Sam Seymour was a small, grey-haired man with rimless spectacles and a stubble moustache. His voice was low and soft, better suited to telling the long shaggy-dog jokes for which he was famous than to addressing this group of men who all had pressing business waiting in the locked boxes on their desks. Seymour was the ‘file editor’; his job was to assemble the facts and figures and evaluate them for the men who made the decisions. ‘OK, guys.’ He tapped the edges of his papers on the polished conference table and waited until they were all looking at him. ‘You’ve got to remember that in the early part of this current year we did not-repeat did not-have any evidence that Yuriy Grechko was anything but an assistant military attaché assigned to the Washington embassy.’
‘We figured him for KGB,’ interrupted the project chairman. As he leant back, his head almost touched the Currier and Ives lithograph of a trotting race: pneumatic-looking horses with spindly legs raced past cheering top-hatted spectators. There was other such nineteenth-century popular art on the floors below, but up here, on the executive floor of the CIA building, the lithographs were originals. ‘We figured him for KGB the day he got off the plane,’ said the project chairman. He turned his head so that he could see the clerk who would be using the tape recording to prepare the minutes of the meeting. The clerk nodded: he would make sure that it was established that Grechko had been identified as a member of the KGB. The project chairman nodded to Sam Seymour to continue.
‘Our big break came in April when Grechko lunched a man we’d never seen before. This man is named Parker, and we triple-digited him into the police computer and passed his name to the FBI Identification Department. Then in June Grechko has got a walk-on part at the USSR embassy in Mexico City. Starring that day we’ve got none other than General Shumuk-the famous, fabulous, and we were beginning to think mythical, General Stanislav Shumuk-the First Directorate’s Operational Division deputy. And if that isn’t already a protein-enriched diet, who comes to the embassy and stays approximately the same time as the other two? None other than our mysterious pal, Edward Parker of Chicago.’
‘And the Los Angeles killing?’ prompted the project chairman, who liked to have the events in strict chronological order.
‘Meanwhile, back at the ranch,’ said Sam Seymour, ‘we’ve had a guy butchered in Los Angeles, and the LA cops are asking Chicago about Parker’s car and what it was doing parked near the victim’s office at the time of the murder.’
‘Hold it, Sam,’ said Melvin Kalkhoven, a tall, thin thirty-five-year-old. He was prematurely balding, and his straw-coloured hair and pale bony face made his dark, active eyes seem unnaturally large. ‘We’ve had a guy butchered, you say. You mean this was one of our people?’ Melvin Kalkhoven was a field agent, and he took the deaths of his colleagues very personally. In such moments of stress as this, it was possible to detect his Texan accent.
‘His name was… ’ Sam Seymour looked at his papers, ‘his name was Bernard Lustig. He was some kind of movie executive. Nothing to do with the ‘pickle factory’: we put him through the computer every which way. No agency connection whatsoever.’ He looked up. ‘No, sincerely; no connection with CIA or FBI or any other government agency.’ He nodded to the FBI representative ‘Right, Ben?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So why was he killed?’ said Kalkhoven.
‘Well, let’s not get into that one for a moment,’ said the project chairman. ‘Sam is the file editor; he can only tell you what we know. Don’t ask him to make guesses, If you want me to make a really far out guess, I’m going to say that Lustig might have been a KGB operative who went sour on them. But let’s keep to what happened… Sam!’
Sam Seymour continued, ‘The Brits have had a double slaying in London -just nine days ago-with all the same modus operandi as the Lustig killing. They’ve asked us to scan the computer for a man named Wilhelm Kleiber. Well, gentlemen, Kleiber has been on the computer for nearly three years. He came on to old Office of Strategic Services files back in 1945. He strolled up to the OSS desk of Third Army HQ and offered to show us where the Nazis had hidden foreign currency and suchlike, in exchange for a job with us. We already had the currency but we gave Kleiber an undercover job. He did OK. He went on to work for the Gehlen set-up back in the good old days, when it was the South German Industries Utilization Company… ’
There was a responsive laugh. It seemed unlikely that the cover which Gehlen had used for mounting intelligence operations against Russia was ever very convincing; by today’s standard, it was nothing less than childish. ‘When Gehlen set up his cover organizations-and made money-in everything from wholesaling wine to public relations, Kleiber set up a security company for them. In 1958, Kleiber was pensioned off and allowed to buy the security company at a bargain price.’
‘Poor old US taxpayer,’ said Kalkhoven.
‘Right,’ said Sam Seymour ‘It was that kind of deal. The security company was his ‘pension’ from Gehlen, but the bottom line was that we picked up the tab. He was, in effect, working for us.’ He took off his spectacles. ‘But it still wasn’t good enough for Kleiber, He got into financial difficulties two or three times in the middle sixties. But he always seemed to survive.’
‘ Moscow got to him?’ said Kalkhoven, who hated Seymour ’s sort of double-talk. ‘Is that what you are implying?’
‘It’s what I’m trying to avoid saying,’ said Seymour, raising his hands in surrender to Kalkhoven’s critical tone. ‘It’s taken us a long time to get the message. But let’s not go jumping to conclusions until we’ve got the evidence. And let me make it clear Kleiber was taken off the agency payroll in 1969.’
‘Don’t push, Melvin,’ the project chairman told Kalkhoven, ‘Sam here is a very cautious individual, you know that. But let me be the fool who rushes in where Seymours fear to tread. Sure, Kleiber was turned for money; it’s as clear as daylight. No evidence anywhere, but I’m telling you, that’s what happened. Kleiber is a Moscow Centre agent, and a damned dangerous one. There’s good indication that Kleiber was the hit man who helped Parker knock off Lustig in Los Angeles last May It’s likely the Brits are right in thinking that Kleiber did the double killing in London last week.’
He nodded to Sam Seymour, who took up the story again. ‘We have something on him for the Los Angeles murder. We know he went through Los Angeles International two days before the killing and left on an intercontinental flight a mere three days after. A ground hostess and a flight purser recognized him as a passenger on the Frankfurt flight. He left his reading spectacles in the first-class lounge A pretty dumb thing to do if you’re a KGB hit man, but people are like that, as we well know.’
‘And thank the Lord,’ said the project chairman.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Sam Seymour. He looked again at his papers. ‘We’ve only had this material since Wednesday, so we’ve got a long way to go. TWA are checking the tickets for that flight, so we might get lucky. But what we have so far is enough to link Grechko, through the mysterious Mr Parker, with Kleiber and three killings.’ He rustled his papers on the table. ‘We’ve pink-starred Kleiber with customs and immigration. If he continues travelling on the same passport, we could nail him.’ He looked round the room to see the reaction. ‘He seems to travel everywhere alone.’
‘ “Woe unto him who is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him,” ’ said Kalkhoven, whose father had been a lay preacher.
‘We think Parker might be the illegal,’ said the project chairman. ‘The resident illegal,’ he added in case there was any misunderstanding.
There were murmurs of surprise and congratulation round the table. The chairman smiled. ‘But we want something better out of this than swapping Parker for some American kid who got caught buying black-market bubble gum on Red Square. And I want something better than Grechko going PNG and winging his way home with a medal. Persona non grata means nothing any more. I want Grechko caught with his pants down. I want solid evidence to show that these decapitation killings were planned here in the goddamned Russian embassy. I want to see it spread good and big across the headlines. The Brits have given us Kleiber but the important targets are Grechko and Parker. Now don’t forget it.’