"I filled him in on what's been going down, Mongo," Garth said quietly.
"All of it?"
"What you've told me, and what I know."
"Then he knows about Harry Peal?"
"Sure. I told him that's how you got on to him."
"Did he kill him?"
"I don't know."
"What was his reaction when you told him Harry Peal was his father?"
"You're looking at it," Garth said, gesturing toward the man sitting on the ledge above us. "He just turned around and climbed up there. He's been sitting there for about an hour."
Acton looked down, saw me. He abruptly rose and, carrying the Uzi in his left: hand, nimbly climbed down through a fissure in the rock connecting the ledge to the plateau on which we stood. He walked up to me, fixed me with the jet-black eyes that were obviously an inheritance from his mother.
"Pm sorry about your friend, Frederickson," he said to me, his voice low, even.
"Yeah," I said, and drained off my coffee. I crumpled the Styrofoam cup, dropped it to my feet. "Did you kill him, Acton? And did you kill your father?"
If the Russian-American was shocked or hurt by my bluntness, he didn't show it. It occurred to me that, whatever he was guilty of, in the hour he had spent alone on the ledge he had somehow made peace with, and perhaps paid homage to, the father he had never known. He stared into my face for a few moments, his features still impassive, then sat down on the stone, setting the Uzi down at his side.
"My mother is still alive," he said in a voice so low that Garth, Mary, and I had to squat down in order to hear him. "She lives in a special residence for retired KGB personnel on the Black Sea. She told me that my father died in the siege of Stalingrad. I grew up in Dayton, Ohio, but I learned later that I was actually born in Kiev, and that my mother and I were smuggled back into the United States when I was still an infant; false identities, papers, and false histories were meticulously prepared, and a home was even provided for us. From the time I could talk it was instilled in me that, although we lived in the United States, I was very different from other American children; I was special, with a very special mission that would gradually be explained to me as I grew older. From a very early age I learned to be secretive. I was bilingual, of course, because my mother was bilingual, and she taught me both languages; but Russian was spoken only in the home, when we were alone, and in Russia. I learned the American version of history in the schools here, and my mother taught me the Russian version-the truth about the class struggle, as she put it. And, of course, there were the indoctrination sessions when I was taken back to the Soviet Union. My mother worked as a professor of music at a community college near Dayton, and part of our cover, or 'legend,' was that we had received a sizeable inheritance from my dead father. There was always money for travel, and when we traveled we almost always ended up in the Soviet Union for variable periods of time. In Russia my mother would meet and plan strategy with her controller while I would attend intensive indoctrination sessions. I was given a great deal of attention from an early age and received special favors. I was given my first 'medal' at the age of eleven. Arrangements were always made to get us in and out of Russia on special travel documents, so that our visits were never recorded in our U.S. passports.
"By the time I graduated from high school in this country I had already had virtually complete training as a KGB operative, if not an officer. I was a committed communist, completely dedicated to my mission, which was to infiltrate the American ultraconservative political movement and eventually move up to a position where I would have power and influence over key figures in that movement, without attracting too much attention to myself. That was my sole assignment. I attended Dartmouth in the late fifties, joined the Young Republicans there, and, years later, helped start up the Dartmouth Review with money I'd supposedly made publishing a small, ultraconservative newsletter in New Hampshire. Of course, it was actually Communist party money. I had a lot of what you might describe as editorial input with the Review — suggesting pieces and writing a lot of letters to the editor. Articles I'd suggested were responsible for inciting the attacks on the anti-apartheid shanties on campus, and I had a lot of input into the magazine's cruder attacks on black and Jewish professors. Op-ed articles I wrote for various newspapers and newsletters, including my own, on the supposed communist infiltration of the Democratic party and leftist organizations brought me to the attention of a number of important archconservatives at the national level. I turned down offers of editorial positions at the National Review and Washington Times; again, too public. When PACs got big, I sold my newsletter and took a job with the fund-raisers. Within six months, Elysius Culhane had hired me as a senior staff assistant and speech-writer." Acton paused, laughed drily. "I could have joined the CIA or FBI if I'd wanted to; I was heavily recruited by both agencies while I was at Dartmouth."
I asked, "Why didn't you?"
"Because that wasn't my assignment, and I hadn't been trained for that kind of intelligence work. I had excellent cover for what I was doing, but my legend might not have survived close vetting by an intelligence or counterintelligence agency. Besides, the KGB gets all the information it wants about the CIA from other sources. Infiltrating the right-wing political infrastructure in this country was considered of much greater importance."
Mary, who had been listening to Jay Acton with an increasingly puzzled expression on her face, shook her head. "Why would you want to waste time with a bunch of right-wing loonies and chickenhawks like Elysius Culhane? That seems like very odd company for a communist. I don't understand."
My brother and I had had more than our share of experiences with said right-wing loonies, chickenhawks, and a battalion of religious zealots to boot. I thought I understood perfectly, and I was sure Garth did too.
"It's the perfect cover for a communist agent," Garth said evenly. "The groups would be relatively easy to penetrate, and once you were accepted in your role, no questions would likely ever be asked. The greatest danger would be discovery by an outsider, which is what happened in this case."
"Correct," Acton said in a flat voice, glancing at me.
My squatting position was beginning to hurt my knees, so I sat down on the stone and leaned back on my hands. "You don't understand because you're a liberal," I said to Mary, who still looked thoroughly bewildered. "You're a left-winger. Liberal types like you tend to be intellectual, straight-ahead rationalists. Symbols-things like the flag, 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' and pledges of allegiance-are all vaguely embarrassing to you; you don't think symbols should mean that much to truly thoughtful and patriotic citizens. You think political candidates visiting flag factories and spouting jingoistic rhetoric in halls filled with flags and nasty-looking bronze eagles is an insult to your intelligence, and you try your best to ignore such things.
"What liberals constantly underestimate is the power of those symbols and rhetoric over the minds of average people in this, or any other, country. The right wing never makes that mistake. They understand and are perfectly willing to exploit the fact that masses of citizens, usually a majority, can be relatively easily swayed by the right combination of demagoguery, hot rhetoric, and the manipulation of national symbols. Ultraconservatives tend to be anti-intellectual, which is why public education is never one of their primary concerns; in any nation where the electorate is 'numb, dumb, and happy,' as it were, it's easier for demagogues to get elected and then to stay in office. But their weakness-and the reason why it was so easy for Mr. Acton here to gain their trust-is that they're vulnerable to the same weapons they use: language and the manipulation of symbols. The right wing loves pageantry-look at the massive rallies in Nazi Germany-and they love to believe that their lies and deceptions aren't really lies and deceptions. In short, they tend to actually start believing their own bullshit, and if you feed it to them, in return they'll easily accept you as one of them.