“I’ll do it,” he said, “until you’re ready to make your move. Then I will return to Israel.”
They struck a deal.
At irregular intervals, Pasternak staged surprise attacks on the villa, testing its security. Now, he thought: Some of the guards are getting careless. I’ll have to replace them.
He walked through the hallways, carefully checking the heat sensors, the electronic warning systems, and the infrared beams at the sill of each door. As he reached Marin Groza’s bedroom, he heard a loud crash, and a moment later Groza began screaming out in agony.
Lev Pasternak passed Groza’s room and kept walking.
3
Headquarters for the Central Intelligence Agency is located across the Potomac River in Langley, Virginia, seven miles northwest of Washington, D.C. At the approach road to the agency is a flashing red beacon on top of a gate. The gatehouse is guarded twenty-four hours a day, and authorized visitors are issued colored badges giving them access only to the particular department with which they have business. Outside the gray seven-level headquarters building, whimsically called the Toy Factory, is a large statue of Nathan Hale. Inside, on the ground floor, a glass corridor wall faces an inner courtyard with a landscaped garden dotted with magnolia trees. Above the reception desk a verse is carved in marble:
And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set ye free.
The public is never admitted inside the building, and there are no facilities for visitors. For those who wish to enter the compound “black”—unseen—there is a tunnel that emerges onto a foyer facing a mahogany elevator door, watched around the clock by a squad of gray-flanneled sentries.
In the seventh-floor conference room, guarded by security aides armed with snub-nosed thirty-eight revolvers under their business suits, the Monday morning executive staff meeting was under way. Seated around the large oak table were Ned Tillingast, director of the CIA; General Oliver Brooks, Army Chief of Staff; Secretary of State Floyd Baker; Pete Connors, chief of counterintelligence; and Stanton Rogers.
Ned Tillingast, the CIA director, was in his sixties, a cold, taciturn man, burdened with maleficent secrets. There is a light branch and a dark branch of the CIA. The dark branch handles clandestine operations, and for the past seven years, Tillingast had been in charge of the forty-five hundred employees working in that section.
General Oliver Brooks was a West Point soldier who conducted his personal and professional life by the book. He was a company man, and the company he worked for was the United States Army.
Floyd Baker, the secretary of state, was an anachronism, a throwback to an earlier era. He was of Southern vintage, tall, silver-haired, and distinguished-looking, with an old-fashioned gallantry. He was a man who wore mental spats. He owned a chain of influential newspapers around the country, and was reputed to be enormously wealthy. There was no one in Washington with a keener political sense, and Baker’s antennae were constantly tuned to the changing signals around the halls of Congress.
Pete Connors was black-Irish, a stubborn bulldog of a man, hard-drinking and fearless. This was his last year with the CIA. He faced compulsory retirement in June. Connors was chief of the counterintelligence staff, the most secret, highly compartmentalized branch of the CIA. He had worked his way up through the various intelligence divisions, and had been around in the good old days when CIA agents were the golden boys. Pete Connors had been a golden boy himself. He had taken part in the coup that restored the Shah to the Peacock Throne in Iran, and had been involved in Operation Mongoose, the attempt to topple Castro’s government in 1961.
“After the Bay of Pigs, everything changed,” Pete would mourn from time to time. The length of his diatribe usually depended upon how drunk he was. “The bleeding hearts attacked us on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. They called us a bunch of lying, sneaking clowns who couldn’t get out of our own way. Some anti-CIA bastard published the names of our agents, and Dick Welch, our chief of station in Athens, was murdered.”
Pete Connors had gone through three miserable marriages because of the pressures and secrecy of his work, but as far as he was concerned, no sacrifice was too great to make for his country.