THE COMPANY

Robert Littell

ROME, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1978

HIGH OVER THE CITY, A RACK OF CLOUDS DRIFTED ACROSS THE hunter's moon so rapidly it looked as if a motion picture had been speeded up. On a deserted avenue near a long wall, a dirty yellow Fiat mini-taxi cut its lights and its motor and coasted to the curb at Porta Angelica. A lean figure wearing the rough ankle-length cassock and hood of a Dominican friar emerged from the back seat. He had been raised in the toe of the boot of Italy and was known as the Calabrian by the shadowy organizations that from time to time employed his services. As a teenager, the Calabrian, a beautiful young man with the angelic face of a Renaissance castrato, had trained for several years as an equilibrist in a circus academy but abandoned it when he fell from a high wire and shattered an ankle. Now, despite a perceptible limp, he still moved with the catlike elegance of a tightrope walker. From the hills above the Tiber, a church bell that had recently been hooked up to an electric timer sounded the half-hour half a minute early. The Calabrian checked the luminous dial of his wristwatch, then walked the fifty meters alongside the colonnade to the heavy wooden doors. Pulling on a pair of surgeon's latex gloves, he scratched at the tradesmen's entrance. Immediately a heavy bolt on the inside was thrown and the small blue door set into the larger doors opened just enough for him to slip through. A pale, middle-aged man, dressed in mufti but with the ramrod bearing of an army officer, held up five fingers and nodded toward the only window of the guard barracks out of which light streamed. The Calabrian nodded once. With the officer leading the way, the two started down the alley, ducking when they came to the lighted window. The Calabrian peered over the sill; inside the orderly room two young soldiers in uniform were playing cards, three others dozed in easy chairs. Automatic weapons and clips of ammunition were visible on the table next to a small refrigerator.

The Calabrian trailed after the officer in mufti, past the Institute for Religious Works, to a servants' door in the back of the sprawling palazzo. The officer produced a large skeleton key from his jacket pocket and inserted it into the lock. The door clicked open. He dropped a second skeleton key into the Calabrian's palm. "For the door on the landing," he whispered. He spoke Italian with the flat elongated vowels of someone who came from one of the mountainous cantons of Switzerland bordering the Dolomite Alps. "Impossible to get the key to the apartment without attracting attention."

"No matter," the Calabrian said. "I will pick the lock. What about the milk? What about the alarms?"

"The milk was delivered. You will soon see whether it was consumed. As for the alarms, I disconnected the three doors on the control panel in the officers' ready room."

As the Calabrian started through the door, the officer touched his arm. "You have twelve minutes before the guards begin their next patrol."

"I am able to slow time down or speed it up," remarked the Calabrian, looking up at the moon. "Twelve minutes, spent carefully, can be made to last an eternity." With that, he vanished into the building.

He knew the floor plan of the palazzo as well as he knew the lifelines on the palms of his hands. Hiking his cassock, taking the steps three at a time, he climbed the narrow servants' staircase to the third floor, opened the door with the skeleton key and let himself into the dimly lit corridor.

A long tongue of violet drugget, faded and worn in the middle, ran from the far end of the corridor to the small table facing the antiquated elevator and the central staircase next to it. Moving soundlessly, the Calabrian made his way down the corridor to the table. A plump nun, one of the Sisters of the Handmaids of Jesus Crucified, sat slumped over the table, her head directly under the pale circle of light from a silver desk lamp almost as if she were drying her hair. An empty tumbler with the last of the drugged milk was next to the old-fashioned telephone perched high on its cradle.

The Calabrian pulled an identical tumbler, with a film of uncontaminated milk at the bottom, from one of the deep pockets of his cassock and retrieved the nun's glass containing traces of the doped milk. Then he headed back up the corridor, counting doors. At the third door, he inserted a length of stiff wire with a hook on the end into the keyhole and expertly stroked the inside until the first pin moved up into position, then repeated the gesture with the other pins. When the last pin moved up, the lock snapped open. The Calabrian eased open the door and listened for a moment. Hearing nothing, he padded through the foyer into a large rectangular drawing room with a marble fireplace on each end and ornate furniture scattered around. The slatted shutters on all four windows had been pulled closed. A single table lamp with a low wattage bulb served, as the briefing report had predicted, as a night-light.

Gliding soundlessly across the room and down a hallway on rubber-soled shoes, the Calabrian came to the bedroom door. He turned the ceramic knob and carefully pushed the door open and listened again. A stifling stuffiness, the stench of an old man's room, emerged from the bedchamber; the person who occupied it obviously didn't sleep with a window open. Flicking on a penlight, the Calabrian inspected the room. Unlike the drawing room, the furnishings were spartan: there was a sturdy brass bed, a night table, two wooden chairs, one piled with neatly folded clothing, the other with dossiers, a wash basin with a single tap over it, a naked electric bulb dangling from the ceiling, a simple wooden crucifix on the wall over the head of the bed. He crossed the room and looked down at the figure sleeping with a sheet drawn up to its chin. A thickset man with a peasant's rugged features, he had been in his new job only thirty-four days, barely enough time to learn his way around the palazzo. His breathing was regular and intense, causing the hairs protruding from his nostrils to quiver; he was deep in a drugged sleep. There was a tumbler on the night table with traces of milk at the bottom, and a photograph in a silver frame—it showed a prince of the church making the sign of the cross over a young priest prostrate on the ground before him. The inscription, written in a bold hand across the bottom of the photograph, read "Per Albino Luciani, Venizia, 1933." A signature was scrawled under the inscription: "Ambrogio Ratti, Pius XI." Next to the photograph was a pair of reading spectacles, a worn bible filled with place markers, and a bound and numbered copy of Humani Generis Unitas, Pius XI's never-promulgated encyclical condemning racism and anti-Semitism that had been on the Popes desk awaiting his signature the day he died in 1939.

The Calabrian checked his wristwatch and set to work. He rinsed the milk glass in the wash basin, dried it on the hem of his cassock and replaced it in precisely the same place on the night table. He produced the phial filled with milk from his pocket and emptied the contents into the glass so there would be a trace of uncontaminated milk in it. Clamping the penlight between his lips, the Calabrian turned to the drugged man in the bed, stripped back the sheet and heaved him over onto his stomach. Then he pulled up the white cotton nightgown, exposing the saphenous vein behind the knee. The people who had hired the Calabrian had gotten their hands on Albino Luciani's medical report after a routine colonoscopy the previous winter; because of the varicose nature of the vein running the length of his right leg, the patient had been given preventive treatment against phlebitis. The Calabrian fetched the small metal kit from his pocket and opened it on the bed next to the knee. Working rapidly—after his high-wire accident, he had spent several years as a male nurse—he inserted a 30-gauge, 0.3 millimeter needle into the syringe filled with extract from a castor oil plant, then deftly stabbed the needle into the saphenae behind the knee and injected the four-milliliter dose of fluid into the bloodstream. According to his employer, cardiovascular collapse would occur within minutes; within hours the toxin would dissipate, leaving no trace in the unlikely event an autopsy were to be performed. Carefully extracting the incredibly thin needle, the Calabrian wiped away the pinpoint of blood with a small moist sponge, then bent close to see if he could detect the puncture wound. There was a slight reddening, the size of a grain of sand but that, too, would disappear by the time the body was discovered in the morning. Satisfied with his handiwork, he went over to the chair piled high with dossiers and shuffled through them until he came to the one marked, in Roman letters, KHOLSTOMER. Lifting the hem of his cassock, he wedged the file folder under his belt, then looked around to see if he had forgotten anything.

Back in the corridor, the Calabrian pulled the apartment door shut and heard the pins in the lock click closed. Checking his watch—he had four minutes remaining before the guards started on their rounds—he hurried down the stairs and through the alleyway to the tradesmen's entrance. The officer in mufti, looking quite shaken, stared at him, afraid to pose the question. The Calabrian smiled the answer as he handed back the skeleton key. The officers lips parted and he sucked in a quick gulp of air; the thing that had no name was accomplished. He pulled open the small blue door wide enough for the Calabrian to slip through and bolted it after him.

The taxi was waiting at the curb, its door ajar. The Calabrian settled into the back seat and slowly began to peel away the latex gloves, finger by finger. The driver, a young Corsican with a broken, badly-set nose, started down the still deserted street, moving cautiously at first so as not to attract attention, then picking up speed as he turned onto a broad boulevard and headed for Civitavecchia, the port of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea, thirty-five minutes away. There, in a dockside warehouse a stones throw from the Vladimir Ilyich, a Russian freighter due to sail on the morning tide, the Calabrian would meet his controller, a reed-like man with a scraggly pewter beard and brooding eyes, known only as Starik. He would return the paraphernalia of assassination— the gloves, the lock-pick, the metal kit, the tumbler with the last drops of doped milk in it, even the empty phial—and deliver the dossier marked KHOLSTOMER. And he would take possession of the bag containing a king's ransom, $1 million in used bills of various denominations; not a bad wage for fifteen minutes' work. About the time first light stained the eastern horizon, when the Sister of the Handmaids of Jesus Crucified (emerging from a drugged sleep) discovered Albino Luciani dead in his bed, the victim of a heart attack, the Calabrian would board the small fishing boat at a wharf that would take him, in two days' time, into exile on the sun-drenched beaches of Palermo.

BERLIN, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1950

FROM ITS PERCH OVER THE MANTELSHELF A MUTILATED BAVARIAN cuckoo clock, its hour hand mangled, its minute hand missing, sent the seconds ricocheting from wall to wall of the shabby room. The Sorcerer, his face contorted in chronic constipation, sniffed tentatively at the air, which was bitterly cold and stung his nostrils. "Someday the goddamn fiction writers will get around to describing what we did here—"

"I love spy stories," the Fallen Angel giggled from the door of the adjoining room.

"They'll turn it into melodrama," Jack McAuliffe said. "They'll make it sound as if we played cowboys and Indians to brighten our dull lives."

"Spying—if that's what I been doing all these years—don't brighten my life none," remarked the Fallen Angel. "I always get stomach cramps before an operation."

"I'm not here in this dry-rotted rain-wash of a city because it brightens my life," the Sorcerer said, preempting the question an apprentice with balls would have posed by now. "I'm here because the goddamn Goths are at the goddamn gate." He tugged a threadbare scarf up over his numb earlobes, tap-danced his scruffy cowboy boots on the floor to keep up the circulation in his toes. "Are you reading me loud and clear, sport? This isn't alcohol talking, this is the honcho of Berlin Base talking. Someone has to man the goddamn ramparts." He sucked on a soggy Camel and washed down the smoke with a healthy gulp of what he called medicinal whiskey. "I drink what my fitness report describes as a toxic amount of booze," he rambled on, addressing the problem Jack didn't have the guts to raise, articulating each syllable as if he were patrolling the fault line between soused and sober, "because the goddamn Goths happen to be winning the goddamn war."

Harvey Torriti, a.k.a. the Sorcerer, scraped back the chair and made his way to the single small oriel window of the safe house two floors above the East Berlin neighborhood cinema. From under the floorboards came the distant shriek of incoming mortars, then a series of dull explosions as they slammed into the German positions. Several of Torriti's hookers had seen the Soviet war film the week before. The Ukrainian girl who bleached her hair the color of chrome claimed the movie had been shot, with the usual cast of thousands, on a studio lot in Alma-Ata; in the background she recognized, so she'd said, the snow-capped Ala-Tau mountain range, where she used to sleigh ride when she was evacuated to Central Asia during the war. Snorting to clear a tingling sinus, the Sorcerer parted the slats of an imaginary Venetian blind with two thick fingers of his gloved hand and gazed through the grime on the pane. At sunset a mustard-color haze had drifted in from the Polish steppe, a mere thirty miles east, shrouding the Soviet Sector of Berlin in an eerie stillness, coating its intestine-like cobble gutters with what looked like an algae that reeked, according to Torriti's conceit, of intrigue. Down the block jackdaws beat into the air and cawed savagely as they wheeled around the steeple of a dilapidated church that had been converted into a dilapidated warehouse. (The Sorcerer, an aficionado of cause-and-effect, listened for the echo of the pistol shot he'd surely missed.) In the narrow street outside the cinema Silwan I, known as Sweet Jesus, one of the two Rumanian gypsies employed by Torriti as bodyguards, could be seen, a sailor's watch cap pulled low over his head, dragging a muzzled lap dog through the brackish light of a vapor lamp. Except for Sweet Jesus, the streets of what the Company pros called "West Moscow" appeared to be deserted. "If there are Homo sapiens out there celebrating the end of the year," Torriti muttered gloomily, "they sure are being discreet about it."

Suffering from a mild case of first operation adrenalin jitters, Jack McAuliffe, a.k.a. the Sorcerer's Apprentice, called from the door with elaborate laziness, "The quiet gives me the willies, Harvey. Back in the States everyone honks their horns on New Years Eve."

The second gypsy, Silwan II, dubbed the Fallen Angel by Torriti after he detected in his dark eyes an ugly hint of things the Rumanian was desperately trying to forget, stuck his head in from the next room. A gangly young man with a smallpox-scarred face, he had been reading for the Rumanian Orthodox church and wound up in the business of espionage when the Communists shut down his seminary. "Blowing horns is against the law in the German Democratic Republic," Silwan II announced in the precise accented English of someone who had picked up the language from textbooks. "Also in our capitalist Germany."

At the window, the Sorcerer fogged a pane with his whiskey breath and rubbed it clean with a heavy forearm. Across the roofs the top floors of several high-rise apartment buildings, their windows flickering with light, loomed through the murky cityscape like the tips of icebergs. "It's not a matter of German law," Torriti reckoned moodily, "it's a matter of German character." He wheeled away from the window so abruptly he almost lost his balance. Grabbing the back of the chair to steady himself, he cautiously shoehorned his heavy carcass onto the wooden seat. "I happen to be the god-damn Company specialist on German character," he insisted, his voice pitched high but curiously melodic. "I was a member of the debriefing team that interrogated the SS Obersturmführer of Auschwitz night before the fucker was strung up for war crimes. What was his goddamn name? Hoss. Rudolf Hoss. Fucker claimed he couldn't have killed five thousand Jews a day because the trains could only bring in two thousand. Talk about an airtight defense! We were all smoking like concentration camp chimneys and you could see Herr Hoss was dying for a goddamn cigarette, so I offered him one of my Camels." Torriti swallowed a sour giggle. "You know what Rudy did, sport?"

"What did Rudy do, Harvey?"

"The night before his execution he turned down the fucking cigarette because there was a 'No Smoking' sign on the wall. Now that's what I call German character."

"Lenin once said the only way you could get Germans to storm a railway station was to buy them tickets to the quay," ventured the Fallen Angel.

Jack laughed—a shade too quickly, a shade too heartily for Torriti's taste.

The Sorcerer was dressed in the shapeless trousers and ankle-length rumpled green overcoat of an East German worker. The tips of a wide and flowery Italian tie were tucked, military style, between two buttons of his shirt. His thin hair was sweat-pasted onto his glistening skull. Eying his apprentice across the room, he began to wonder how Jack would perform in a crunch; he himself had barely made it through a small Midwestern community college and then had clawed his way up through the ranks to finish the war with the fool's gold oak leaves of a major pinned to the frayed collar of his faded khaki shirt, which left him with a low threshold of tolerance for the Harvard-Yale-Princeton crowd—what he called "the boys from HYP." It was a bias that grew during a brief stint running organized crime investigations for the FBI right after the war (employment that ended abruptly when J. Edgar Hoover himself spotted Torriti in the corridor wearing tight trousers and an untied tie and fired him on the spot). What the hell! Nobody in the Company bothered consulting the folks on the firing line when they press-ganged the Ivy League for recruits and came up with jokers like Jack McAuliffe, a Yalie so green behind the ears he'd forgotten to get his ashes hauled when he was sent to debrief Torriti's hookers the week the Sorcerer came down with the clap. Well, what could you expect from a college graduate with a degree in rowing?

Clutching the bottle of PX whiskey by its throat, closing one eye and squinting through the other, the Sorcerer painstakingly filled the kitchen tumbler to the brim. "Not the same without ice," he mumbled, belching as he carefully maneuvered his thick lips over the glass. He felt the alcohol scald the back of his throat. "No ice, no tinkle. No tinkle, schlecht." He jerked his head up and called across to Jack, "So what time do you make it, sport?"

Jack, anxious to put on a good show, glanced nonchalantly at the Bulova his parents had given him on his graduation from Yale. "He should have been here twelve, fifteen minutes ago," he said.

The Sorcerer scratched absently at the two-day stubble on his overlapping chins. He hadn't had time to shave since the high priority message had sizzled into Berlin Base forty-two hours earlier. The heading had been crammed with in-house codes indicating it had come directly from counterintelligence; from Mother himself. Like all messages from counterintelligence it had been flagged "CRITIC," which meant you were expected to drop whatever you were doing and concentrate on the matter at hand. Like some messages from counterintelligence—usually the ones dealing with defectors—it had been encoded in one of Mother's unbreakable polyalphabetic systems that used two cipher alphabets to provide multiple substitutes for any given letter in the text.

TOP SECRET

WARNING NOTICE: SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION

Intelligence sources and methods involved

FROM: Hugh Ashmead [Mother's in-house cryptonym]

To: Alice Reader [the Sorcerers in-house cryptonym]

SUBJECT: Bringing home the bacon

The message had gone on to inform Torriti that someone claiming to be a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer had put out feelers that had landed in one of the several in-boxes on Mother's desk. (In the Sorcerers experience everything landed in one of the in-boxes on Mother's desk but that was another story.) Mother's cable identified the would-be defector by the random cryptonym SNOWDROP, preceded by the digraph Æ to indicate the matter was being handled by the Soviet Russia Division, and went on to quote the entire contents of the Company's 201—the file in Central Registry—on the Russian.

Vishnevsky, Konstanun: born either 1898 or 1899 in Kiev; father, a chemical engineer and Party member, died when subject was a teenager; at age 17 enrolled as cadet in Kiev Military Academy; graduated four years later as an artillery officer; did advanced studies at the Odessa Artillery School for officers; co-opted into military intelligence at the start of Second World War; believed to be a member of the Soviet Communist Party; married, one son born 1940; after war transferred to the Committee for State Security (KGB); studied counterintelligence at the High Intelligence School (one-year short course); on graduation posted to Brest-Litovsk for four months; attended the KGB Diplomatic Institute in Moscow for one year; on successfully completing course assigned to Moscow Centre for six months as analyst in US order of battle section of the KGBs Information Department; posted to Stockholm summer 1948—January 1950 where he believed to have specialized in military affairs; subsequent assignment unknown. No record of anti-Soviet opinions. Conclusion: considered poor candidate for recruitment.

Always maternally protective of his sources. Mother had been careful not to identify where the original tip had come from, but the Sorcerer was able to make an educated guess when Berlin Base asked the Germans— "our" Germans, which was to say Reinhard Gehlen's Sud-Deutsche Industrie-Verwertungs GmbH, working out of a secret compound in the Munich suburb of Pullach—for routine background traces on a baker's dozen KGB officers stationed at the Soviet Karlshorst enclave in East Berlin. Gehlen's people, always eager to please their American masters, quickly provided a bulky briefing book on the Russians in question. Buried in the report was a detail missing from the Company's 201: ÆSNOWDROP was thought to have had a Jewish mother. That, in turn, led the Sorcerer to suspect that it was the Israeli Mossad agent in West Berlin known as the Rabbi who had been whispering in Mother's ear; nine times out of ten anything that even remotely concerned a Jew passed through the Rabbi's hands. (The Israelis had their own agenda, of course, but high on it was scoring Brownie points in Washington against the day when they needed to cash in their lOUs.) According to Mother the potential KGB defector wanted to come over with a wife and a child. The Sorcerer was to meet with him in the safe house designated MARLBOROUGH at such and such a date, at such and such an hour, establish his bona fides to make absolutely certain he wasn't what Mother called a "bad 'un"—a dispatched agent sent across with a briefcase full of KGB disinformation—at which point he was to "press the orange" and find out what goodies he had to offer in exchange for political asylum. After which the Sorcerer would report back to Mother to see if Washington wanted to go ahead with the actual defection.

In the next room the Fallen Angel's radio crackled into life. Surfing on a burst of static came the codewords Morgenstunde hat Gold im Mund ("the morning hour has gold in its mouth"). Jack, startled, snapped to attention. Silwan II appeared at the door again. "He's on the way up," he hissed. Kissing the fingernail of his thumb, he hurriedly crossed himself.

One of the Sorcerer's Watchers, a German woman in her seventies sitting in the back row of the theater, had seen the dark figure of a man slipping into the toilet at the side of the cinema and mumbled the news into a small battery-powered radio hidden in her knitting bag. Inside the toilet the Russian would open the door of a broom closet, shove aside the mops and carpet sweepers and push through the hidden panel in the back wall of the closet, then start up the ridiculously narrow wooden stairs that led to the top floor and the safe house.

The Sorcerer, suddenly cold sober, shuddered like a Labrador shaking off rain water and shook his head to clear his vision. He waved Silwan II into the adjoining room, then leaned toward the spine of God and Man at Yale— the Superstition of Academic Freedom and whispered "Testing five, four, three, two, one." Silwan popped through the door, flashed a thumbs-up sign and disappeared again, shutting and locking the door behind him.

Jack felt his pulse speed up. He flattened himself against the wall so that the door to the corridor, once opened, would conceal him. Pulling a Walther PPK from the holster strapped to the belt in the hollow of his back, he thumbed off the safety and held the weapon out of sight behind his overcoat. Looking across the room, he was unnerved to see the Sorcerer rocking back and forth in mock admiration.

"Oh, neat trick," Torriti said, his face straight, his small beady eyes flashing in derision. "Hiding the handgun behind you like that, I mean. Rules out the possibility of frightening off the defector before the fucker has a chance to give us his name, rank, and serial number." Torriti himself carried a pearlhandled revolver under one sweaty armpit and a snub-nosed .38 Detective Special in a holster taped to an ankle, but he made it a rule never to reach for a weapon unless there was a strong possibility he would eventually pull the trigger. It was a bit of tradecraft McAuliffe would pick up if he stuck around Berlin Base long enough: the sight of handguns made the nervous people in the business of espionage nervouser; the nervouser they got the more likely it was that someone would wind up shooting someone, which was from everyone's point of view a disagreeable denouement to any operation.

The fact of the matter was that Torriti, for all his griping about greenhorns, got a charge out of breaking in the virgins. He thought of tradecraft as a kind of religion—it was said of the Sorcerer that he could blend into a crowd even when there wasn't one—and took a visceral pleasure in baptizing his disciples. And, all things considered, he judged McAuliffe—with his tinted aviator sunglasses, his unkempt Cossack mustache, his flaming-red hair slicked back and parted in the middle, the unfailing politeness that masked an affinity for violence—to be a cut above the usual cannon fodder sent out from Washington these days, and this despite the handicap of a Yale education. There was something almost comically Irish about him: the progeny of the undefeated bareknuckle lightweight champion of the world, a McAuliffe whose motto had been "Once down is no battle"; the lapsed moralist who came out laughing and swinging and wouldn't stop either simply because a gong sounded; the lapsed Catholic capable of making a lifelong friend of someone he met over breakfast and consigning him to everlasting purgatory by teatime.

At the door Jack sheepishly slipped the Walther back into its holster. The Sorcerer rapped a knuckle against his forehead. "Get it into your thick skull we're the good guys, sport."

"Jesus H. Christ, Harvey, I know who the good guys are or I wouldn't be here."

In the corridor outside the room, the floorboards groaned. A fist drummed against the door. The Sorcerer closed his eyes and nodded. Jack pulled open the door.

A short, powerfully built man with close-cropped charcoal hair, an oval Slavic face, and skin the color and texture of moist candle wax stood on the threshold. Visibly edgy, he looked quickly at Jack, then turned to study through narrowed, vaguely Asiatic eyes the Buddha-like figure who appeared to be lost in meditation at the small table. Suddenly showing signs of life, the Sorcerer greeted the Russian with a cheery salute and waved him toward the free chair. The Russian walked over to the oriel window and peered down at the street as one of those newfangled East German cars, its sorethroated motor coughing like a tubercular man, lurched past the cinema and disappeared around a corner. Reassured by the lack of activity outside, the Russian took a turn around the room, running the tips of his finger over the surface of a cracked mirror, trying the handle on the door of the adjoining room. He wound up in front of the cuckoo clock. "What happened to his hands?" he asked.

"The first time I set foot in Berlin," the Sorcerer said, "which was one week after the end of what you jokers call the Great Patriotic War, the Ring Road was crammed with emaciated horses pulling farm wagons. The scrawny German kids watching them were eating acorn cakes. The horses were being led by Russian soldiers. The wagons were piled high with loot—four-poster beds, toilets, radiators, faucets, kitchen sinks and stoves, just about anything that could be unscrewed. I remember seeing soldiers carrying sofas out of Hermann Goering's villa. Nothing was too big or too small. I'll lay odds the minute hand of the cuckoo clock was in one of those wagons."

An acrid smirk made its way onto the Russian's lips. "It was me leading one of the wagons," he said. "I served as an intelligence officer in an infantry regiment that battled, in four winters, from the faubourg of Moscow to the rubble of the Reichstag in the Tiergarten. On the way we passed hundreds of our villages razed to the ground by the fleeing Nazis. We buried the mutilated corpses of our partisan fighters—there were women and children who had been executed with flame throwers. Only forty-two of the original twelve hundred sixty men in my battalion reached Berlin. The hands of your cuckoo clock, Mister American Central Intelligence agent, were small repay for what the Germans did to us during the war."

The Russian pulled the seat back from the table so that from it he could watch both Jack and the Sorcerer, and sat down. Torriti's nostrils flared as he nodded his chins toward the bottle of whiskey. The Russian, who reeked of a trashy eau de cologne, shook his head no.

"Okay, let's start down the yellow brick road. I've been told to expect someone name ofKonstantin Vishnevsky."

"I am Vishnevsky."

"Funny part is we couldn't find a Vishnevsky, Konstantin, on the KGB Berlin roster."

"That is because I am carried on the register under the name Volkov. How, please, is your name?"

The Sorcerer was in his element now and thoroughly enjoying himself. "Tweedledum is how my name is."

"Tweedle-Dum how?"

"Just Tweedledum." Torriti wagged a forefinger at the Russian sitting an arm's length from the table. "Look, friend, you're obviously not new at this game we're playing—you know the ground rules like I know the ground rules."

Jack leaned back against the wall next to the door and watched in fascination as Vishnevsky unbuttoned his overcoat and produced a battered tin cigarette case from which he extracted a long, thin paper-tipped papyrosi. From another pocket he brought out an American Army Air Corps lighter. Both his hand and the cigarette between his lips trembled as he bent his head to the flame. The act of lighting up appeared to soothe his nerves. The room filled with the foul-smelling Herzegovina Flor that the Russian officers smoked in the crowded cabarets along the Kurfurstendamm. "Please to answer me a single question," Vishnevsky said. "Is there a microphone? Are you recording our conversation?"

The Sorcerer sensed a great deal was riding on his answer. Keeping his unblinking eyes fixed on the Russian, he decided to wing it. "I am. We are. Yes."

Vishnevsky actually breathed a sigh of relief. "Most certainly you are. In your position I would do the same. If you said me no I would get up and exit. A defection is a high-wire act performed without benefit of safety net. I am putting my life in your hands, Mr. Tweedle however your name is. I must be able to trust you." He dragged on the cigarette and exhaled through his nostrils. "I hold the rank of lieutenant colonel in our KGB."

The Sorcerer accepted this with a curt nod. There was a dead silence while the Russian concentrated on the cigarette. Torriti made no effort to fill the void. He had been through this drill more times than he could remember. He understood that it was crucial for him to set the agenda, to impose a pace that violated the defectors expectations; it was important to demonstrate, in subtle ways, who was running the show. If there was going to be a defection it would be on the Sorcerer's terms and at the Sorcerer's pleasure.

"I am listed as a cultural attaché and function under the cover of a diplomatic passport," the Russian added.

The Sorcerer reached out and caressed the side of the whiskey bottle with the backs of his gloved fingers. "Okay, here's the deal," he finally said. "Think of me as a fisherman trawling the continental shelf off the Prussian coast. When I feel there is something in the net I pull it up and examine it. I throw the little ones back because I am under strict orders to only keep big fish. Nothing personal, it goes without saying. Are you a big fish, Comrade Vishnevsky?"

The Russian squirmed on his seat. "So: I am the deputy to the chief of the First Chief Directorate at the KGB's Berlin base in Karlshorst."

The Sorcerer produced a small notebook from an inside pocket and thumbed through it to a page filled with minuscule writing in Sicilian. He regularly debriefed the sister of a cleaning woman who worked at the hotel a stone's throw from Karlshorst where KGB officers from Moscow Centre stayed when they visited Berlin. "On 22 December 1950 KGB Karlshorst had its books inspected by an auditor sent out from the Central. Committee Control Commission. What was his name?"

"Evpraksein, Fyodor Eremeyevich. He ended up at the spare desk in the office next to mine."

The Sorcerer arched his eyebrows as if to say: Fine, you work at Karlshorst, but you'll have to do a lot better if you want to qualify as a big fish. "What exactly do you want from me?" Torriti asked suddenly.

The defector cleared his throat. "I am ready to come over," he announced, "but only if I can bring with me my wife, my son."

"Why?"

"What does it change, the why?"

"Trust me. It changes everything. Why?"

"My career is arrived to a dead end. I am"—he struggled to find a word in English, then settled for the German—li desillusioniert with system. I am not talking about Communism, I am talking about the KGB. The rezident tried to seduce my wife. I said him face to face about this. He denied the thing, he accused me of trying to blackmail him into giving me a good endyear report. Moscow Centre believed his version, not mine. So: this is my last foreign posting. I am fifty-two years old—I will be put out like a sheep to graze in some obscure pasture. I will spend the rest of my life in Kazakhstan typewriting in triplicate reports from informers. I dreamed of more important things... This is my last chance to make a new life for myself, for my wife, for my son."

"Is your rezident aware that you are half-Jewish?"

Vishnevsky started. "How can you know..." He sighed. "My rezident discovered it, which is to say Moscow Centre discovered it, when my mother died last summer. She left a testament saying she wished to be buried in the Jewish cemetery of Kiev. I tried to suppress the testament before it was filed but—"

"Your fear of being put out to pasture—is it because Moscow found out you were half-Jewish or your dispute with the Berlin rezident?"

The Russian shrugged wearily. "I said you what I think."

"Does your wife know you've contacted us?"

"I will tell her when the time arrives to leave."

"How can you be sure she'll want to go?"

Vishnevsky considered the question. "There are things a husband knows about a wife... things he does not have to ask in words."

Grunting from the effort, the Sorcerer pushed himself to his feet and came around the table. He leaned back against it and looked down at the Russian. "If we were to bring you and your family out, say to Florida, we would want to throw you a party." Torriti's face twisted into an unpleasant smile as he held out his hands, palms up. "In the US of A it's considered rude to come to a party empty-handed. Before I can get the folks I work for to agree to help you, you need to tell me what you plan to bring to the party, Comrade Vishnevsky."

The Russian glanced at the clock over the mantle, then looked back at Torriti. "I was stationed in Stockholm for two years and two months before being posted to Berlin. I can give you the names of our operatives in Stockholm, the addresses of our safe houses—"

"Exfiltrating three people from East Germany is extremely complicated."

"I can bring with me the order of battle of the KGB Karlshorst rezidentura in Berlin."

Jack noticed the Sorcerers eyes misting over with disinterest; he made a mental note to add this piece of playacting to his repertoire. The Russian must have seen it, too, because he blurted out, "The KGB works under cover of Inspektsiia po voprosam bezopasnosti—what you call the Inspectorate for Security Questions. The Inspektsiia took over the Saint Antonius Hospital and has a staff of six hundred thirty full-time employees. The rezident, General Ilichev, works under the cover of counselor to the Soviet Control Commission. The deputy rezident is Ugor-Molody, Oskar— he is listed as chief of the visa section. General Ilichev is creating a separate illegals directorate within the Karlshorst-based First Chief Directorate—the designation is Directorate S. It will train and provide documents for KGB illegals assigned to Westwork."

The Sorcerer's lids seemed to close over his eyes out of sheer boredom. The Russian dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out under a heel. "I can give you microphones... phone taps... listening posts."

The Sorcerer glanced across the room at Jack in obvious disappointment. Under the floorboards heavy caliber machine guns spat out bullets as the Russians stormed Guderian's tanks dug in along the Oder-Neisse line. "For us to get a KGB officer, assuming that's what you are, his wife, his son into West Berlin and then fly them out to the West will take an enormous effort. People will be asked to put their lives in jeopardy. An extremely large sum of money will be spent. Once in the West the officer in question will need to be taken care of, and generously. He will require a new identity, a bank account, a monthly stipend, a house on a quiet street in a remote city, an automobile." The Sorcerer stuffed his notebook back into a pocket. "If that's all you have, friend, I'm afraid we're both wasting our time. They say there are seven thousand spies in Berlin ready to put down cold cash for what our German friends call Spielmaterial. Peddle your wares to one of them. Maybe the French or the Israelis—"

Following every word from the wall, Jack grasped that Torriti was an artiste at this delectable game of espionage.

The Russian lowered his voice to a whisper. "For the last several months I have been assigned as the KGB liaison with the new German Democratic Republic intelligence service. They are setting up an office in a former school in the Pankow district of East Berlin near the restricted area where the Party and government leaders live. The new intelligence service, part of the Ministerium füer Staatssicherheit, goes by a cover name—Institut füerWirtschaftswissenschafüiche Forschung, the Institute for Economic and Scientific Research. I can deliver you its order of battle down to the last paper clip. The chief is Ackermann, Anton, but it is said that his second in command, who is twenty-eight years of age, is being groomed as the eventual boss. His name is Wolf, Marcus. You can maybe find photographs of him—he covered the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1945 for the Berlin radio station Berliner Rundfunk."

Jack, who had been poring over the Berlin Base morgue files in the six weeks since he'd been posted to Germany, interrupted in what he hoped was a bored voice. "Wolf spent the war years in Moscow and speaks perfect Russian. Everyone at Karlshorst calls him by his Russian name, Misha."

Vishnevsky plunged on, dredging up names and dates and places in a desperate attempt to impress the Sorcerer. "The Main Directorate started out with eight Germans and four Soviet advisors but they are expanding rapidly. Within the Main Directorate there is a small independent unit called Abwehr, what you call counterintelligence. Its brief is to monitor and penetrate the West German security services. The Abwehr staff plans to use captured Nazi archives to blackmail prominent people in the West who have suppressed their Nazi pasts. High on their list of targets is Filbinger, Hans, the BadenWurttemberg political figure who, as a Nazi prosecutor, handed down death sentences for soldiers and civilians. The architect of this Westwork program is the current head of the Main Directorate, Stahlmann, Richard—"

Jack interrupted again. "Stahlmann's real name is Artur Illner. He's been a member of the German Communist Party since the First World War. He's operated under a cover alias for so long even his wife calls him Stahlmann."

The Sorcerer, pleased with Jack's ability to pick up on the game, rewarded him with a faint smile.

Jack's comments had rattled the Russian. He dragged an oversized handkerchief from a trouser pocket and mopped the back of his neck. "I am able to give you—" Vishnevsky hesitated. He had planned to dole out what he had, an increment of information in exchange for an increment of protection; he had planned to keep the best for when he was safely in the West and then use it to pry a generous settlement package out of his hosts. When he spoke again his words were barely audible. "I am able to reveal to you the identity of a Soviet agent in Britain's intelligence service. Someone high up in their MI6...."

To Jack, watching from the wall, it appeared as if the Sorcerer had frozen in place.

"You know his name?" Torriti asked casually.

"I know things about him that will allow you to identify him."

"Such as?"

"The precise date he was debriefed in Stockholm last summer. The approximate date he was debriefed in Zurich the previous winter. Two operations that were exposed because of him—one involved an agent, the second involved a microphone. With these details even a child would be capable of identifying him."

"How do you happen to have this information?"

"I was serving in Stockholm last February when a KGB officer from Moscow Centre turned up. He traveled under the cover of a sports journalist from Pravda. He was flying in and out for a highly secret one-time contact. It was a cutout operation—he debriefed a Swedish national who debriefed the British mole. The KGB officer was the husband of my wife's sister. One night we invited him to dinner. He drank a great deal of Swedish vodka. He is my age and very competitive—he wanted to impress me. He boasted about his mission."

"What was the name of the KGB agent who came to Stockholm?"

"Zhitkin, Markel Sergeyevich."

"I would like to help you but I must have more than that to nibble on..."

The Russian agonized about it for a moment. "I will give you the microphone that went dry."

The Sorcerer, all business, returned to his seat, opened his notebook, uncapped a pen and looked up at the Russian. "Okay, let's talk turkey."

Part 2

52:34

The hand-lettered sign taped to the armor-plated door of the Sorcerer's Berlin Base sanctum, two levels below ground in a brick building on a quiet, tree-lined street in the upper-crust suburb of Berlin-Dahlem, proclaimed the gospel according to Torriti: "Territory needs to be defended at the frontier, sport." Silwan II, his eyes pink with grogginess, his shoulder holster sagging into view under his embroidered Tyrolean jacket, sat slumped on a stool, the guardian of the Sorcerers door and the water cooler filled with moonshine slivovitz across from it. From inside the office came the scratchy sound of a 78-rpm record belting out Bjorling arias; the Sorcerer, who had taken to describing himself as a certified paranoid with real enemies, kept the Victrola running at full blast on the off chance the Russians had succeeded in bugging the room. The walls on either side of his vast desk were lined with racks of loaded rifles and machine pistols he'd "liberated" over the years; one desk drawer was stuffed with handguns, another with boxes of cartridges. A round red-painted thermite bomb sat atop each of the three large office safes for the emergency destruction of files if the balloon went up and the Russians, a mortar shot away, invaded.

Hunched like a parenthesis over the message board on his blotter, the Sorcerer was putting the finishing touches on the overnight report to Washington. Jack, back from emptying the Sorcerer's burn bag into the incinerator, pushed through the door and flopped onto the couch under some gun racks. Looking up, Torriti squinted at Jack as if he were trying to place him. Then his eyes brightened. "So what did you make of him, sport?" he called over the music, his trigger finger absently stirring the ice in the whiskey glass.

"He worries me, Harvey," Jack called back. "It seems to me he hemmed and hawed his way through his biography when you put him through the wringer. Like when you asked him to describe the street he lived on during his first KGB posting in Brest-Litovsk. Like when you asked him the names of the instructors at the KGB's Diplomatic Institute in Moscow."

"So where were you raised, sport?"

"In a backwater called Jonestown, Pennsylvania. I went to high school in nearby Lebanon."

"And then, for the paltry sum of three-thousand-odd dollars per, which happens to be more than my secretary makes, you got what the hoi polloi call a higher education at Yale U."

Jack smoothed back the wings of his Cossack mustache with his forefingers. "'Hoi' already means the,' Harvey. So you don't really need to put a 'the' before 'hoi polloi' because there's already..." His voice trailed off as he spotted the pained expression lurking in the creases around the Sorcerers eyes.

"Stop busting my balls, sport, and describe the street your high school was on."

"The street my high school was on. Sure. Well, I seem to recall it was lined with trees on which we used to tack dirty Burma-Shave limericks."

"What kind of trees were they? Was it a one-way street or a two-way street? What was on the corner, a stop sign or a stoplight? Was it a no-parking zone? What was across the street from the school?"

Jack examined the ceiling. "Houses were across the street. No, it must have been the public school in Jonestown that had houses across the street. Across from the high school in Lebanon was a playground. Or was that behind the school? The street was—" Jack screwed up his face. "I guess I see what you're driving at, Harvey."

Torriti took a swig of whiskey. "Let's say for arguments sake that Vishnevsky is a disinformation operation. When we walked him through his legend, he'd have it down pat, he'd be able to give you chapter and verse without sounding as if he made it up as he went along."

"How do you know the Russians aren't one jump ahead of you? How do you know they haven't programmed their plants to hem and haw their way through the legend?"

"The Russians are street-smart, sport, but they're not sidewalk-smart, which happens to be an expression I invented that means sophisticated. Besides which, my nose didn't twitch. My nose always twitches when it gets a whiff of a phony."

"Did you swallow the story about the rezident making a play for his wife?"

"Hey, on both sides of the Iron Curtain rank has its privileges. I mean, what's the point of being the head honcho at Karlshorst if you can't make a pass at the wife of one of your minions, especially one who's already in hot water for hiding the fact that he's part-Jewish? Listen up, sport, most of the defectors who come over try to tell us what they think we want to hear— how they've become disenchanted with Communism, how they're being suffocated by the lack of freedom, how they've come to understand that old Joe Stalin is a tyrant, that sort of bullshit."

"So what are you telling Washington, Harvey? That your nose didn't twitch?"

"I'm saying there is a seventy percent chance the fucker is who he says he is, so we should exfiltrate him. I'm saying I'll have the infrastructure ready in forty-eight hours. I'm saying the serial about the mole in MI6 needs to be explored because, if it's true, we're in a pretty fucking pickle; we've been sharing all our shit with the cousins forever, which means our secrets may be winding up, via the Brits, on some joker's desk in Moscow. And I'm reminding Washington, in case they get cold feet, that even if the defector is a black agent, it's still worth while bringing him across."

"I don't follow you there, Harvey."

The Sorcerer's fist hit a buzzer on the telephone console. His Night Owl, Miss Sipp, a thirtyish brunette with somnolent eyes that blinked very occasionally and very slowly, stuck her head into the office; she was something of a legend at Berlin Base for having fallen into a dead faint the day Torriti peeled off his shirt to show her the shrapnel wound that had decapitated the naked lady tattooed on his arm. Since then she had treated him as if he suffered from a communicable sexual disease, which is to say she held her breath in his presence and spent as little time as possible in his office. The Sorcerer pushed the message board across the desk. "Happy 1951, Miss Sipp. Have you made any New Year's resolutions?"

"I've promised myself I won't be working for you this time next year," she retorted.

Torriti nodded happily; he appreciated the female of the species who came equipped with a sharp tongue. "Do me a favor, honey, take this up to the radio shack. Tell Meech I want it enciphered on a one-time pad and sent priority. I want the cipher text filed in a bum bag and the original back on my desk in half an hour." As the Night Owl scurried from the office, Torriti splashed more whiskey into his glass, melted back into the leather chair he'd bought for a song on the black market and propped his pointed cowboy boots up on the desk. "So now I'll walk you through the delicate business of dealing with a defection, sport. Because you have a degree from Yale I'll talk real slow. Let's take the worst case scenario: let's say our Russian friend is a black agent come across to make us nibble at some bad information. If you want to make him seem like the real McCoy you send him over with a wife and kid but we're smart-assed Central Intelligence officers, right? We're not impressed by window dressing. When all is said and done there is only one way for a defector to establish his bona fides— he has to bring with him a certain amount of true information."

"So far so good. Once he delivers true information, especially true information that's important, we know he's a real defector, right?"

"Wrong, sport. A defector who delivers true information could still be a black agent. Which is another way of saying that a black agent also has to deliver a reasonable amount of true information in order to convince us that he is a genuine defector so that we'll swallow the shit he slips in between the true information."

Jack, intrigued by how intricate the game was, sat up on the couch and leaned forward. "They sure didn't teach us this in Washington, Harvey. So the fact that the defector delivers true information doesn't tell us if he's a true defector."

"Something like that."

"Question, Harvey. If all this is so, why do we bother taking defectors?"

"Because, first off, the defector may be genuine and his true information may be useful. The identity of a Russian mole in MI6 doesn't fall into your lap every day. Even if the defector's not genuine, if we play the game skillfully we can take the true information he brings with him and avoid the deception."

"My head's spinning, Harvey."

The Sorcerer snickered. "Yeah, well, basically what we do is we go round and round the mulberry bush until we become stark raving mad. In the end it's all a crazy intellectual game—to become a player you need to cross the frontier into what Mother calls a wilderness of mirrors."

Jack thought about this for a moment. "So who's this Mother you're always talking about?"

But the Sorcerer's head had already nodded onto his chest; balancing the whiskey glass on the bulge of his stomach, he had fallen asleep for the first time in two whole nights.

The Sorcerer's overnight report, addressed—like all cables to Washington originating with Company stations abroad—to the Director, Central Intelligence, was hand-delivered to the desk of Jim Angleton in a metal folder with a distinctive red slash across it indicating that the material stashed between the covers was so incredibly sensitive it ought (as the mock directive posted on a second floor bulletin board put it) to be burned before reading. The single copy of the deciphered text had already been initialed by the Director and routed on for "Immediate Action" to Angleton, known by his in-house code name, Mother. The Director, Walter Bedell Smith, Elsenhower's crusty chief of staff at the Normandy invasion whose mood swings were said to alternate between anger and outrage, had scrawled across the message in a nearly illegible script that resembled hieroglyphics: "Sounds kosher to me. WBS." His Deputy Director/Operations, the World War II OSS spymaster Allen Dulles, had added: "For crying out loud, Jim, let's not let this one wriggle off the hook. AD."

The Sorcerers report began with the usual Company rigmarole:

FROM: Alice Reader
To: DCI
COPY TO: Hugh Ashmead
SUBJECT: ÆSNOWDROP
REFERENCE: Your 28/12/50 re bringing home the bacon

Angleton, the Company's gaunt, stoop-shouldered, chain-smoking countermtelligence wizard, worked out of a large corner office in "L" building, one
of the "temporary" wooden hulks that had washed up like jetsam next to the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln and Washington monuments during World War II and had since been nicknamed, for reasons that were painfully apparent to the current tenants, "Cockroach Alley." From Angleton's windows there would have been a magnificent view of the Lincoln Memorial if anybody had bothered to crack the Venetian blinds. Thousands of three-by-five index cards crammed with trivia Mother had accumulated during his years on the counterintelligence beat—the 1935 graduating class of a BrestLitovsk gymnasium, the pre-war curriculum of the Odessa Artillery School, the license plate numbers on the Zil limousines that ferried members of the Soviet elite to and from their Kremlin offices—lay scattered across the desk and tables and shelves. If there was a method to the madness, only Angleton himself had the key to it. Sorting through his precious cards, he was quickly able to come up with the answers to the Sorcerers questions:

1. Yes, there is a street in Brest-Litovsk named after the Russian hero of the Napoleonic war, Mikhail Kutuzov; yes, there is a large statue of a blindfolded partisan woman tied to a stake and awaiting execution in the small park across Kutuzov Street from the apartment building complex where the local KGB officers are housed.

2. Yes, instructors named Piotr Maslov, Gennady Brykin and Johnreed Arkhangelsky were listed on the roster of the KGB Diplomatic Institute in Moscow in 1947.

3. Yes, the deputy rezident at KGB Karlshorst is named Oskar UgorMolody.

4. Yes, an entity using the appellation Institute for Economic and Scientific Research has set up shop in a former school in the Pankow district of East Berlin.

5. Yes, there is a sports journalist writing for Pravda under the byline M. Zhitkin. Unable to confirm the patronymic Sergeyevich. He is said to be married but unable to confirm that his wife is ÆSNOWDROP's sister-in-law.

6. No, we have no record of Zhitkin traveling to Stockholm last February, although his weekly Pravda column failed to appear during the third week of February.

7. Yes, the audio device Division D embedded in the arm of an easy chair purchased by the Soviet Embassy in The Hague and delivered to the ambassador's office was operational until 2245 hours on 12 November 1949, at which point it suddenly went dry. A friendly national subsequently visiting the Soviet Ambassador reported finding a small cavity in the underside of the arm of the chair, leading us to conclude that KGB counterintelligence had stumbled on the microphone during a routine sweep of the office and removed it. Transcripts of the Soviet Ambassador s conversations that dealt with Kremlin plans to pressure the Americans into withdrawing occupation forces from West Berlin had been narrowly circulated in American and British intelligence circles.

8. The consensus here is that ÆSNOWDROP has sufficiently established his bona fides to justify an exfiltration operation. He is being notified by my source to turn up at MARLBOROUGH with his wife and son, no valises, forty-eight hours from time of his last meeting.

Angleton signed off on the message and left it with his girl Friday to be enciphered using one of his departments private polyalphabetic codes. Back in his corner office, he frisked himself for cigarettes, stabbed one between his delicate lips and stared off into space without lighting it, a distracted scowl on his brow. For Angleton, the essence of counterintelligence was penetration: you penetrated the enemy's ranks, either by defections such as the one being organized now in Berlin or, more rarely, through the occasional agent in place who sent back material directly from the KGB inner sanctums, to get at their secrets. And the secret you most wanted to get at was whether they had penetrated you. The Russians had already succeeded in penetrating the American government and scientific communities; Elisabeth Bentley, a dowdy American Communist serving as a courier for her Soviet handler in Washington, had reeled off under FBI questioning the names of a hundred or so people linked to Soviet spy rings in the states and in Canada, among them Hiss, Fuchs, Gold, Sobell, Greenglass, the Rosenbergs. There was good reason to believe that the blueprint for the atomic bomb the Russians successfully tested in 1949 had been swiped from American A-bomb labs in Los Alamos. Angleton's job was to circle the Company with the counterintelligence wagons and make sure the Russians never got a toe in the CIA's door. Which is how Mother, riding high on his reputation as a World War II counterintelligence ace for the Office of Strategic Services, America's wartime spy agency, wound up looking over everyone's shoulder to monitor clandestine operations—a situation that rubbed a lot of people, including Torriti, the wrong way.

Angleton and Torriti had crossed paths—and swords—in 1944 when Mother, at twenty-seven already considered a master of the subtleties of the espionage game, had been in charge of rounding up stay-behind fascist agents as the Germans retreated up the boot of Italy. Torriti, who spoke the Sicilian dialect fluently and went out of his way to look like a Sicilian caid, had been acting as liaison with the Mafia clans that aided the allies in the invasion of Sicily and, later, the landings in Italy. In the months after the German surrender the Sorcerer was all for nurturing the Italian Social Democrats as a way of outflanking the local Communists, who received considerable support from Moscow and were threatening to make a strong showing in the next elections. Angleton, who was convinced that World War III started the day World War II ended, argued that if you scratched a Social Democrat you uncovered a Communist who took orders from the Kremlin. Angleton's reasoning prevailed with what the Sorcerer called the "poison Ivy League" crowd in Washington; the Company threw its considerable weight—in the form of tens of millions of dollars in cold cash, propaganda campaigns, and the occasional blackmail caper—behind the Christian Democrats, who eventually came out on top in the elections.

From Angleton's vantage point, the Sorcerer had enough experience with nuts-and-bolts field operations to put in the plumbing for a defection but was over his head in a situation requiring geopolitical sophistication; and he was too dense—and, in recent months, too drunk—to follow Mother into what T.S. Eliot had called, in his poem "Gerontion," "the wilderness of mirrors." Oh, Torriti grasped the first level of ambiguity well enough: that even black defectors brought with them real secrets to establish their bona fides. But there were other, more elegant, scenarios that only a handful of Company officers, Angleton foremost among them, could fathom. When you were dealing with a defector bearing true information, it was Mother's fervent conviction that you were obliged to keep in the back of your head thie possibility that thie greater the importance of the true information he brought with him, the bigger the deception the other side was trying to pull off. If you grasped this, it followed, as night the day, that you had to treat every success as if it were a potential calamity. There were OSS veterans working for the Company who just couldn't get a handle on the many levels of ambiguity involved in espionage operations; who whispered that Mother was a stark raving paranoid. "Ignore the old farts," Angleton's great British buddy would cackle when, over one of the regular weekly lunches at their Washington watering hole, Mother would allow that the whispering occasionally got him down. "Their m-m-mentalities grow inward like t-t-toenails."

A buzz on Angletons intercom snapped him out of his reverie. A moment later a familiar face materialized at the door. It belonged to Mother's British friend and mentor, the MI6 liaison man in Washington. "Hello t-t-to you, Jimbo," Adrian cried with the exuberant upper-class stutter Angleton had first heard when the two had shared a cubbyhole in the Rose Garden Hotel on London's Ryder Street during the war. At the time the ramshackle hotel had served as the nerve center for the combined counterintelligence operations of the American OSS and the British Secret Service, MI6. The Brit, five years Angleton's senior and MI6's wartime counterintelligence specialist for the Iberian peninsula, had initiated the young American corporal, fresh out of Yale and a virgin when it came to the business of spying, into the mysteries of counterintelligence. Now, with a long string of first rate exploits to his credit, both during the war and after, Adrian was a rising star in the British intelligence firmament; office scuttlebutt touted him as the next "C," the code-letter designation for the head of MI6.

"Speak of the devil, I was just thinking about you," Angleton said. "Take a load off your feet and tell me what worlds you've conquered this morning."

The Brit cleared several shoe boxes filled with index cards off a government-issue chair and settled onto it across the desk from his American friend. Angleton found a match and lit up. Between them an antique Tiffany lamp beamed a pale yellow oval of light onto the reams of paper spilling from the in-baskets. Angleton's thin face, coming in and out of focus behind a swirling mist of cigarette smoke, appeared unusually satanic, or so the Brit thought.

"Just came from breakfast with your lord and master," Adrian announced. "Meager fare—would have thought we were b-b-back at the Connaught during rationing. He gave me a sales-cackle on some cockamamie scheme to infiltrate emigré agents into Alb-b-bania, of all places. Seems as if the Yanks are counting on us to turn Malta into a staging base and lay on a Spanish Armada of small boats. You'll want a copy of the p-p-paper work if you're going to vet the operation?"

"Damn right I'll want a copy."

The Brit pulled two thick envelopes from the breast pocket of his blazer. "Why don't you have these put through the p-p-pants presser while we chew the fat."

Angleton buzzed for his secretary and nodded toward the envelopes in his friend's hand. "Gloria, will you get these Thermofaxed right away and give him back the originals on his way out." Half-Chicano by birth but an Anglophile by dint of his wartime service in London and his affinity for the Brits, Mother waved a hole in the smoke and spoke through it with the barest trace of a clipped English accent acquired during a three-year stint at an English college. "So what's your fix on our Bedell Smith?" he asked.

"Between you, me and the wall, Jimbo, I think he has a cool fishy eye and a precision-tooled brain. He flipped through twenty-odd p-p-paragraphs on the Albanian caper, dropped the paper onto his blotter and started quoting chapter and verse from the d-d-damn thing. The bugger even referred to the paragraphs by their bloody numbers. Christ, I had to spend the whole night memorizing the ropey d-d-document."

"No one denies he's smart—"

"The problem is he's a military man. Military men take it on faith that the shortest distance between two p-p-points is a straight line, which you and I, old boy, in our infinite wisdom, know to be a dodgy proposition. Me, I am an orthodox and Euclidean. There simply is no short distance between two points. There's only a meander. Bob's never your uncle; you leave p-p-point A and only the devil knows where you're going to wind up. To dot the I's, your 'Beetle' Smith started griping about how his operational chaps tell him one thing about resistance groups in Albania and his analysts, another."

"Knowing you, I'll lay odds you set him straight."

The Brit tilted the chair back until it was balanced on its hind legs. "As a matter of fact I did. I quoted chapter and verse from our illustrious former naval p-p-person. True genius, Churchill taught us, resides in the capacity to evaluate conflicting information. You have true genius, Jimbo. You have the ability to look at a mass of what seems like conflicting trivia and discern patterns. And patterns, as any spy worth his salt grasps, are the outer shells of conspiracies."

Angleton flashed one of his rare smiles. "You taught me everything I know," he said. And the two of them recited E.M. Forster's dictum, which had been posted over the Brit's desk during the Ryder Street days, in chorus: "Only connect!" And then they laughed together like public school boys caught in the act.

Angleton suppressed the start of a hacking cough by sucking air through his nostrils. "You're buttering me up," he finally decided, "which means you want something."

"To you, Jimbo, I'm the proverbial open book." Adrian righted his chair. "Your General Smith allowed as how he had an exfiltration in the works that would be of keen interest to me and mine. When I asked him for the dirty details he gave me leave to try and p-p-pry them out of you. So come clean, Jimbo. What do you have cooking on that notorious front b-b-burner of yours?"

Angleton began rummaging through the small mountain of paper on his desk for the Sorcerer's overnight cable. He found it under another cable from the Mexico City CIA Station; signed by two Company officers, E. Howard Hunt and William F. Buckley, Jr., it provided the outline for what was euphemistically called a "tangential special project."

"Frankly, you're the only Brit I'd trust with this," Angleton said, flapping Torriti's cable in the air to disperse the cigarette smoke.

"Thanks for that, Jimbo."

"Which means you'll have to give me your word you won't spill the beans to London before I say so."

"Must be bloody important for you to take that line."

"It is."

"You have my word, old boy. My lips are sealed until you unseal them."

Angleton slipped the cable across the desk to his British friend, who fitted a pair of National Health spectacles over his nose and held the report under the Tiffany lamp. After a moment his eyes tightened. "Christ, no wonder you don't want me to cable London. Handle with care, Jimbo— there's always the chance the Russian bloke is a dangle and his serial is p-p-part of a scheme to set my shop and yours at each other's throats. Remember when I scattered serials across Spain to convince the Germans we had a highlevel mole chez-eux? The Abwehr spent half a year chasing their tails before they figured out the serials were phony."

"Everything Torriti pried out of him at their first meeting checked out."

"Including the microphone that went dry?"

Behind the cloud of smoke Angleton nodded. "I've already assigned a team to walk back the cat on the microphone in the Soviet Ambassador's chair in The Hague—the product was circulated narrowly but circulated all the same. You can count the people who knew where the product came from on the fingers of two hands."

Angleton's Brit, an old hand at defections, was all business. "We'll have to tread on eggshells, Jimbo. If there really is a mole in MI6, he'll jump ship the instant he smells trouble. The KGB will have contingency p-p-plans for this sort of thing. The trick'll be to keep the defection under wraps for as long as p-p-possible."

Angleton pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit it from the bitter end of the old one. "Torriti's going to smuggle the Russian and his family into West Berlin and fly them straight back to the states out ofTempelhof," he said. "I'll put people on the plane so that we can start sorting through the serials before word of the defection leaks. With any luck we'll be able to figure out the identity of the mole before KGB Karlshorst realizes the deputy to the chief of the First Chief Directorate has gone AWOL. Then the ball will be in MI6's court—you'll have to move fast on your end."

"Give me a name to go on," the Brit insisted, "we'll draw and quarter the son of a b-b-bitch."

Part 3

Torriti had gone on the wagon for the exfiltration, which probably was a bad idea inasmuch as the lack of booze left him edgier than usual. He skulked through the small room of the safe house over the cinema the way a lion prowls a cage, plunging round and round so obsessively that Jack became giddy watching him. At the oriel window the Fallen Angel kept an eye on Sweet Jesus walking his muzzled lap dog in endless ovals in the street below. Every now and then he'd remove his watch cap and scratch at the bald spot on the top of his head, which meant he hadn't seen hide nor hair of the Russian defector, hide nor hair of his wife or eleven year old son either. Silwan II's radio, set on the floor against one wall, the antenna strung across the room like a laundry line, burst into life and the voice of the Watcher in the back row of the cinema could be heard whispering: "Der Film ist fertig... in eight minutes. Where is somebody?"

"My nose is twitching to beat the band," the Sorcerer growled as he pulled up short in front of the clock over the mantle. "Something's not right. Russians, in my experience, always come late for meetings and early for defections." The pounding pulse of the imperturbable cuckoo ticking off the seconds was suddenly more than Torriti could stomach. Snatching his pearlhandled revolver from the shoulder holster, he grasped it by the long barrel and slammed the grip into the clock, decapitating the cuckoo, shattering the mechanism. "At least it's quiet enough to think straight," he announced, preempting the question Jack would have posed if he had worked up the nerve.

They had made their way into the Soviet Sector of East Berlin in the usual way: Torriti and Jack lying prone in the false compartment under the roof of a small Studebaker truck that had passed through a little-used checkpoint on one of its regular runs delivering sacks of bone meal fertilizer; Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel, dressed as German workers, mingling with the river of people returning through the Friedrichstrasse Station after a day of digging sewage trenches in the western part of the city. Sweet Jesus had had a close call when one of the smartly dressed East German Volkspolizei patrolling beyond the turnstiles demanded his workplace pass and then thumbed through its pages to make sure it bore the appropriate stamps. Sweet Jesus, who once worked as a cook for an SS unit in Rumania during the war and spoke flawless German, had mumbled the right answers to the Volkspolizei's brittle questions and was sent on his way.

Now the plumbing for the exfiltration was in place. The defector Vishnevsky and his wife would be smuggled out in the fertilizer truck, which was waiting for them in an unlighted alleyway around the corner from the cinema; the driver, a Polish national rumored to have a German wife in West Berlin and a Russian mistress in the eastern part of the city, had often returned from one of his fertilizer runs well after midnight, provoking ribald quips from the German frontier guards. An agent of the French Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), carrying a diplomatic passport identifying him as an assistant cultural attaché, was scheduled to pass close to the cinema at midnight on his way back from a dinner at the Soviet embassy. Allied diplomats refused to recognize the authority of the East German police and never stopped for passport controls. His Citröen, with diplomatic license plates and a small French flag flying from one of its teardrop fenders, would spirit the Sorcerer and Jack past the border guards back into West Berlin. The two Rumanians would go to ground in East Berlin and return to the west in the morning when the workers began to cross over for the day. Which left Vishnevsky's eleven-year-old son: the Sorcerer had arranged for the boy to be smuggled across by a Dutch Egyptologist who had come into East Germany, accompanied by his wife, to date artifacts in an East Berlin museum. The Dutch couple would cross back into West Berlin on a forged family passport with a blurred photo taken when the boy was supposed to have been five years younger, and a visa for the Dutch father, his wife and 10-year-old boy stamped into its very frayed pages. The Sorcerer had been through this drill half a dozen times; the sleepy East German Volkspolizei manning the checkpoints had always waved the family through with a perfunctory glance at the passport photo. Once over the border, the three Russians would be whisked to the Tempelhof airport in West Berlin and flown in a US Air Force cargo plane to the defector reception center in Frankfurt, Germany, and from there on to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

But the success of the exfiltration hinged on Vishnevsky and his family shaking off their Watchers—there were KGB people at Karlshorst who did nothing but keep track of the other KGB people—and making their way to the safe house over the cinema. Torriti resumed his prowl, stopping once every orbit to peer over the Fallen Angel s shoulder at the street.

Another burst of static came from the radio on the floor. "Film ist zu Ende. All must leave. Gute Nacht to you. Please for God's sake remember to deposit the Geld in my account."

In the street below figures bundled into long overcoats hurried away from the cinema. Sweet Jesus, stamping his feet under a vapor lamp, glanced up at the faint light in the oriel window under the eaves and hiked his shoulders in an apprehensive shrug. Jack pulled the antenna down and started packing it away in the radio's carrying case. "How long do you figure on waiting, Harvey?" he asked.

The Sorcerer, sweating from alcohol deprivation, turned on Jack. "We wait until I decide to stop waiting," he snapped.

The Irishman in Jack stood his ground. "He was supposed to get here before the film ended." And he added quietly, "If he hasn't shown up by now chances are he's not going to show. If he hasn't been blown we can reschedule the exfiltration for another night."

The Fallen Angel said anxiously, "If the Russian was blown, the safe house maybe was blown. Which leaves us up the creek filled with shit, chief."

Torriti screwed up his face until his eyes were reduced to slits. He knew they were right; not only was the Russian not going to turn up but it had become imprudent for them to hang in there. "Okay, we give him five minutes and we head for home," he said.

Time passed with excruciating slowness, or so it seemed to Jack as he kept his eyes fixed on the second hand of his Bulova. At the window, Silwan II, rolling his head from side to side, humming an ancient Rumanian liturgical chant under his breath, surveyed the street. Suddenly he pressed his forehead against the pane and grabbed his stomach. "Holy Mother of God," he rasped, "Sweet Jesus went and picked up the dog."

"Damnation," cried Jack, who knew what the signal meant.

The Sorcerer, freezing in mid-prowl, decided he badly needed a swig of medicinal whiskey to clear the cobwebs from his head. "Into every life a little rain must fall," he groaned.

The Fallen Angel called, "Oh, yeah, here they come—one, two, oh shit, seven, wait, eight Volkspolizei wagons have turned into the street. Sweet Jesus is disappearing himself around the corner."

"Time for us to disappear ourselves around a corner, too," Torriti announced. He grabbed his rumpled overcoat off the back of a chair. Jack crammed the radio into its satchel and the three of them, with Jack in the lead and the Sorcerer puffing along behind him, ducked through the door and started up the narrow stairs. It was the route they would have taken if the Russian defectors had turned up. From three floors below came the clamor of rifle butts pounding on the heavy double doors of the cinema, then muffled shouts in German as the Volkspolizei—accompanied by a handful of KGB agents—spread out through the building.

At the top of the stairs Jack unbolted the steel door and pushed it open with his shoulder. A gust of wintry night air slammed into his face, bringing tears to his eyes. Overhead a half moon filled the rooftop with shadows. Below, in the toilet off the cinema, heavy boots kicked in the false door at the back of the broom closet and started lumbering up the narrow stairs. Once Jack and Torriti were on the roof, the Fallen Angel eased the door closed and quietly slid home the two bolts on it. The Sorcerer, breathing heavily from the exertion, managed to spit out, "That'll slow the fuckers down." The three made their way diagonally across the slippery shingles. Silwan II helped the Sorcerer over a low wall and led the way across the next roof to a line of brick chimneys, then swung a leg over the side of a wall and scrambled down the wooden ladder he had planted there when the Sorcerer had laid in the plumbing for the exfiltration. When his turn came Jack started down the ladder, then jumped the rest of the way to the roof below. The Sorcerer, gingerly stabbing the air with his foot to locate the next rung, climbed down after them.

The three of them squatted for a moment, listening to the icy wind whistling over the rooftops. With the adrenalin flowing and a pulse pounding in his ear, Jack asked himself if he was frightened; he was quite pleased to discover mat he wasn't. From somewhere below came guttural explicatives in German. Then a door leading to the roof was flung open and two silvery silhouettes appeared. The beams from two flashlights swept across the chimneys and illuminated the wooden ladder. One of the silhouettes grunted something in Russian. From a pocket the Fallen Angel produced an old 9 mm Beretta he had once stripped from the body of an Italian fascist whose throat he'd slit near Patras in Greece. A subsonic handgun suited to in-fighting, the Beretta was fitted with a stubby silencer on the end of the barrel. Torriti scratched Silwan II on the back of the neck and, pressing his lips to his ear, whispered, "Only shoot the one in uniform."

Bracing his right wrist in his left hand, the Fallen Angel drew a bead on the taller of the two figures and pulled back on the hairpin trigger. Jack heard a quick hiss, as if air had been let out of a tire. One of the two flashlights clattered to the roof. The figure who had been holding it seemed to melt into the shadow of the ground. Breathing heavily, the other man thrust his two arms, one holding the flashlight, the other a pistol, high over his head. "I know it is you, Torriti," he called in a husky voice. "Not to shoot. I am KGB."

Jack's blood was up. "Jesus H. Christ, shoot the fucker!"

The Sorcerer pressed Silwan II s gun arm down. "Germans are fair game but KGB is another story. We don't shoot them, they don't shoot us." To the Russian he called, "Drop your weapon."

The Russian, a burly figure wearing a civilian overcoat and a fedora, must have known what was coming because he turned around and carefully set his flashlight and handgun on the ground. Straightening, he removed his fedora and waited.

Moving on the balls of his feet, the Fallen Angel crossed the roof and stepped up behind the Russian and brought the butt of the Beretta sharply down across his skull over an ear—hard enough to give him splitting headaches for the rest of his life but not hard enough to kill him. The Rumanian deftly caught the Russian under the armpits and lowered him to the roof.

Moments later the three of them were clambering down the dimly lit staircase of the apartment building, then darting through a corridor reeking of urine and out a back door to an alley filled with garbage cans piled one on top of another. Hidden behind the garbage cans was the fertilizer truck. Without a word the Fallen Angel vanished down the alley into the darkness. Torriti and Jack climbed up into the compartment under the false roof of the vehicle and pulled the trap-ladder closed after them. The engine coughed softly into life and the truck, running on parking lights, eased out of the alley and headed through the silent back streets of East Berlin toward a Pankow crossing point and the French sector of the divided city beyond it.

Even the old hands at Berlin Base had never seen the Sorcerer so worked up. "I don't fucking believe it," he railed, his hoarse cries echoing through the underground corridors, "the KGB fucker on the roof even knew my name" Torriti slopped some whiskey into a glass, tossed it into the back of his throat and gargled before swallowing. The sting of the booze calmed him down. "Okay," he instructed his Night Owl, "walk me through it real slow-like."

Miss Sipp, sitting on the couch, crossed her legs and began citing chapter and verse from the raw operations log clipped to the message board. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard over Tito Gobbi's 78-rpm interpretation of Scarpia. It was an indication of Torriti's mental state that he didn't seem to catch a glimpse of the erotic frontier where the top of her stocking fastened to the strap of a garter belt.

"Item number one," began Miss Sipp, her voice vibrating with suppressed musicality. (She had actually signed on as Torriti's Night Owl in order to pay for singing lessons at the Berlin Opera, which ended when her teacher informed her that she had almost as much talent as his rooster.) "The listening post at Berlin Base noticed an increase in radio traffic between Moscow and Karlshorst, and vice versa, eighty-five minutes before the defector and his family were due to show up at the safe house."

"Bastards were getting their marching orders from Uncle Joe," the Sorcerer snarled.

"Item number two: The sister of the cleaning woman who works at the hotel near Karlshorst called her contact in West Berlin, who called us to say the Russians were running around like chickens without a head, i.e., something was up."

"What time was that?" Jack, leaning against a wall, wanted to know.

"D-hour minus sixty minutes, give or take."

"The fuckers knew there was going to be a defection," figured the Sorcerer, talking more to himself than to the eight people who had crowded into his office for the wake-like postmortem. "But they didn't get ahold of that information until late in the game."

"Maybe Vishnevsky lost his nerve," Jack suggested. "Maybe he was perspiring so much he drew attention to himself."

The Sorcerer batted the possibility away with the back of his hand. "He was a tough cookie, sport. He didn't come that far to fink out at the last moment."

"Maybe he told his wife and she lost her nerve."

Torriti's brow wrinkled in concentration. Then he shook his head once. "He'd thought it all through. Remember when he asked me if I had a microphone running? He was testing me. He would have tested his wife before he brought her in on the defection. If he thought she'd lose her nerve he would have skipped without her. As for the kid, all he had to know was that they were going to see a late movie."

"There's another angle," Jack said. "The wife may or may not have gone to bed with the rezident—either way she was probably afraid of him, not to mention ashamed of the trouble she'd brought down on her husband after he confronted the rezident. All of which could have given her enough motivation to defect with Vishnevsky."

"There's smoke coming out your ears, sport," Torriti said, but it was easy to see he was pleased with his Apprentice. The Sorcerer closed his eyes and raised his nose in the direction of Miss Sipp. She glanced down at the log sheet balanced on her knees.

"Oh dear, where was I? Ah. Item number three: The Rabbi reported in from the German-Jewish Cultural Center to say that East Germany's Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung troops were mustering next to vehicles parked in the courtyard behind the school in the Pankow district. That was D-hour minus thirty-five minutes."

"The time frame would seem to suggest that the Russians were the ones who were tipped off, as opposed to the Germans."

All heads turned toward the speaker, a relative newcomer to Berlin Base, E. Winstrom Ebbitt II. A big, broad-shouldered New York attorney who had seen action with the OSS during the last months of the war, Ebby, as his friends called him, had recently signed on with the Company and had been posted to Berlin to run emigré agents into the "denied areas" of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He had spent the entire night in the base's radio shack, waiting for two of his "Joes" who had parachuted into Poland to come on the air. Curious to hear about the aborted defection, he'd drifted into the Sorcerer's office when he learned there would be an early morning wake. "My guess is the Russians probably brought their Germans in at the last moment," Ebby added, "because they don't trust them any more than we trust our Germans."

The Sorcerer fixed a malevolent eye on the young man with long wavy hair and fancy wide suspenders sitting atop one of the office safes and toying with a red thermite canister. "Elementary deduction, my dear Watson," Torriti said mockingly. "Careful that doohickey doesn't blow up in your puss. By the way, did you get ahold of the lambs you sent to the slaughter?"

"Afraid I haven't, Harvey. They missed the time slot. There's another one tomorrow night."

"Like I said, it's the goddamn Goths who are winning the goddamn war." Torriti turned his attention back to Miss Sipp.

"Item number four: Gehlen's night duty officer at Pullach rang us on the red phone to say that one of their agents in the Soviet zone who is good at 'Augenerkundung'—the Night Owl raised her eyes and translated for the benefit of those in the room who didn't speak German—"that means 'eye spying'; the Augenerkundung had just spotted wagons filled with Volkspolizei throwing up roadblocks across the approaches to the Soviet air base at Eberswalde. Minutes later—just about the time the defector was supposed to present his warm body at your safe house, Mr. Torriti—the Augenerkundung spotted a convoy ofTatra limousines pulling on to the runway from a little used entrance in the chainlink fence. Sandwiched in the middle of the convoy was a brown military ambulance. Dozens of civilians—KGB heavies, judging by the cut of their trousers, so said the Watcher—spilled out of the Tatras. Two stretchers with bodies strapped onto them were taken out of the ambulance and carried up a ramp into the plane parked, with its engines revving, at the end of the runway." Miss Sipp looked up and said with a bright smile, "That means Vishnevsky and his wife were still alive at this point. I mean"—her smile faded, her voice faltered—"if they were deceased they wouldn't have needed to strap them onto stretchers, would they have?"

"That still leaves the kid unaccounted for," noted Jack.

"If you'd let me finish," the Night Owl said huffily, "I'll give you the kid, too." She turned back toward the Sorcerer and recrossed her legs; this time the gesture provoked a flicker of interest from his restless eyes. "A boy—the Watcher estimated he was somewhere between ten and fifteen years of age; he said it was difficult to tell because of all the clothing the child was wearing—was pulled from one of the Tatras and, accompanied by two heavies, one holding him under each armpit, led up the ramp onto the plane. The boy was sobbing and crying out 'papa' in Russian, which led Gehlen's duty officer to conclude that the two people strapped onto the stretchers must have been Russians."

The Sorcerer palm came down on his desk in admiration. "Fucking Gehlen gives good value for the bucks we provide. Just think of it, he had a Watcher close enough to hear the boy call out for his papa. Probably has one of the fucking Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung storm troopers on his payroll. We fucking pay through the nose, how come we don't get Watchers of this quality?"

"Gehlen was supposed to have planted one of his Fremde Heere Ost agents in Stalin's inner circle during the war," remarked the Berlin Base archivist, a former Yale librarian named Rosemarie Kitchen.

"Lot of good it did him," quipped Ebby, which got a titter around the room.

"I don't fucking see what there is to laugh about," Torriti exploded. His eyes, suddenly blazing, were fixed on Ebby. "The frigging Russians were tipped off—the KGB pricks know when and where and who. Vishnevsky's got a rendezvous with a bullet fired at point blank range into the nape of his neck, and that bothers me, okay? It bothers me that he counted on me to get him out and I didn't do it. It bothers me that I almost didn't get myself and Jack and the two Silwans out neither. All of which means we're being jerked off by a fucking mole. How come almost all the agents we drop into Czechoslovakia or Rumania wind up in front of firing squads? How come the emigrés we slip into Poland don't radio back to say they're having a nice vacation, PS regards to Uncle Harvey? How come the fucking KGB seems to know what we're doing before we know what we're doing?"

Torriti breathed deeply through his nostrils; to the people crowded into the room it came across like a bugle call to action. "Okay, here's what we do. For starters I want the names of everyone, from fucking Bedell Smith on down, in Washington and in Berlin Base, who knew we were going to pull out a defector who claimed he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6. I want the names of the secretaries who typed the fucking messages, I want the names of the code clerks who enciphered or deciphered them, I want the names of the housekeepers who burned the fucking typewriter ribbons."

Miss Sipp, scrawling shorthand across the lined pages of the night order book, looked up, her eyes watery with fatigue. "What kind of priority should I put on this, Mr. Torriti? It's seven hours earlier in DC. They're fast asleep there."

"Ticket it Flash," snapped the Sorcerer. "Wake the fuckers up."

Holding fort at table number 41, seated facing a large mirror on the back wall so that he could keep track of the other customers in La Nicoise, his watering hole on Wisconsin Avenue in upper Georgetown, Mother polished off the Harper bourbon and, catching the waiter's eye, signaled that he was ready to switch to double martinis. Adrian, no slouch when it came to lunchtime lubricants, clinked glasses with him when the first ones were set on the table. "Those were the d-d-days," he told the visiting fireman from London, a junior minister who had just gotten the Company to foot the bill for turning Malta into an Albania ops staging base. "We all used to climb up to the roof of the Rose Garden, whiskeys in our p-p-paws, to watch the German doodlebugs coming in. Christ, if one of them had come down in Ryder Street it would have wiped out half our spooks."

"From a distance the V-1's sounded like sewing machines," Angleton recalled. "There was a moment of utter silence before they started down. Then came the explosion. If it landed close enough you'd feel the building quake."

"It was the silence I detested most," Adrian said emotionally. "To this day I can't stand utter silence. Which I suppose is why I talk so damn much."

"All that before my time, I'm afraid," the visiting fireman muttered. "Rough war, was it?" He pushed back a very starched cuff and glanced quickly at a very expensive watch that kept track of the phase of the moon. Leaning toward Adrian, he inquired, "Oughtn't we to order?"

Adrian ignored the question. "Nights were b-b-best," he prattled on. "Remember how our searchlights would stab at the sky stalking the Hun bombers? When they locked onto one it looked like a giant bloody moth pinned in the beam."

"I say, isn't that your Mr. Hoover who's just come in? Who's the chap with him?"

Adrian peered over the top of his National Health spectacles. "Search me."

Angleton studied the newcomer in the mirror. "It's Senator Kefauver," he said. He raised three fingers for another round of drinks. "I had a bachelor flat at Craven Hill near Paddington," he reminded Adrian. "Hardly ever went there. Spent most nights on a cot in my cubbyhole."

"He was nose to the grindstone even then," Adrian told the visiting fireman. "Couldn't pry him away. Poke your head in any hour day or night, he'd be puzzling over those bloody file cards of his, trying to solve the riddle."

"Know what they say about all work and no play," the visiting fireman observed brightly.

Adrian cocked his head. "Quite frankly, I don't," he said. "What do they say?"

"Well, I'm actually not quite sure myself—something about Jack turning into a dull chap. Some such thing."

"Jack who?" Mother asked with a bewildered frown.

"Did I say Jack?" the fireman inquired with a flustered half-smile. "Oh dear, I suppose any Jack will do."

"Christ, Jimbo, I thought I'd split my trousers when you asked him who Jack was," Adrian said after the visiting fireman, his cuff worn from glancing at his wristwatch, was put out of his misery and allowed to head to Foggy Bottom for an important four o'clock meeting.

They were sampling a Calvados that the sommelier had laid in especially for Angleton. After a moment Mother excused himself and darted from the restaurant to call his secretary from the tailor's shop next door; he didn't want to risk talking on one of the restaurant's phones for fear it might have been tapped by the Russians. On his way back to the table he was waylaid by Monsieur Andrieux, the Washington station chief for the French SDECE, who sprang to his feet and pumped Mother's hand as he funneled secrets into his ear. It was several minutes before Angleton could pry his fingers free and make his way to table 41. Sliding onto the chair, holding up the Calvados glass for a refill, he murmured to Adrian, "French've been treating me like a big wheel ever since they pinned a Legion d'Honneur on my chest."

"Frogs are a race apart," Adrian crabbed as he jammed the back of his hand against his mouth to stifle a belch. "Heard one of their senior spooks vet an op we were proposing to run against the French Communists—he allowed as how it would probably work in practice but he doubted it would work in theory. Sorry about my junior minister, Jimbo. They say he's very good at what he does. Not sure what he does, actually. Someone had to give him grub. Now that he's gone we can talk shop. Any news from Berlin?"

Mother studied his friend across the table. "You're not going to like it."

"Try me."

"Amicitia nostra dissoluta est. 'Our friendship is dissolved.' I am on to you and your KGB friends!"

The Brit, who knew a joke when he heard one, chortled with pleasure as he identified the quotation. "Nero's telegram to Seneca when he decided time had come for his tutor to commit hari-kari. Christ, Jimbo, only surprised I was able to p-p-pull the wool over your eyes this long. Seriously, what happened to your Russian coming across in Berlin?"

"The Sorcerer woke me up late last night with a cable marked Flash— been going back and forth with him since. Vishnevsky never showed up. The KGB did. Things turned nasty. Torriti hung around longer than he should have—had to shoot one of the Germans and hit a Russian over the head to get himself out of a tight corner. Vishnevsky and his wife, drugged probably, were hauled back to Moscow to face the music. Kid, too."

"Christ, what went wrong?"

"You tell me."

"What about Vishnevskys serial's? What about the mole in MI6?"

For answer, one of Mother's nicotine-stained fingers went round and round the rim of the snifter until a melancholy moan emerged from the glass.

After a moment Adrian said thoughtfully, "Hard cheese, this. I'd better p-p-pass Vishnevsky's serials on to C—there's not enough to dine out on but he can work up an appetite. Do I have it right, Jimbo? The Russian chaps debriefed someone from MI6 in Stockholm last summer, in Zurich the winter before. There were two blown operations that could finger him—one involved an agent, the other a microphone in The Hague—"

"I haven't unsealed your lips," Angleton reminded his friend.

"He'll take my guts for garters if he gets wind I knew and didn't tell him."

"He won't hear it from me."

"What's to be gained waiting?"

"If Vishnevsky wasn't feeding us drivel, if there is a mole in MI6, it could be anybody, up to and including C himself."

"I would have thought C was above and beyond." The Brit shrugged. "I hope to Christ you know what you're doing."

A waiter brought over a silver salver with their bill folded on it. Adrian reached for the check but Angleton was quicker. "Queen got the last one," he said. "Let me get this."

Angleton's luncheon partner, Harold Adrian Russell Philby—Kim to his colleagues in MI6, Adrian to a handful of old Ryder Street pals like Angleton—managed a faint smiled. "First Malta. Now lunch. Seems as if we're fated to live off Yankee largess."

Jack McAuliffe had taken Ebby slumming to a posh cabaret called Die Pfeffermühie—The Peppermill—off the Kurfiirstendamm, West Berlin's main drag sizzling with neon. The joint was crawling with diplomats and spies and businessmen from the four powers that occupied Berlin. On the small stage a transvestite, wearing what the Germans called a Fahne, a cheap gaudy dress, rattled off one-liners and then laughed at them so hard his stomach rippled. "For God's sake, don't laugh at anti-Soviet jokes," the comic warned, wagging a finger at an imaginary companion. "You'll get three years in jail." Raising his voice half an octave, he mimicked the friend's reply. "That's better than three years in one of those new high-rise apartments in Friedrichsmain." Some upper-class Brits drinking at a corner table roared at a joke one of them had told. The comedian, thinking the laughter was for him, curtsied in their direction.

At a small table near the toilets Jack scraped the foam off a mug with his forefinger, angled back his head and, his Adam's apple bobbing, drained off the beer in one long swig. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, he carefully set the empty mug down next to the two others he'd already knocked back. "Jesus H. Christ, Ebby, you're coming down too hard on him," he told his friend. "The Sorcerer's like a wild dog you come across in the field. You need to stand dead still and let him sniff your trousers, your shoes, before he'll start to accept you."

"It's the drinking that rubs me the wrong way," Ebby said. "I don't see how a drunk can run Berlin Base."

"The booze is his pain killer. He hurts, Ebby. He was in Bucharest at the end of the war—he served under the Wiz when Wisner ran the OSS station there. He saw the Soviet boxcars hauling off Rumanians who had sided with Germany to Siberian prison camps. He heard the cries of the prisoners, he helped bury the ones who killed themselves rather than board the trains. It marked him for life. For him the battle against Communism is a personal crusade—it's the forces of good versus the forces of evil. Right now evil's got the upper hand and it's killing him."

"So he drinks."

"Yeah. He drinks. But that doesn't stop him from performing on a very high level. The alcohol feeds his genius. If the KGB ever cornered me on an East Berlin rooftop, Harvey's the man I'd want next to me."

The two exchanged knowing looks; Ebby had heard scuttlebutt about the close call on the roof after the aborted defection.

On the other side of the room a middle-aged Russian attaché wearing a double-breasted suit jacket with enormous lapels staggered drunkenly to his feet and began belting out, in Russian, a popular song called "Moscow Nights." At the bar two American foreign service officers, both recent graduates of Yale, pushed themselves off their stools and started singing Kipling's original words to what later became the Yale Whiffenpoof song.

We have done with Hope and Honor, we are lost to Love and Truth...

Jack leaped to his feet and sang along with them.

We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung...

Ebby, who had done his undergraduate work at Yale before going on to Columbia Law, stood up and joined them.

And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth, God help us, for we knew the worst too young.

Half a dozen American civilians sitting around a large table in a corner turned to listen. Several added their voices to the chorus.

Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence,

Our pride it is to know no spur of ride.

As they neared the end of the song others around the cabaret joined in. The transvestite comic, furious, stalked off the stage.

And the Curse of Reuben holds us till an Allen turf enfolds us

And we die, and none can tell Them where we died.

By now Americans all over the cabaret were on their feet, waving mugs over their heads as they bellowed out the refrain. The Russian and East European diplomats looked on in amused bewilderment.

GENTLEMEN-RANKERS OUT ON THE SPREE,

DAMNED FROM HERE TO ETERNITY,

GOD HA'MERCI ON SUCH AS WE,

BAA! YAH! BAH!

"We're all mad here, Ebby." Jack had to holler to be heard over the riotous applause. "I'm mad. You're mad. Question is: How the hell did I end up in this madhouse?"

"From what you told me back at the Cloud Club," Ebby shouted, "your big mistake was saying yes when the coach offered you and your rowing pal that Green Cup down at Mory's."

Part 4