Текст книги "Snow Wolf"

Автор книги: Glenn Meade

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Now that the rain was gone the heat lingered like smoke on a windless day.

I had waited over forty years to know my father's secret. Another few hours was nothing.

The sun was shining on the Swallow Hills, flowers blooming in the gardens of the big wooden houses that overlook the Moscow River. The address was one of the old villas from the Tsar's time. A big, rambling place with a white picket fence and clapboard windows and flower boxes out front.

The taxi dropped me at the gate and when I walked up there were two men in plain clothes, Israeli guards, standing beside a security hut. They checked my passport and one of them examined the bunch of white orchids I had brought, then telephoned the villa, before they opened the gate for me and I walked up to the front.

Unexpectedly it was a young woman who opened the door when I rang the bell. She wore jeans and a sweater and was in her early twenties, tall and dark-haired and deeply tanned.

The smile was warm when she said in English, "Mr. Massey, please come in."

I followed her into a cool marble hall that echoed to our footsteps.

She led me out to the back of the villa. The gardens were dazzling with color but in the bright Moscow sunshine the place looked a little shabby. Creepers grew raggedly on walls and looked as if it could do with a coat of fresh paint.

As I followed the girl across the patio I saw the elderly woman waiting at a table, She was tall and elegant, with one of those chiseled, well-proportioned faces that keep their age so well.

She would have been in her late sixties but she didn't look it. She was remarkably handsome. Her face had a Slavic look, high cheekbones, and although her hair was completely gray, she looked like a woman ten years younger. She wore a simple black dress that hugged her slim figure, dark glasses and a white scarf tied around her neck. She stared up at my face for a long time before she stood and offered her hand "Mr. Massey, it's good to meet you."

I shook her hand and offered her the orchids. "Just to say hello. They tell me all Russians adore flowers."

She smiled and smelled the flowers. "How very kind. Would you like something to drink? A coffee? Some brandy?"

"A drink would be good."

"Russian brandy? Or is that too strong for you Americans?"

"Not at all. That sounds fine."

The girl hovered by her side, poured me a drink from a tray and handed it across.

The woman placed the orchids on the coffee table and said, "Thank you, Rachel. You may leave us now." When the young woman had gone she said, "My granddaughter. She traveled with me to Moscow," as if explaining the girl's presence, and then she smiled again. "And I'm Anna Khorev, but doubtless you know that."

She offered me a cigarette from a pack on the table and I accepted. She took one herself, and when she had lit both, she looked out at the view. She must have been aware of me staring at her but then I guessed she was used to men staring.

She smiled as she looked back at me. "Well, Mr. Massey, I hear you've been very persistent."

"I guess it comes with the territory of being a journalist." She laughed, an easy laugh, and then she said, "So tell me what you know about me?"

I sipped the brandy. "Almost nothing until a week ago, when I learned you were still alive and living in Israel."

"is that all?"

"Oh, there's more, I assure you."

She seemed amused. "Go on, please."

"Over forty years ago you escaped from a Soviet prison camp, after being sentenced to life imprisonment. You're the only survivor of a top-secret CIA mission, code-named Snow Wolf."

"I can see your friends in Langley filled you in." She smiled. "Tell me more."

I sat back and looked at her. "They told me hardly anything. I think they wanted to leave that to you. Except they did tell me my father wasn't buried in Washington, but in an unmarked grave in Moscow. He died on active service for his country and you were with him when it happened."

She nodded at me to continue.

"I found some papers. Old papers of his he kept."

"So I'm told."

"Four names were written in the pages, and they cropped up several times. Yours. And another three names. Alex Stanski, Henfi Lebel, lrena Dezov. There was also a line written on the bottom of one of the pages, the last line, 'if they're caught, may God help us all.' I was hoping you could help me there." For a long time she said nothing, just looked at me through her dark glasses. And then she removed them and I saw her eyes. They were big and dark brown and very beautiful.

I said, "That line means something to you?" She hesitated. "Yes, it means something," she said enigmatically. She was silent for several moments and turned her head to look away. When she looked back she said, "Tell me what else you know."

I sat back in my chair. "The file cover I found, would you care to see it?"

Anna Khorev nodded. I took the photocopied single sheet from my pocket and handed it across.

She read it for several moments, then slowly laid the page on the table.

I glanced down. I had read it so many times I didn't need to read it again.

OPERATION SNOW WOLF.

SECURITY, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY, SOVIET DIVISION.

VITAL: ALL COPY FILES AND NOTE DETAILS RELATING TO THIS OPERATION TO BE DESTROYED AFTER USE.

REPEAT DESTROYED.

UTMOST SECRECY. REPEAT, UTMOST SECRECY.

Her face showed no reaction as she looked back at me.

"So when you read this and the other pages and learned your father had not committed suicide or died on the date you were told, you realized there was perhaps more to his death, and went looking for answers?"

"That's when I was offered a deal. If I agreed to hand over the original pages I'd hear some answers, and I'd be present when my father was given a proper burial service. But I was told that the matter was still highly secret, and that I had to sign a declaration promising to uphold that secrecy."

She crushed her cigarette in the ashtray and said, as if quietly amused, "Yes, I know all about your friends in Langley, Mr. Massey."

"Then you'll also know I was told that it was all up to you, whether you'd tell me what I wanted to know."

"Which is?"

"The truth about my father's death. The truth pure and simple about Snow Wolf and how my father ended up in a grave in Moscow at the height of the Cold War."

She didn't answer, but stood and crossed to the veranda. i sat forward in my chair. "The way I see it, my father was involved in something highly covert, something that people are still reluctant to talk about. I'm not just talking about a secret. I'm talking about something totally extraordinary."

"Why extraordinary?"

"Because the people from Langley I spoke with still wanted to hide the truth after all these years. Because when my father was involved in the operation it was a time when the Russians and the Americans were out to annihilate one another. And you're the only person alive who maybe knows what happened to my father." I looked at her. "Am I right?"

She didn't speak and I continued to look at her.

"Can I tell you something? I lost my father over four decades ago. Four decades of not having a father to talk to, and to be loved by. It was like having a hole in my life for a long time, until finally he just slowly became a wistful memory. I had to live with the lie that he committed suicide. And you-you know how and why he really died. And what's more I think you owe me an explanation."

She didn't reply, just looked at me thoughtfully.

I said, "And I have a question. Why did you want to meet me in Moscow, and not someplace else? I was told you escaped from this country. Why come back?"

Anna Khorev thought for a moment. "I suppose the simple truth of it is I would very much have liked to have gone to your father's ceremony, Mr. Massey, but I considered it your own private affair. But perhaps my just coming here was the next best thing." She hesitated. "Besides, I've never seen his grave. And it was something I wanted to do."

"The second grave, the one beside my father's-it had the same unmarked headstone. Whom does the grave belong to?"

Something passed across her face then, a look like sadness, and she said, "Someone very brave. Someone quite remarkable indeed."

"Who?"

She looked out at the view of the city, toward the red walls of the Kremlin, as if she seemed to be trying to make up her mind, and then she finally turned back to look at me. She seemed to soften suddenly, and she looked down briefly at the flowers on the table.

"You know you look very much like your father? He was a good man, a very good man. And everything you've said is true." She paused. "You're right. All that pain and silence deserves an explanation. And that's why I'm here. Tell me, what do you know about Joseph Stalin, Mr. Massey?"

The unexpectedness of her question threw me and I looked at her for several moments. I shrugged. "No more than most. He was a god to some, I guess. The Devil to others. Depends on which side of the fence you sat on. But certainly one of the great despots of this century. They say he was responsible for as many if not more deaths than Hitler. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage eight years after the war."

Anna Khorev shook her head fiercely. "Twenty-three million deaths. Not including those who died in the last war because of his stupidity. Twenty-three million of his own people whom he murdered. Men, women, children. Slaughtered. Shot or sent to die in camps worse than the Nazis ever imagined, by one of the cruelest men this world has ever known."

I sat back, surprised by the sudden ferocity in her voice. "I don't understand. What has this got to do with what we're discussing?"

"it has everything to do with it. Stalin died, certainly, but not in the way the history books record."

I sat there stunned for several moments. Anna Khorev's face looked deadly serious. Finally she said, "I guess the story I'm going to tell you goes back a long time, to when it first began in Switzerland."

She smiled suddenly. "And do you know something? You're the first person I've spoken to about it in over forty years."

Lucerne, Switzerland. December 11th, 1952

All over Europe that year the news seemed to have consisted of nothing but bad.

In Germany, the past was to resurface at Nuremberg where a tribunal began its hearing into the Katyn Forest massacre of 1940. Four thousand bodies had been unearthed outside a small Polish town, all bound and shot with small-caliber pistols, the grisly remains of what had once been the cream of the Polish Army.

It was the year that also saw the French face an all-out offensive by the Viet Minh, a bloody war was raging in Korea, and in Europe the Iron Curtain was lowered between West Berlin and the surrounding Soviet Zone, the ultimate gesture by the Kremlin that a postwar peace was not to be.

Otherwise, wartime rationing was still in force in Britain, Eva Peren died, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower beat his Democratic rival, Adlai Stevenson, in the US presidential election, and in Hollywood, one of the few bright moments in a dull year was the debut appearance of a stunning blond starlet named Marilyn Monroe.

To Manfred Kass, stalking through the woods outside the old Swiss city of Lucerne that cold December morning, such things hardly mattered. And although he could not have known it, that day was to mark a beginning, and also an ending.

It was growing light when Kass parked his ancient black Opel on the road in front of the entrance to the woods. He removed the single-barrel shotgun from beneath the blanket on the backseat of the car. It was a Mansten twelve-gauge, getting a little old now, but still reliable. He climbed out and locked the doors before slipping a cartridge into the breech but leaving the gun broken. He shoveled a boxful of cartridges into the pockets of his shooting jacket, then he started to walk into the woods.

At thirty-two, Kass was a tall, awkward man. He walked clumsily and with a slight limp. The clumsiness had been with him since childhood, but the limp had been an unwanted memento from the Battle of Kiev eleven years before. Though he had been born in Germany, being conscripted into Hitler's army had not been one of Kass's ambitions in life. He had intended emigrating to Lucerne before the war, where his wife's uncle ran the bakery business, but he had left it too late, the way he had left many things in his life too late.

"Trust me, Hilda," he had told his wife when the winds of war had started to whisper and she suggested they beat a hasty retreat to Switzerland and her family. "There won't be a war, liebchen."

Two days later Hitler had invaded Poland.

Kass had been proved wrong on many other occasions. Like volunteering for the front at the start of the Russian campaign. He reckoned that because the German army was rolling across the steppes of the Ukraine with such ease, and because the Russkis were dirty and stupid peasants, the war against them would be a piece of cake.

He had been right about one thing. The Russians he had met were generally dirty, stupid peasants. But they were also fierce fighters. And the fiercest enemy of all had been the Russian winter. So cold that your own piss froze and you had to snap it off when it turned to solid ice. So razor-sharp were the freezing Baltic and Siberian winds that swept over the steppes that within minutes of defecating, your shit was freeze-blasted as hard as cement.

Kass had laughed the first time he saw his own frozen turd. But it was nothing to laugh at really. Prodding the phenomenon with his bayonet, he had been hit by a sniper's bullet. A clear shot from two hundred meters, into the right flank of his bare ass.

Manfred Kass was used to making mistakes.

But the mistake he was about to make that December morning in the woods outside Lucerne was to be the biggest of his life. He knew the forest reasonably well. Which paths led where, and the locations of the best rabbit grounds. The rabbits made tasty stew to accompany the fresh, floury bread he helped bake six nights a week. And the thought of food made him hungry as he stalked through the forest, snapping the breech of the shotgun closed as he came closer to the clearing in the woods.

The light was reasonably good and getting better. A faint watery mist lingering on the low ground, Not perfect light, but good enough for him to get a clear shot.

As he stepped carefully toward the clearing, he heard the voices. He halted and rubbed his stubbly jaw. He had never met anyone in the woods that early and the sound of voices made him curious. it occurred to him that he might have come across a courting couple, still out after a late Friday-night dance in Lucerne, who had come to make love in the woods. It sometimes happened, he supposed. But he had not seen any car parked on the road, nor any bicycle tracks in the forest.

As Kass moved through the trees to the edge of the clearing, his eyes snapped open, and he halted, riveted to the spot.

A man wearing a dark winter overcoat and hat stood in the center of the forest clearing. He held a revolver in his hand. But what shocked Kass, stunned him, was that it was aimed at a man and a young girl kneeling in the wet grass, their faces deathly white, their hands and feet bound with rope.

As Kass stumbled back, his belly churned and his body broke out into a cold sweat. The kneeling man was crying in pitiful sobs. He was middle-aged, his face painfully thin and sickly gray, and Kass noticed the dark bruises under his eyes and the cuts on his hands indicating he had been savagely beaten.

The child was crying too, but there was a white cloth gagging her mouth and tied behind her long dark hair. She was no more than ten, Kass guessed, and when he saw the frightened, pitiful look on her face, her body trembling with fear, it made him want to vomit.

And then suddenly Kass's anger flared, his veins no longer ice, but boiling now, because there was something pitiful and debauched about the man and the young girl kneeling there as if waiting for death.

He looked at the man. His weapon had a long, slim silencer, but from where Kass stood he couldn't see his face, only his profile. But he noticed a vivid red scar that ran from the man's left eye to his jaw, the blemish so livid that from a distance it looked as if someone had painted it on.

He was talking to the man kneeling in the grass, and in between his sobs the kneeling man was pleading. Kass couldn't hear the words but he could see that the man with the scar was not listening, realized that what he was about to witness was an execution.

And then it happened. So fast Kass hardly had time to react.

The scar-faced man lifted his revolver until it was Lebel with the kneeling man's forehead. The weapon gave a hoarse cough. A bullet slammed into the man's skull and his body jerked and crumpled on the grass.

The child screamed behind her gag, her eyes wild with raw fear.

Kass swallowed, wanted to scream too, felt icy sweat run down his face. He felt his heart was about to explode with terror. He wanted to turn back, to run, not witness what was about to happen, but for the first time he seemed to realize that he held the shotgun in his hands and that unless he did something the child was going to die.

He saw her struggle helplessly as the executioner pressed the tip of the barrel to her head and prepared to squeeze the trigger.

As Kass fumbled to raise his shotgun, he called out hoarsely, "Halt!"

A brutal, hard face turned to look at him. The scar-faced man stared coldly at Kass, his thin lips like slits cut in his face with a razor. His eyes seemed to take in everything at a glance, flicking to the forest left and right, then settling on Kass again, assessing his enemy, but no sign of fear in his eyes.

Kass called out shakily, "Stop, do you hear me! Put down your weapon!"

He heard the naked fear in his own voice and barely had time to squeeze the trigger as his adversary swung around and the silenced pistol gave another hoarse cough. The bullet smashed into Kass's right jaw, shattering bone and teeth, slicing through flesh, flinging him back against a tree, the shotgun flying from his grasp.

As Kass screamed in agony he saw the man fire into the child's head. Her body jerked and crumpled.

Kass stumbled back into the trees, but the man was already rushing toward him. As Kass crashed through the woods and fled, oblivious to the pain in his shattered jaw, his only thoughts were of survival and making it back to the car.

Fifty meters to go and he could see the Opel through the trees, could hear the man rushing through the forest after him.

Fifty long meters that seemed like a thousand, and Kass ran like a man possessed, a hand on his bloodied face, his whole body on fire with a powerful will to survive, the savage image of the young girl's execution replaying in his mind like a terrible nightmare, spurring him on.

Please God. Thirty meters. Please. Twenty. Ten. God Please A bullet zinged through the trees, splintering wood to his left.

Sweet Jesus ... And then suddenly he was out of the woods.

As he reached the Opel and yanked open the door the man emerged out of the forest behind him.

Kass did not hear the shot that hit him but he felt the bullet slip between his back ribs like a red-hot dagger. It jerked him forward onto the hood of the Opel.

He was already dead before he hit the ground.

The bodies were found in the woods two days later. Another hunter, like Kass, but this one more fortunate because he hadn't been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He threw up when he saw the child's body.

Her pretty face was frozen and white. The flesh around her head wound and behind her neck had been partly chewed away by forest rodents.

Even the hardened policemen of the Lucerne Krindnaiamt thought it one of the most brutal murder scenes they had ever witnessed. There was always something pitiful and particularly brutal about the body of a murdered child.

The subsequent forensic and pathology examinations determined that the girl was aged between ten and twelve. She had not been raped, but there was severe bruising on her legs, arms, chest and genital area, which suggested she had been badly beaten and tortured some hours before being shot. The same with the man's corpse lying next to hers. Both bodies were placed in cold storage in the Lucerne police morgue.

The only corpse that could be identified was that of Manfred Kass. In his wallet was a driver's license and a shotgun permit, and he wore a wristwatch with an inscription, "To Manni, with love, Hilda."

The police learned that the bakery worker had gone hunting after his Friday-night shift and deduced that he had perhaps stumbled onto the slaughter of the man and the child and paid with his life.

But of the murderer or his identity, there was no trace at all.

A month later there was still no evidence that linked the two unknown corpses to missing persons. Both had no personal identification and had been wearing the sort of clothes that could be bought in any large clothing store in Europe. The child's dress and underwear had been purchased in a Paris department store, the man's suit had been bought from a very popular chain of men's outfitters in Germany.

Concerning the bodies, the only clue was a faded, minute tattoo on the man's right arm. It was of a small white dove, two centimeters above his wrist.

Washington, D.C. December 12th It was a little after eight in the evening when the DC-6 carrying President-Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower from Tokyo landed at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

Although he was not to take over the reins of power until January, Eisenhower had flown to Seoul a month after his election to assess personally the war situation in the Far East, wanting to see for himself the state of play on the muddy battlefields of Korea.

His meeting with President Harry Truman the next day was unofficial, and after the brief welcome Truman suggested they take a walk in the White House gardens.

The air was crisp and clear, the ground covered in a moist carpet of brown and gold leaves, as Truman led Eisenhower down the path through the lawns where the Secret Service men stood at strategic intervals.

The two men seemed a strange pair: the small bespectacled President with the bow tie and walking cane who, like a certain predecessor, believed that the way to earn respect was to speak softly and carry a big stick, and the tall, erect military man and former five-star general who had been a professional soldier all his life.

They had reached one of the oak benches and Truman gestured for them to sit.

He lit up a Havana cigar, puffed out smoke and sighed. "You know what I'm going to do the day after I leave office?

I'm going to fly down to Florida and bake under a hot sun. Maybe do me some fishing. Seems like I haven't had time for that in years." The President hesitated before he looked at Eisenhower's face and said more seriously, "Tell me, Ike, what's your opinion of Stalin?"

The President called his successor by his nickname, the one that had stuck with him since West Point as a young cadet. Eisenhower ran a hand over his almost bald head. His shoulders tensed as he sat forward and looked out at the White House gardens.

"You mean as a military adversary?"

Truman shook his head. "I meant as a man."

Eisenhower shrugged and laughed bitterly. "I don't think you need to ask me that question. I'm on the record in that regard. The man's a despot and a dictator. Shrewd and cunning as they come. You could say he's the cause of all our present problems, or certainly most of them. I wouldn't trust the goddamned son-of-a-bitch an inch."

Truman leaned forward, his voice firm. "Hell, Ike, that's my point. He is the whole damned problem. Forget about the Chinese. We don't have to worry about them for at least another ten years down the road. But the way the Russians are moving so fast with their nuclear research they're going to be way ahead of us militarily. And you know as well as I do they've got some pretty good technical minds working for them. The top ex-Nazi scientists. We've exploded a hydrogen device, but they're working on the actual bomb, for God's sakes. And they'll make it, Ike, you mark my words, and sooner than we think. And when that happens, old Joe Stalin knows he can do pretty much as he likes."

"What do our intelligence people say?"

"About the Russian hydrogen program? Six months. Maybe sooner. But six months at the outside. The word is, Stalin's authorized unlimited funds. And our latest intelligence reports say they've built a test site at a place near Omsk, in Siberia."

Eisenhower frowned. The sun was still warm on his face as he glanced toward the Washington Monument half a mile away He looked back as Truman put down his cigar and spoke again' "Ike, this is the first real opportunity we've had to talk in' private, and no doubt the CIA will be briefing you in the coming weeks, but there's something else you ought to know. Something pretty disturbing."

Eisenhower studied the small dapper-dressed man. "You mean about the Russian bomb program?"

Truman shook his head and his face appeared suddenly grim.

"No. What I'm talking about is a report. A highly classified report. It was sent to me by the special Soviet Department we have over near the Potomac. I want you to read it. The source is a highly placed contact we have who has links to the Kremlin. And to tell you the truth, the report has me scared. More scared than I've been in a long time. And you're looking at a man who's come through two world wars, like yourself. But this ..." Truman broke off and shook his head. ""Hell, this worries me even more than the Germans or the Japs did."

There was a look of surprise on Eisenhower's face. "You mean the source of the report is a Russian?"

"An immigrant Russian, to be precise."

"Who?"

"Ike, even I can't tell you that. That's a matter for the CIA. But you'll know the first day you're sitting in the Oval Office."

"Then why let me read this report now?"

Truman took a deep breath, then stood up slowly.

"Because, Ike, I'd like you to be prepared before you come into office. What you're going to be privy to doesn't make for pleasant reading. There are some pretty disturbing things in there, like I said, that scare the pants off me. And whether you like it or not, the contents of the report are going to determine not only your presidency but a hell of a lot else besides. Certainly the future course of this country, maybe even the future course of the whole damned world."

Eisenhower frowned. "It's that serious?"

"Ike, believe me, it's that serious."

The two men sat in the silence of the Oval Office, Eisenhower reading from the manila-colored file, the cover and each were marked in red lettering: "For President's Eyes Only." aged Truman sat opposite, not in the President's chair, but on the small floral couch by the window that faced the Washington Monument. His hands were resting on his cane as he looked over at Eisenhower Is rubbery face. It was grave and the generous wide lips were pursed.

Finally, Eisenhower placed the report gently on the coffee table. He stood and crossed restlessly to the window, hands behind his back. In another five weeks he would inhabit the President's chair, but suddenly the prospect seemed to hold less appeal for him. He put a hand to his forehead and massaged his temples. Truman's voice brought him back.

"Well, what do you think?"

Eisenhower turned. Truman stared at him, his glasses glinting in the strong light from the window.

For a long time Eisenhower said nothing, his face drawn. Then he shook his head. "Jesus, I don't know what to think."

He paused. "You trust the source of the report?"

Truman nodded firmly. "I damned well do. No question. And I've had some independent experts brought in on this. Non-CIA and all top-class people in their field. I wanted them to verify everything you just read. They all agreed with the facts."

Eisenhower took a deep breath. "Then with respect, sir, the day I become President I'm walking into a goddamned mine field."

"I guess you are, Ike," Truman replied, matter-of-factly. "And hell, I'm not being flippant. Just scared. Damned scared.

Truman stood and went over to the window. There were dark rings under his eyes and his soft face looked troubled in the harsh light, as if the strain of eight years in office was finally taking its toll. Suddenly Harry Truman looked very old and very tired.

"To tell the truth, maybe even more scared than I was when I made the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This has even wider implications. Greater dangers."

When he saw Eisenhower stare back at him, Truman nodded gravely over toward the desk.

"I really mean it, Ike. I'm glad it's going to be a former five-star general sitting in that President's chair and not me. Florida's going to be hot enough. Who the hell needs Washington?"

While the two men talked in the Oval Office, four thousand miles away in Paris, France another man lay in the darkened bedroom of a hotel on the boulevard Saint Germain.

Rain drummed against the windows, a downpour falling beyond the drawn curtains.

The telephone rang beside the bed. He picked it up. When he spoke he recognized the voice that answered.

' "It's Konstantine. It happens Monday in Berlin. Everything's arranged, I want no mistakes."

"There won't be." There was a pause, and then the man heard the bitterness in the caller's voice.

"Send him to hell, Alex. Send the butcher to hell."

Soviet-Finnish border. October 23rd Just after midnight the snow had stopped and she lay in the cottony silence of the woods, listening to her heart beating in her ears like the flutter of wild wings. She was cold.

Her clothes were soaked through and her hair was damp and she was aware of the icy sweat on her face. She was more tired than she had ever been in her life, and suddenly she wanted it to be over.

For the past hour now she had watched the sentry hut beside the narrow metal bridge that ran across the frozen river. Every now and then she rubbed her limbs, trying to get warm, but it was no use, she was chilled to her bones, and she longed for warmth and for a final end to the exhaustion. Her uniform coat was covered in frost and snow, and as she lay in the narrow gully behind the bank of fir trees she tried not to think of the past, only the future that lay beyond the narrow metal bridge.