Stalin and Beria killing us in droves. Everyone who could was coming to America, and we could only keep our own citizens inside our borders by force and by bringing down the Iron Curtain around the captive nations. It looked as if you would bury the dream of Marxism before it had ever had a chance to flower-unless a way could be found to dilute the ideological strength of the United States.
"And then Joseph McCarthy rose to power, and he was the answer to our planners' prayers. The KGB was astonished at the degree of paranoia, terror, and divisiveness this one man and his followers were able to generate as he searched for wicked communists in American government and the military. Our planners realized that the American right wing would happily decimate American cities, throw people out of work, and in short do just about anything, as long as they believed they were defending America against Russia. We didn't have to subvert or attack; the right wing was all too happy to subvert and attack the fiber of their own country for us. The planners realized that we could actually use this anticommunist atmosphere McCarthy was creating to vastly improve our operations here. McCarthy and the ultraconservative right wing were studied closely. And then our program was instituted. My mother, of course, was one of the pioneers, the first to offer up herself and her son to exile in order to further the communist cause by weakening America. As Garth has correctly pointed out, our primary task was to act as provocateurs. We were to infiltrate organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi party, and organizations like Elysius Culhane's would come to be, in order to provoke the organizations' members into the kinds of extreme behavior and rhetoric that would polarize America, divide her from her allies, and tarnish her image in the eyes of the rest of the world. The communists would hide in the last place that anticommunists, and even your counterintelligence people, would think to look: right in the heart of the fascist sector of America.
"Again, we were given success stories to boost our morale. One of our jobs was to make it seem like the Republican party wants to steal the country every time it gets into power. I don't know if this is true, but I was told that Watergate and the subsequent attempt by Nixon and his plumbers to cover it up were instigated-inspired, perhaps, is a better word-by operatives like me, as was the subsequent exposure; Deep Throat may have been a KGB operative, and one of the 'plumbers' may have been also. The same with Iran-Contra. Our people pushed the politicians for the. invasion of Grenada because it made Americans look like reckless fools to the rest of the world. Actually our job was-is-easy because it entails simply goading the extreme rightists to do what they want to do anyway. Thus, Elysius Culhane's death squad. He's always wanted to control a death squad to quickly and efficiently kill people he thought represented a danger to the country, and in effect I gave him permission to do so by subtly, but repeatedly, telling him what a good idea it was, and then suggesting ways it could be done. I'm not saying that the American government, like the Soviet government, can't do stupid and self-destructive things all on its own; what I'm saying is that some-maybe most-of the more spectacularly stupid and self-destructive behavior of the past few conservative administrations has been inspired in no small part by KGB operatives like myself. The KGB loves it when Americans keep electing conservatives to power; administrations like Kevin Shannon's present much more difficult problems of infiltration and manipulation."
When Acton finished, we were all silent for some time. The KGB operative studied us, looking from one face to another, apparently waiting for some response. I was the one who finally broke the silence.
"You've talked a lot, Acton, but you still haven't answered my question. Did you kill Michael Burana and Harry Peal-your father?"
"No," Acton replied in a flat voice. "I never laid eyes on Michael Burana, and I never knew that he'd discovered my secret. And I didn't kill my father."
I looked at Garth, who nodded to me. "He could be telling the truth about that, Mongo. He cried when I told him who his father was and what had happened." He paused, shifted his gaze to Acton. "Then again, he wouldn't have known who Harry Peal was when he killed him."
"I knew who he was," Acton said quietly. "I didn't know that he was my father, but Harry Peal was always one of my idols."
"Why are you being so hard on him?" Mary asked, looking back and forth between Garth and me. "If it hadn't been for Jay, the three of us wouldn't be alive now."
"The question becomes one of why he saved our lives," Garth replied evenly, gazing steadily at Acton. "If you didn't kill Burana and your father, then who did?"
"I have to assume it was the same man who tried to kill me-a KGB assassin."
"Why would the KGB want you dead?" I asked. "You have to be one of their most important assets."
"I would no longer be of any value at all if I was exposed as a KGB operative. Also, they may have feared that I'd become unreliable; that was always the fear with people like me and the reason we were never given high rank. And in my case, they feared me being caught and telling American intelligence what I'm telling you."
"How did this attack take place?"
"A poison gas grenade was lobbed through my bedroom window at around the same time Garth was driving up from New York to see you in the hospital. If I'd been in bed asleep, I would have died almost instantly, and all an autopsy would have shown was that I died of a heart attack; the grenade itself would have been retrieved. As it happened, I was in the bathroom, with the door closed. I heard the window break and the grenade hitting the floor, and I immediately knew what was happening. I managed to escape through the bathroom window before the gas got to me. I had a spare set of keys taped under my car's bumper. I drove here, got into these clothes. The machine I used to monitor all Culhane's calls is in my home, but there's an electronic hookup to my telephone that I can activate by remote control. I played back the tapes of his most recent conversations, heard what he'd said to Gregory Trex, and realized what had happened. Then I went to the Community of Conciliation mansion to try and head off the death squad."
"If you're not in the business of killing people, why would the KGB give you all the weapons you have up here?"
"The KGB never provided me with anything but communications and wiretapping equipment. I got my weapons from the same places Culhane got his-various arms dealers in the western states and Florida. I trained myself to use them. He supplied the death squad with their weapons."
Garth grunted, said, "What exactly do you want from us, Acton?"
"I want the two — of you to walk me in, to get all of us in the hands of people you trust, and who can guarantee our safety. Supposedly you have powerful friends in Washington and elsewhere; Culhane claimed you have a personal relationship with the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Is that true?"
"It might be," Garth replied evenly.
"Do you have other friends in the intelligence community, people you trust completely?"
"Maybe."
"We have all the communications equipment we need up here. I would like you to contact whoever can get us safely off this mountain and to Washington, where I'll talk to your counterintelligence people. They'll have to guarantee our safety for an indefinite period of time. Thousands-maybe tens of thousands-of people in federal and state governments, and in conservative political organizations, are going to have to be vetted; and others are going to have to vet the vetters. It won't be as formidable a task as it might sound to flush out the other KGB people like me, because the legends constructed for us aren't as complex as they'd be if we were engaged in ordinary espionage. It was never anticipated that anyone would delve too deeply into our birth records or other background. But it must be done. Only when my story has been accepted by your people, and the process of rooting out the other KGB plants has begun, will the four of us be safe from assassination; the KGB is more likely to leave us alone if there's nothing to be gained by killing us and if our murders could be logically blamed on them. I need the three of you to back up my story and then support me."