She shook her head.
“I never did, either. He wrote a few best-sellers that caused a big stir in conservative circles.”
“And would you happen to know what the stir was about?”
“If I recall, one revealed a bunch of dirty CIA operations in Vietnam, and another poked holes at our cold war strategy. Anyway, he speaks Russian, has lots of prestigious degrees, and was held in very high esteem in Russia. They say he could twist their arms to do things even the President couldn’t deliver.”
“He impressed me.” Katrina then said, “But was he telling the truth, or just trying to get his distance from Morrison? Which one speaks with forked tongue?”
I reminded myself to quit underestimating her. Without prompting she’d figured out the purpose of the interview.
I replied, “You heard what he said. Morrison’s at the very least an exaggerator.”
“But who wouldn’t want to crawl as many miles from him as they possibly could?”
“There’s that. He must feel like the elephant that got raped by the butterfly.”
So what was the truth? Was Morrison his indispensable right hand or a distant groom with an inflated title? Truthfully, the exaggerations fit with my view of Morrison. However, I didn’t want to be swayed by my prejudices and I knew how to find out.
The moment we landed back at Ronald Reagan Airport, we rushed back to the office. I called Mary, but of course, Homer answered, and I said, “I need to talk with your daughter, the girl I tell everybody in Washington I used to sleep with.”
I heard the gagging sound in his throat as he threw the receiver down and fled. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for this.
Mary finally came on and started with, “Hi, Sean. Listen, please, you’ve got to stop taunting my father. He said he thinks you’re putting dents in his car, but I insisted it couldn’t be you. I told him you’re not that immature or vindictive. He’s not as young as he used to be.”
I chuckled. “All I do is say my name and he gets all red and puffy. Between you and me… I don’t think he likes me.”
I could hear her sigh.
“Listen,” I said, “I just got back from New York, where I met with Milton Martin.”
“Bill’s old boss.”
“Right. A most delightful guy. Now, Bill told me he used to be Martin’s Cato. He said the two of them were inseparable, the Siamese twins of the State Department. Martin said that’s a big, nasty lie. He said your husband was a bag handler, a factotum with an inflated title, who went around exaggerating his value to his boss and blowing so much hot air it eventually got embarrassing. He said that’s why he kicked him upstairs to the White House. I’m just trying to see which one’s the dirty rotten liar.”
The line was quiet so long, I finally said, “Mary, you still there?”
“Sean, I don’t know what the truth is.”
“You don’t?”
A pained, even resentful tone crept into her voice. “Bill has a few flaws. Everybody does. I have to be frank with you about this, though, because I brought you in, and I don’t want you having illusions. Bill wasn’t always truthful about things. He’s very ambitious. He wasn’t above taking credit for things he had little to do with.”
“Isn’t everybody like that?”
“Bill is… more like that than others. I used to warn him about it, and he always insisted that’s how the game’s played in Washington. The meek never inherit the earth, not in D.C., he would always respond. He even took credit for some of my work. It was maddening, but what could I do? He was my husband.”
“So he wasn’t close with Martin?”
“He told everybody he was. I really don’t know, Sean. It’s, uh, well, it’s possible Bill thought it was truer than it was. He’s very vain. He could fool himself about his own importance.”
Note how tactfully she couched it. She was his wife, and therefore wasn’t going to blurt out the obvious-the man was a lousy, lying, self-inflated weasel.
“Okay.” I paused, and then said, “One other question. Your 1996 tax form listed an inheritance of nine hundred grand. Where’d that come from?”
“That was the year Bill’s mother died. She and her husband were well-to-do. His father died back in 1994 and everything passed to her. When she died, the estate passed to Bill.”
“His father was a Pepsi exec, right?”
“Yes. His name was William also. I adored him. In fact, he was the one who got Bill interested in the Soviet Union in the first place.”
“How so?”
“You may recall that Pepsi was the first big Western conglomerate to open operations in the Soviet Union.”
“That somehow escaped my notice.”
“Way back in 1961, the co-founder of Pepsi, Don Kendall, actually met with Khrushchev and talked him into letting Pepsi build a few plants. It was a big thing at the time, the first American corporation to get a foothold in the Communist capital of the world.”
“And this had something to do with Morrison’s father?”
“Bill’s father was in charge of the whole operation. He oversaw the construction of those first plants, marketed the products, oversaw the whole thing. It was his life’s work.”
“And did he speak Russian?”
“Fluently. He made countless trips over there. He even had an apartment in Moscow and another in Leningrad. When Bill was younger, he took him over a few times.”
I was getting a truly sickening feeling. If Eddie and his goons got wind of this, it spelled big trouble. The conclusion was inescapable-Morrison’s father was the perfect conduit for the Russians to make their payments.
Perhaps I’d been hasty overruling greed as a motive. Even if it wasn’t Morrison’s motive, the Russians would probably have insisted he take some cash. In every spy novel, spymasters invariably try to use money as the hook in the fish’s gullet. Then, if Morrison got cold feet, they could blackmail him into staying in the business.
But how to channel those payments? Well, there’s always the rub.
Aldrich Ames made himself vulnerable when he began driving to work every day in a flamboyant new Jaguar sedan. That car should have brought all kinds of suspicions in his direction-it didn’t, but it should have. Hanssen had better sense and lived frugally, while he had the Russians open a Swiss account, and buy him diamonds, and stockpile his earnings like a squirrel saves his stash of acorns for winter. The problem with that tack is that you don’t realize the benefits of your crime. There you are, slaving away and betraying your nation’s secrets, but where’s the instant gratification we Americans are so well-known for?
The problem is hiding or justifying those big lump-sum payments, because anytime a check larger than $10,000 gets cashed, federal law requires the bank to report it. And pretty soon the federal government’s knocking on your door, wanting to know why you’re not paying taxes on hidden income, and why there are no W-2 statements accompanying all those big payments. But if the payoff gets shuffled through your father’s account, probably one that was with a Russian bank in the first place, and lands in your lap as an inheritance, you’ve bypassed that scrutiny.
Money may not have been Morrison’s main motivation, but who’s going to turn down free cash when it’s offered? Not me: I rummage through public pay phones for wanton quarters.
I said, “Well, thanks.”
“Okay. Listen, I’m just telling you Bill has some fairly serious warts.”
“Right.” Maybe bigger warts than either of us knew.
“Sean, I, uh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault.”
It didn’t help when I got back to my apartment that night and the late news revealed the newest government release on Morrison’s crimes. According to that voluble unnamed source, he’d not only given the Soviets the names of two of their agents whom we’d turned-both of whom were recalled and executed-but he’d also provided the Russians with our negotiating position toward the North Koreans on the nuclear issue, which the Russians had then generously passed along to the North Koreans.