie, I know you don’t want to,” Dulles commiserated, softly and persuasively as always, not that he had to. “Khrushchev’s trip next month is important, or I wouldn’t ask.” As director, both men knew he could simply order Scanlon to go anywhere he wanted, but that was not his style.

  “I’ll be useless there,” Scanlon said. “You need a diplomat, not me.”

  “The KGB won’t listen to a diplomat. You, they’ll listen to.” Scanlon rolled his eyes, completely unconvinced, but Dulles continued. “They know you’re speaking for me, and that I’m speaking for the President. And believe me, Eddie, they know all about you.”

  “I’m sure they do, and I know all about them. That’s why I don’t want to go anywhere near the place.”

  Dulles leaned across the desk, reaching out to the younger man. “We both know the problem isn’t Khrushchev, or the KGB, or Moscow. It’s the Steiner woman, isn’t it?”

  Scanlon’s eyes flashed at the mention of her name. “You say that with such a nice, clinical detachment, Allen, like she was an experiment gone wrong, or a missing pet.”

  Dulles didn’t react. His expression remained kind and conciliatory, which hurt Scanlon even worse. “I’m sorry about what happened back there and how it turned out, but that was a long time ago, a very long time ago. The truth is you don’t know if she even made it out of Germany, much less to Moscow, do you?”

  “I know she did, Allen.”

  “No, you think you know. In this business, that is a big mistake.”

  Scanlon could not look at him. Think? At 3:00 a.m., lying alone in his Georgetown apartment staring at the ceiling over and over again, his memories of Hanni were all he had, as were the many, many ways he knew he lost her.

  “You know we turned over every rock looking for her, but we couldn’t find a thing, not even a whisper about what happened,” Dulles commiserated.

  “I know.”

  “And it’s been a lot of years now, too many.”

  “I know that, too, Allen.”

  “She was a professional, like you, and one of their best. I hate to say it, but she knew exactly what she was getting herself into. She knew the risks.”

  Yes, Hanni knew exactly what she was doing, but when she left him on that beautiful April afternoon, she left a shell of a man behind. She was heading east toward the open arms of the Red Army. Like a fool, he just stood there and watched her go, not that he ever could have stopped her. Moscow! That was why he hated the place, sight unseen.

  Moscow’s new Sheremetyevo Airport was located eighteen miles north-west of the Kremlin. While it did not officially open until the next month, it had been the preferred terminus for “unofficial” government flights for almost a year now. The embassy sent a shiny black Cadillac out to pick him up. The driver and the head of embassy security shared the front seat, leaving Scanlon alone in the rear for the ride into town. That gave him an opportunity to lean back and relax. Nice car, he thought as he ran his good hand across the leather. It was big and solid, like that bastard Otto Dietrich’s old Maybach. That car was long gone now, probably a quaint rusting hulk sitting in the weeds on some Russian collective farm. Hanni was long gone too, probably buried along with millions of other nameless, faceless inmates in one of Stalin’s Gulag work camps. That sure knowledge left Scanlon feeling like the lead character in Boris Pasternak’s recently published novel, Doctor Zhivago. He was doomed to chase the ghost of a lost love until it killed him. Silently, he cursed that big bastard Otto Dietrich once again. Somehow, the Chief Inspector managed to cast Scanlon and Hanni for their parts whether they wanted them or not.

  The Cadillac’s driver was Jim Grimes, a large, powerfully built black man in dark sunglasses with the shoulders and neck of the offensive tackle he had once been at Ohio State. Sitting next to him in the passenger seat was Art Jensen, head of embassy security.

  “Are the babysitters really necessary, Art?” Scanlon asked.

  “Probably not,” Jensen answered as his head continued to pivot slowly and his eyes swept the road around them, “but with Ivan you never know.”

  It was 2:00 p.m. on a hot, hazy, late-summer afternoon. Other than a few Soviet VIP limousines, several Red Army trucks, and the ever-present KGB trail car behind them, there was not much traffic on the highway. There never was, Art said, because there were not many cars in the USSR and even fewer authorized to go anywhere near an airport, new or old. Still, he found it a nice drive. The sanitized views of the rustic Russian countryside along the new, showpiece highway were lovely and the asphalt perfect, but they were a sham. The rest of the country still used horse-drawn carts on rutted, dirt farm roads, but a showpiece was important. In Soviet Russia, appearance is everything.

  The temperature outside was hovering around 105 degrees Fahrenheit and the Cadillac’s rudimentary air-conditioning was not working worth a damn, so Scanlon shed his suit jacket. “Sorry about the air,” Art Jensen told him. “Repair parts are all but impossible to get here, and GM doesn’t make house calls.” Both Jensen and the driver wore heavy suit coats and the sweat was pouring off them.

  “Hey, you guys can take off the jackets,” Scanlon offered. “You don’t have to stand on formality on my account.”

  “Can’t,” Jensen answered. “We’re both packing, in shoulder holsters, and the Russians don’t like to be publicly shown up.”

  “That’s interesting. What do you think they’d do if they caught you?”

  “Again, it’s hard to say. Sometimes Ivan isn’t the easiest to figure out,” Jensen said with a fatalistic shrug. “He’d probably ignore it; but then again, he could have some reason we don’t know about, much less understand, to make a big stink and send us home. Then we’d send some of theirs home, and they’ll send more of ours home, and it will go back and forth like that until everybody had made whatever point it was that they were trying to make. Like I said, it all depends on what Ivan’s thinking, and nobody knows that but Ivan.”

  “Then why carry? What’s the point?”

  “To remind Ivan that we do have them and don’t give a shit about their rules,” Jensen answered, well aware of Scanlon’s reputation and the “notches” on his own gun. “They love watching old John Wayne movies in the Kremlin. They think we’re all a bunch of gun-crazy American cowboys anyway, so it tells them not to pu
sh us too far. That’s fine with me, and a point we need to make every now and then,” Jensen said as he raised his leg and patted the top of a shiny, pointy-toed, snakeskin cowboy boot. “Hell, I’m from Detroit, not Texas,” he laughed, “but if these things keep Ivan guessing, then my feet can get used to anything.”

  “Sounds like a fun assignment, Art.”

  “Fun? No, I wouldn’t call it fun.” He shook his head. “It’s all a game, Mister Scanlon, a big goddamned game that Ivan started playing with the Brits over a century ago. Ivan is the undefeated grand master now, and he is always trying some new move on us. You might keep that in mind while you’re here, and don’t forget who told you.”

  “Don’t worry,” Scanlon reassured Jensen with a thin, wry smile. “I’m just a tourist passing on through town. A couple of meetings and I’m the hell out of here, but it doesn’t sound like things have changed much under the new regime.”

  “Changed?” Jensen chuckled as his eyes continued to search the road behind them. “Joe Stalin’s laid out in Red Square next to Lenin like two pheasants under glass, but that don’t make a damned bit of difference. It’s Stalin’s system, and that’ll never change.”

  Scanlon’s eyes narrowed to thin, dark slits but he kept quiet.

  “In the 1930s and 1940s, right up until the old bastard died, tens of thousands of people disappeared right off these very streets,” Jensen went on, unaware. “Tens of thousands. You get one of the old comrades drunk enough, he’ll tell you what it was like here ten or twenty years ago. He’ll also tell you it can all come back just as quick as it went away. See, Ivan’s got a long memory, and an even longer past. To him, it was like yesterday.”

  Tens of thousands, Scanlon thought, and he did not need to be reminded.

  “Nicky Khrushchev may look like a dumb, shit-kickin’, country hick, which he is, but he didn’t get where he is by being no Boy Scout. He was the party hatchet man in the Ukraine in the mid to late 1920s. They called it ‘the Great Terror’ back then, when they liquidated all the kulaks, the small farmers, and forced everyone onto collective farms. Later, they say he’s the one who put the bullet into the back of Beria’s head in the basement of the Lubyanka when the Politburo had him arrested after Stalin died. The truth is, it was kill or be killed for him and all the rest of them. They’ve got basements under the basements in that place, and not a whole lot of people ever came out alive.”

  Basement torture cells? Did the Russians learn that art from the Nazis or was it the other way around, Scanlon wondered. As for Beria, he was Stalin’s enforcer and Hanni’s boss, and he got what he deserved.

  “No, Mister Scanlon. The KGB hasn’t changed one damned bit. You can call it the GRU, the NKVD, or the KGB but it is still the same old creeps doing the same old jobs, and Moscow is still Moscow. So don’t go wandering off by yourself on any late-night walks because they love to set up the new guy. If you need to go anywhere, you give me or Grimes here a call.” He nodded to the muscular black driver. “Grimes is the best wheel man in Moscow and I’m the best shot. Together, we’ll get you where you want to go. More importantly, we’ll make sure you get back.”

  The new guy? My ass, Scanlon thought. Still, he had been in and out of airplanes and airports for the better part of thirty-six hours, and he was too brain-dead to argue. He desperately wanted to sleep but he faced the torture of an evening diplomatic reception at the embassy with a bunch of fat, sweating Russians instead. Wonderful, he thought, as the Cadillac finally passed through the embassy gates. This trip to Moscow was going to be one more of those big pieces of cake, wasn’t it, he asked himself.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It was 8:30 p.m. when Ed Scanlon found himself in a hot, poorly ventilated embassy ballroom sipping tepid champagne and trying to act friendly. As usual, whenever he was in a crowd of strangers he kept his left hand tucked safely inside his pants pocket where the badly scarred fingertips remained out of sight and occasionally out of mind. After fifteen years, the hand no longer embarrassed him but he had long grown tired of the curious looks and dumb questions which invariably followed.

  Between the soggy canapés and strained conversations, he was introduced to a succession of Russian bureaucrats with bad teeth and terminal cases of bad breath. They all seemed to wear the same cheap, ill-fitting brown suit, a wide necktie from a 1930s American gangster movie, and rows upon rows of shiny medals from “the Great Patriotic War,” which dangled down their barrel-shaped chests. Amazing, he thought — so many men and so little taste. They looked like a bunch of farmers who came up to the big city to buy a used tractor. Then again, it might not be healthy to appear better-dressed or more intelligent than Comrade Khrushchev.

  Even with the free western food and booze, the Russians did not look particularly happy to be here tonight, Scanlon thought. This was August, the flipside of the infamous Russian winter which single-handedly defeated Napoleon and Hitler. For those subjected to it, however, the Russian summer was no less brutal. It was when the party big shots and even the little shots evacuated Moscow for their country dachas out in the cool forests, and they hated anything that kept them in the city. Well, that makes us even, Scanlon smiled. If you make me miserable, I shall respond in kind.

  Scanlon took another slow stroll around the ballroom. What he desperately wanted was to fade into a corner and get lost in the drapery, or find an excuse to slip out and grab a good night’s sleep. Unfortunately, that was when he saw David Van Meter, the embassy’s military attaché, headed his way with a Red Army General in tow, and Scanlon knew his hopes for a quick evening were fading fast. The General resembled a short bowlegged bear that someone dressed in the standard frumpy, Russian Army uniform with its sleeves lengthened and pants legs shortened.

  “Ed!” Van Meter gushed with a forced smile. “I would like you to meet General Konstantin Pomarenko from the Moscow Military District. I told the General you had just arrived from Washington and he couldn’t wait to speak with you.”

  Wonderful, Scanlon thought. “I’m the instant expert, right?”

  “So, you tell me.” The Russian edged closer with a conspiratorial smile on his face as he glanced left and right to make sure no one else was looking. “Your big election next year, who you like? Nixon? These fellows Symington or Johnson? Maybe Stevenson, eh? You are there, who you like?”

  “General, I’m just a simple public servant and we aren’t supposed to have…”

  “Da, da, da,” Pomarenko dismissed the excuse with a wave of his hand and pressed even closer, his big gut bumping into Scanlon. “Come on, you tell old Konstantin who you like, eh?”

  “You have an office pool going in the Kremlin, don’t you?” Scanlon smiled knowingly. “Looking for a little edge?”

  “From God’s mouth to my ear, as my sainted grandmother used to say,” he crossed himself piously, “I swear it will be our little secret, so you tell old Konstantin, eh?”

  Scanlon rolled his eyes. “Okay. Me? I like Kennedy,” he finally answered.

  “Kennedy!” The Russian drew back and frowned. “You joke me. Millionaire boy? Catholic, anti-labor, from fucking Navy! And Irish? No, no, no.” Pomarenko vigorously shook his head. “No, not even in your country.”

  “You didn’t ask me who I thought would win,” Scanlon reminded the General. “You asked me who I liked.”

  Pomarenko slapped him on the back and roared with laughter. “Hokay, hokay, and you I like. You I like!”

  “By the way, the General is heading for East Germany next week,” Van Meter interjected. “He’ll be taking over an armored command near Leipzig.”

  “Leipzig?” Scanlon reminisced without thinking. “Lovely place.”

  “Ah, you know Leipzig, then?” the surprised Russian asked, knowing full well that Leipzig had been a top-secret East German and Russian intelligence center and off-limits to foreigners since the war. On top of that, they both knew the American Army never got anywhere near the place. “And you were there, then? In Leipzig?” P
omarenko asked, suddenly suspicious.

  “Oh, a long, long time ago, at the end of the war,” he dismissed the question.

  “No! I was there, too, you know, in 1945. April, I think,” Pomarenko probed, his hooded eyes watching Scanlon’s.

  “Well, I left the porch light on for you,” Scanlon answered, knowing the Russian was getting too close to the truth. “Pardon me, General,” he said as he glanced at his watch, feeling the old memories crowding in again. “Gotta see a man about a horse.”

  “Horse? Loshad? Gde loshad? Where is horse?” Pomarenko asked, confused, as he turned toward Van Meter for an explanation. Meanwhile, Scanlon headed for the bar at the far side of the room, leaving the Russian standing there with a frown and a puzzled expression.

  Ducking behind a cluster of State Department types, Scanlon managed to find a place where he could hide near an open window. At least he could steal a few breaths of fresh air, he thought. Moscow! He shook his head. How did he ever let Allen talk him into this one?

  He drained the last dregs of warm champagne from his glass and turned back to the room, only to find a teenaged Russian waiter standing in front of him. The kid was tall, about Scanlon’s height, but young and awkward-looking, with tousled black hair, nervous gray eyes, and a white jacket a couple of sizes too large. Scanlon was not certain how long the kid had been lurking there, but he held a tray of champagne glasses balanced precariously on the upturned palm of his hand. He quickly extended the tray to him; and for the briefest of instants, Scanlon swore he saw the kid studying him, too.

  “Ah, good,” Scanlon finally said as he placed his empty glass on the tray and began to turn away.