Part 8

3

FRANKFURT, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1951

THE OVERHEAD LIGHTS DIMMED AND THE TWO CHICKEN COLONELS attached to the Joint Chiefs materialized in the spotlight. Endless rows of campaign ribbons shimmered over the breast pockets of their starched uniforms. Company scuttlebutt had it that they'd passed the time on the flight out from Washington spit-shining their shoes until they resembled mirrors. "Gentlemen," the colonel with the cropped mustache began.

"Seems as how he's giving us the benefit of the doubt," Frank Wisner, his shirtsleeves rolled up, muttered in his inimitable southern drawl, and the officers within earshot, Ebby among them, laughed under their breaths.

They had gathered in Frankfurt Station's sloping auditorium on the second floor of the huge, drearily modern I.G. Farben complex in the Frankfurt suburb of Hochst to hear the Pentagons latest Cassandra-like forebodings. For Wisner, Allen Dulles's deputy in the Dirty Tricks Department who was passing through Germany on a whirlwind tour of the CIA's European stations, the briefing was another installment in the "pissing contest" between the Joint Chiefs and the Company over Cold War priorities. The chicken colonels who had turned up in Frankfurt before had agonized over the Soviet order of battle as if it were the entrails of a slaughtered ram, counting and recounting the armored divisions that could punch on six hours' notice through the cordon sanitaire the Allies had strung like a laundry line across Europe. In the great tradition of military mindset, they had made the delicate leap from capabilities to intentions; from could to would. Like Delphic oracles predicting the end of the world, they had even identified D-day (in a top-secret "Eyes Only" memo with extremely limited distribution; the last thing they wanted was for this kind of information to fall into the hands of the Russians). World War III would break out on Tuesday, 1 July 1952.

Now they had come back with details of the Soviet assault. Tapping a large map of Europe with a pointer, the chicken colonel with the mustache reeled off the names and effective strengths of the Soviet divisions in East Germany and Poland, and asserted that the Kremlin had massed three times as many troops as it needed for occupation duties. A slim, crewcut sergeant major who walked as if he had a ramrod up his butt changed maps, and the colonel briefed the audience on the route the two-pronged Soviet armored blitzkrieg would follow across the northern plain; in a Pentagon war game simulation, the colonel said, the Soviet attack had reached the English Channel in a matter of weeks. Still a third map was thumbtacked to the easel, this one showing Soviet airfields in Poland and East Germany and the western Bohemian area of Czechoslovakia that would provide close air support for the assault. Signaling for the houselights, the colonel strode to the edge of the stage and looked out at Wisner, who was slouched in the third row next to General Lucian Truscott IV, the Company's Chief of Station in Germany. "What the Joint Chiefs want," the colonel announced, his jaw elevated a notch, his eyes steely, "is for you to plant an agent at every one of these airfields before July first, 1952 in order to sabotage them when the balloon goes up and the fun starts."

Wisner pulled at an earlobe. "Well now, Lucian, we damn well ought to be able to handle that," he remarked. There was no hint in his tone or expression that he was being anything but serious. "How many airfields did you say there were, colonel?"

The chicken colonel had the figure at the tip of his tongue. "Two thousand, give or take half a hundred. Some of them have got tarmac runways, some dirt." He grinned at his colleague; he was sure they would be returning to Washington with upbeat news.

Wisner nodded thoughtfully. "Two thousand, some tarmac, some dirt," he repeated. He twisted in his seat to speak to his deputy, Dick Helms, sitting directly behind him. "I'll bite, Dick—how does an agent on the ground go about sabotaging a runway?"

Helms looked blank. "Beats me, Frank."

Wisner looked around at his troops. "Anyone here have an inkling how you put a runway out of action?" When nobody spoke up Wisner turned back to the colonel. "Maybe you can enlighten us, colonel. How do you sabotage a runway?"

The two colonels exchanged looks. "We'll have to get back to you with an answer," one of them said.

When the chicken colonels had wrapped up the briefing and beat a tactical retreat, Wisner settled onto the back of the seat in front of him and joked with his people. "I'll be goddamned surprised if we ever hear from them again," he said with a belly laugh. "Carpet bombing can put an airfield out of action in two hours, three tops. What a single agent on the ground could do is beyond me. To turn to more serious matters than planting two thousand agents at two thousand airfields—"

There were guffaws around the auditorium.

"Back in the insulated offices of the District of Columbia, the Pentagon is trying to figure out how to blunt a Soviet attack across Europe that is highly unlikely, given our superiority in atomic weaponry and delivery capacity, not to mention that some divisions in the satellite armies are more likely to attack the Russians than the Americans if war breaks out. The Washington civilians, led by our erstwhile specialist on all things Soviet, George Kennan, are rambling on about containment, though nobody has made the case why the Russians would want to add another dozen satellites to their fragile empire. And make no mistake about it—the Soviet empire is a house of cards. One good puff in the right place at the right time and the whole thing will come crashing down. I am not presiding over the clandestine service in order to sabotage airfields or contain Communism. Our mission is to roll back Communism and liberate the captive nations of East Europe. Am I getting through to you, gentlemen? Our mission is to destroy Communism, as opposed to dirt runways on airfields."

Ebby had been deeply involved in Wisner s roll-back campaign from the day he reported for duty in Germany the previous November. His first assignment, at Berlin Base, had ended abruptly when Ebby's gripe about a "pathological dipsomaniac" being in charge of a Company base reached the Sorcerer's ear and he had whipped off one of his notorious "It's him or me" cables to the DD/0. Bowing to the inevitable, Ebby had put in for a transfer to Frankfurt Station, where he wound up working as an assistant case officer in the Internal Operations Groups of the SE (Soviet/Eastern Europe) Division, cutting his teeth on a new and risky campaign: agent drops into the Russian Carpathians.

It was the first of these drops that almost broke Ebby's heart—and led to an incident that came within a hairsbreadth of cutting short his Company career.

He was unpacking his valise in an upstairs bedroom of a private house in the "Compound," an entire residential neighborhood commandeered by the Army a mile down the road from the I.G. Farben building, when his immediate superior, a grizzly, curly-haired Russian-speaking former OSS officer named Anthony Spink, came around to collect him. They were off, he explained, gunning the engine of a motor pool Ford as he sped west out of Frankfurt, to meet an agent code-named SUMMERSAULT, a Ukrainian agent trained at a secret Army base for infiltration into the denied areas behind the Iron Curtain. Jockeying in and out of heavy truck traffic, Spink briefed Ebby on the agent: he was a twenty-three-year-old from the westcentral Ukrainian city of Lutsk who had fought for the Germans under the turncoat Russian General Vlasov during the war. Vlasov himself, along with hundreds of his officers, had been hanged by the Russians after V-E Day. SUMMERSAULT, whose real name was Alyosha Kulakov, had been one of the lucky few who had been able to flee west with the retreating Germans and eventually wound up in one of the Displaced Persons camps teeming with refugees from the Soviet Union and the satellite countries. There he had been spotted by a Company recruiter and interviewed by Spink. SUMMERSAULT had maintained that there were thousands of armed Ukrainian nationalists still battling the Russians in the Carpathian Mountains, a claim supported by a deciphered intercept from the Communist boss of the Ukraine, a little known apparatchik named Nikita Khrushchev, who had cabled Moscow: "From behind every bush, from behind every tree, at every turn of the road, a government official is in danger of a terrorist attack." The Company decided to train SUMMERSAULT in radio and ciphers, and to drop him into the Carpathians to establish a link between the CIA and the resistance movement.

On paper the operation looked propitious.

Spink drove the Ford along a winding unpaved road through endless fields planted with winter wheat to an isolated dairy farm. Pulling up in front of a stone barn, they could see a young man with a baby face and blond hair drawing water from a well. He greeted Spink with a broad smile, pounding him on the back. "When you sending me home to my Carpathians?" he asked eagerly.

"Pretty soon now," Spink promised.

Spink explained that he had come out to introduce Ebby (for security reasons, he used a pseudonym), who was going to be working with SUMMERSAULT in devising a legend and fabricating the official Soviet documents to go with it. "I got a birthday present for you, son," he added. With Alyosha dancing behind him excitedly, he opened the Ford's trunk and gave SUMMERSAULT a Minox camera disguised as a cigarette lighter, and a book-size battery-powered shortwave radio with a built-in Morse key and an external antenna that could be strung between trees; the transmitter, German war surplus, had a range of eight hundred kilometers.

When Spink headed back to Frankfurt, Ebby and SUMMERSAULT circled each other cautiously. As a prelude to creating a workable legend, Ebby began to walk Alyosha through his biography; when they constructed a legend they wanted as much of it as possible to be true. At first, the young Ukrainian seemed reluctant to tell his story and Ebby had to worm details out of him: his childhood on the banks of the Styr River in Lutsk with his father deeply involved in a clandestine circle of Ukrainian nationalists; an adolescence filled with terror and suffering when his father and he wound up fighting against the Russians ("because they are Russians, not because they are Communists") in Vlasov's Army of Liberation. When Alyosha finally came to talk about his father's execution by the Russians, his eyes brimmed with tears and he had difficulty finishing his sentences. Ebby's eyes misted over, too, and he found himself telling Alyosha about the death of his father, a legendary OSS officer who had parachuted into Bulgaria at the end of the war to pry that country out of the Axis alliance. Winstrom Ebbitt had been betrayed by a supposed partisan and tortured by the Germans until he had agreed to radio back false information; he had included in the report a prearranged signal to indicate he was being "played back" by German intelligence. After a while the Germans realized that the OSS hadn't taken the bait. On the day the Red Army crossed the Danube into Bulgaria, Ebbitt had been hauled out on a stretcher—because both of his ankles had been broken—to a soccer field on the edge of Sofia, lashed to a goal post and bayonetted to death by a German firing squad that was short of ammunition. One of the executioners, on trial for war crimes after the end of hostilities, remembered a curious detail: the American OSS officer had died with a smile on his lips.

The telling of the story broke the ice between the two young men and, for the better part of two weeks, they became inseparable companions. During sessions that went on into the early hours of the morning, on long walks through the fields of waist-high winter wheat, Alyosha related the details of his life to the person he came to call "my American brother." Using the main lines of the Ukrainian's biography, filling in the gaps with plausible fictions (Alyosha had to account for the years in Vlasov's army and the post-war years in Western DP camps), Ebby painstakingly constructed a persona that could pass all but the most careful examination by trained KGB investigators. Seeing that Alyosha was chafing at the bit, he took him for a night on the town in Frankfurt that included a visit to a local brothel (paid for with a pair of nylon stockings from the station's PX) and a meal in a black-market restaurant, where a dinner and a bottle of Rhine wine could be had in exchange for several packs of American cigarettes.

Back at the farm Alyosha polished his Morse "fist," memorized the silhouettes of Soviet planes from flash cards and plowed through thick briefing books to bring himself up to date on life in the Soviet Union—trolley fares, the price of a loaf of black bread, the latest regulations on changing jobs or traveling between cities, the most recent Russian slang expressions. Ebby, meanwhile, began the last phase of the legend-building: creating the Soviet documents that would support the legend. Which is how he came in contact with the shadowy West German intelligence "Org" run by Reinhard Gehlen.

Over lunch in the "Casino," a dollar-a-day mess in one of the enormous I.G. Farben buildings. Tony Spink told Ebby more about the man whose unofficial Company code name was "Strange Bedfellow." General Gehlen, it seemed, had been the commander of Fremde Heere Ost, a World War II German intelligence unit that had targeted the Soviet Union. With the war winding down, Gehlen had microfilmed his archives (including invaluable profiles of Soviet political and military leaders), destroyed the originals and buried fifty-two cases of files near an alpine hut in the Bavarian mountains. "The microfilmed files were Gehlen's life insurance policy," Spink explained. "He put out feelers to Western intelligence and offered to give his files to the Americans."

"In exchange for?"

One of the Casino waiters, recruited from a nearby Displaced Persons camp, cleared off the empty plates and carefully emptied the butts in the ashtray into an envelope, which he put in the pocket of his white jacket. Spink made sure the waiter was out of earshot before he answered the question.

"Gehlen wanted to set up a West German intelligence entity, with him as its Fuhrer, and he expected the CIA to fund it. There was a lot of soul searching. Putting a German general back in business—especially one who had remained loyal to Der Fuhrer to the bitter end—rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Sure, we wanted his files and his assets, but Gehlen came with the package. Take it or leave it, that was his attitude. To make a long story shorter, the Cold War was starting to heat up and Gehlen's microfilms contained a gold mine of information on the enemy. Besides which Gehlen had stay-behind teams along the railway line from Vologda to Moscow, he claimed to be in contact with survivors of Vlasov's army scattered across the Oriol Mountains, he could identify antiSoviet Ukrainian units around Kiev and Lvov, he even had assets in the part of Germany occupied by Soviet armies." Spink shrugged philosophically. "Without Gehlen and his microfilm we would have been up shit's creek as far as the Ruskies were concerned." He pulled two cigarettes from a pack and left them on the table as a tip. "I know how your old man bought it, Ebby. So here's some unsolicited advice: grit your teeth and get the job done."

The next afternoon Ebby checked out a car from the motor pool and drove the two hundred miles down to the village of Pullach, some eight miles from downtown Munich. Arriving at dark, he found Heilmannstrasse, with a ten-foot-high gray concrete wall running along one side, then turned and followed the narrow road that ran parallel to the thick hedges with the electrified fence behind it until he came to the small guardhouse manned by sentries wearing green Bavarian gameskeepers' uniforms. A naked electric bulb illuminated a sign in four languages that read: "SUD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIE-VERWERTUNGS GmbH—Switch off your headlights and switch on your inside lights." Only when Ebby had complied did one of the guards approach the car. Ebby cracked the window and passed him his American passport and Company ID card. The guard took them back to the house, dialed a number and read the documents to someone on the other end. Moments later a jeep roared up to the gate and a lean, balding man with a distinctive military bearing pushed through a turnstile and let himself into the passengers seat of Ebby's car. "I am Doktor Uppmann of the Records Department," he announced. He never offered his hand. "You may switch on the headlights now."

"What about my ID?" Ebby asked.

"They will be returned to you when you leave. I will accompany you until then."

The gate in the electrified fence swung open and Ebby followed Herr Uppmann's directions through the Compound. "This is your first visit here, yes?" Uppmann commented.

"Yes," Ebby said. He could feel a tingling at the back of his neck.

"We are, be assured, eager to be of service to our American friends," his guide said, gesturing with an open palm toward a lighted road to the right.

Ebby turned into the road. "Does anyone fall for the South German Industries Utilization Company sign back at the gate?" he inquired.

The German managed a thin smile. "Doktor Schneider"—Gehlen's cover name—"has a hypothesis: If you want to keep a big secret, disguise it as a boring and inconsequential secret rather then try to convince people it is not a secret at all. You would be astonished how many Germans think we steal industrial secrets from the Americans or the French."

Following his guide's hand signals, Ebby pulled up on the side of a long one-story building. Doktor Uppmann produced a metal ring with half a dozen keys attached to it. With one he turned off the alarm system, with another he opened the two locks on a heavy metal door. Ebby followed him down a lighted corridor. "How long have you been here?" he asked, waving toward the Compound.

"We moved in soon after the end of hostilities. Except for some underground vaults that were added, the compound existed much as you see it today. It was originally built for SS officers and their families and by good fortune survived your bombers." Uppmann let himself into a lighted office and locked the door behind them. Looking around, Ebby took in the sturdy furniture and the gray walls encrusted with squashed insects. He noticed an American poster taped to the back of the door. It read: "Watched from a safe distance an atomic explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man."

"Do you really believe that?" Ebby asked his guide.

Doktor Uppmann looked flustered. "It is merely a joke."

"I have heard it said a German joke is no laughing matter," Ebby muttered.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing."

Uppmann crouched in front of a large safe and fiddled with the dial until the door clicked open. From a shelf in the safe he withdrew a manila folder. He swung the safe's door closed and spun the dial to make sure it was locked, then, straightening, emptied the contents of the manila folder onto a table. "All of these were fabricated by the Abwehr in the last months of the great struggle against Bolshevism," Uppmann informed his visitor. "They are first-class forgeries, in some ways superior to the documents we fabricated earlier in the war. Many of the agents we dropped behind Bolshevik lines were executed because we made the error of using our own stainless steel staples and not the Russian staples which rust after a very short period of time. You Americans have a saying we Germans appreciate—live and learn. Take a close look at the stamps—they are small masterpieces. Only a Russian trained in credentials could distinguish them from the real thing." He slid the documents across the table, one by one. "An internal passport for the Ukrainian Republic, a labor book, a military status book, an officers identity book, a Ukrainian ration book. When filling in the documents you must bear in mind certain Russian idiosyncracies. Whereas the internal passport, the military status and officer's identity books would normally be filled in by secretaries with a more or less elaborate bureaucratic penmanship, the labor book would be signed by the factory managers who, if they rose from the ranks, might be quite illiterate and would scratch their initials in place of a readable signature. There is also the matter of which inks are used in Russia. But I am confident your experts in Frankfurt are familiar with these details, Herr Ebbitt."

Herr Doktor Uppmann led Ebby to a lounge at the end of the corridor. Waving him toward an easy chair, he fetched a bottle of three-star French cognac and two small glasses from a painted Bavarian cabinet. He filled them to the brim and handed one to Ebby. "Prosit," he said, smiling, carefillly clicking glasses. "To the next war—this time we get them together."

Ebby, trembling with anger, rose to his feet and set the glass down on a table without drinking. "I must tell you, Herr Doktor Uppmann—" He took a deep breath to control his temper.

Uppmann cocked his head. "You must tell me what, Herr Ebbitt? That your father was killed in the war? I see you are surprised to discover I am familiar with your pedigree. As a matter of absolute routine we perform background checks on all visitors to the compound. My father, too, was a casualty of the war—he was taken captive at Stalingrad and did not survive the long march through the snow to the prison camp. My younger brother, Ludwig, stepped on a land mine and returned from the war with both of his legs amputated above the knees. My mother cares for him at our family estate in the Black Forest."

Ebby murmured, "Did you know?"

"Did I know what?"

"Did you know about the Final Solution?"

The German rested a finger along the bridge of his nose. "Of course not."

Ebby said, "How could you not know? A little girl named Anne Frank hiding in an attic in Amsterdam wrote in her diary that the Jews were being packed off in cattle cars. How come she knew and you didn't?"

"I was not involved with the Jewish question. I did then what I do now—I fought Bolsheviks. I served on the intelligence staff of General Gehlen—three and one-half years on the Russian front. One thousand two hundred and seventy-seven days, thirty thousand six hundred hours in purgatory! Bolshevism is the common enemy, Herr Ebbitt. If we had had the good sense to join forces earlier your father and my father might still be alive, the Bolsheviks would not have swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe as well as a large portion of Greater Germany—"

"You swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe before the Bolsheviks—Poland, the Sudetenland, Yugoslavia."

Uppmann bridled. "We created a buffer between the Christian West and the atheistic Bolsheviks." He turned to stare out the window at the lighted streets of the Compound. "Hitler," he whispered, his hollow voice drifting back over a shoulder, "betrayed Germany. He confused the priorities—he was more concerned with eliminating the Jews than eliminating the Bolsheviks." Uppmann turned back abruptly to face his visitor and spoke with quiet emotion. "You make the mistake of judging us without knowing what really happened, Herr Ebbitt. My class—the German military class— despised the crude corporal but we agreed with his goals. After the Versailles Diktat we Germans were a Volk ohne Raum—a nation without space to develop. I tell you frankly, German patriots were seduced by Hitler's denunciation of the odious Versailles Treaty, we were drawn to his promise of Lebensraum for the Third Reich, we shared his passionate anti-Bolshevism. Our mistake was to see Hitler's chancellorship as a passing phase in chaotic German politics. Do you know what Herr Hindenburg said after he met Hitler for the first time? I shall tell you what he said. 'Germany could, never be ruled by a Bohemian corporal! That is what he said." Uppmann threw back his head and gulped down the entire glass of cognac. Then he poured himself a refill. "I personally saw Hitler at the end in his bunker—Herr Gehlen sent me to deliver an appreciation of the Russian offensive against Berlin. You cannot imagine... a stooped figure with a swollen face, one eye inflamed, sat hunched in a chair. His hands trembled. He tried without success to conceal the twitching of his left arm. When he walked to the map room he dragged his left leg behind him. The one we called the Angel of Death, the Braun woman, was present also: pale, pretty, frightened to die and afraid not to. And what did Hitler have to offer the German people at this tragic hour? He issued an order, I myself heard him, to record the sound of tanks rolling over roads, cut gramophone records and distribute them to the front line with commands to play them over loudspeakers for the Russians. We were reduced to stopping the Bolsheviks with gramophone records, Herr Ebbitt. This will never—I repeat to you the word never—happen again."

Ebby covered his mouth with a palm to keep from speaking. Herr Doktor Uppmann took this as a sign of sympathy for the story he had told. "You maybe begin to see things in the new light."

"No!"Ebby closed the gap between him and the German. "It makes me want to throw up. You didn't wage war, Doktor Uppmann, you inflicted holocausts. Your solutions to Germany's problems were Final Solutions."

Uppmann appeared to address his words directly to a photograph of Gehlen hanging on the wall. "The Jews won the war and then wrote the history of the war. This number of six million—they picked it out of a hat and the victors swallowed it to diabolize Germany."

"The only thing left of your thousand-year Reich, Herr Doktor Uppmann, is the memory of the crimes you committed—and the memory will last a thousand years. It makes me sick to my stomach to be on the same side as you— to be in the same room with you. If you will conduct me to the main gate—"

The German stiffened. A muscle in his neck twitched. "The sooner you are gone from here the sooner we can get on with the struggle against Bolshevism, Herr Ebbitt." He downed the last of his cognac and flung the empty glass against a wall, shattering it into pieces. Crunching the shards under foot, he stalked from the room.

The official complaint was not long in working its way up the German chain of command and back down the American chain of command. Summoned to explain what had happened, Ebby appeared before a three-man board of inquiry. The Wiz came up from Vienna to sit in on the hearing. Ebby made no effort to water down what the officers in Frankfurt Station were calling "The Affair." It turned out that Ebby had punctured the abscess. Company officers across Germany heard the story on the grapevine and slipped him memos and Ebby boiled them down to an indictment, which he read aloud to the board of inquiry. "When General Gehlen was allowed to get back into the business of intelligence," he began, "he agreed in writing not to employ former Gesrapo officers or war criminals. Yet he has surrounded himself with ex-Nazis, all of whom are listed on his masthead under false identities."

"I assume you are prepared to name names," snapped the CIA officer presiding over the hearing.

"I can name names, yes. There are SS Obersturmfuhrers Franz Goring and Hans Sommer. Sommer's name will ring a bell—he got into trouble with his Gestapo superiors for organizing the 1941 burning of seven Paris synagogues. There is SS Sturmbannfuhrer Fritz Schmidt, who was involved in the executions of slave labor workers at the Friedrich Ott camp near Kiel in 1944. There is Franz Alfred Six, the SS Brigadefuhrer of Section VII of Himmler's RSHA, convicted at Nuremberg to twenty years imprisonment for having ordered executions of hundreds of Jews when he commanded a Jajdkommando in July and August 1941; he was released after four years and immediately employed by Gehlen's Org. There is Standartenfuhrer Emil Augsburg, who headed a section in Adolf Eichmann's department handling the so-called Jewish problem. My guide when I turned up at Gehlen's compound goes by the name of Doktor Uppmann. His real name is Gustav Pohl. He was a staff officer in Gehlen's Foreign Armies East but he wore a second hat—he was the German Foreign Office's liaison to the SS during the invasion of Russia. According to evidence presented at Nuremberg, Pohl participated in the creation of the SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads ant shot Jews, including women and children, as well as Commissars, into the graves that the condemned had been forced to dig."

At the side of the room Frank Wisner appeared to be dozing in a wooden chair tilted back against a wall. "Now I did warn you, Ebby," he called out, his eyes still closed. "You can't say I didn't. I warned you I'd kick ass when things didn't work out the way I thought they ought to." The Wiz righted his chair and came ambling across the room. "I'm 'bout to kick ass, Ebby. Let me fill you in on some facts of life—you know who the OSS officer was who negotiated with Gehlen to get hold of his goddamned microfilms? It was me, Ebby. I negotiated with him. I swallowed my pride and I swallowed my bile and I swallowed whatever scruples the weak-kneed crowd came up with and I made a deal with one devil the better to fight another devil. Do you really believe we don't know that Gehlen employs ex-Nazis? Come off it, Ebby—we pick up the tab over in Pullach. Jesus Christ Almighty, here you got a Joe 'bout to jump out of an aeroplane into Communist Russia and you suddenly have qualms about where you're getting the ID your Joe needs to avoid a firing squad. Myself, I'd crawl through dog shit on all fours and kiss Hermann Goering's fat ass if he could supply me with what my Joe needed to survive. In what ostrich hole have you been hiding your head, Ebby? In Berlin Station you got all hot under the collar because Harvey Torriti—who happens to be one of the most competent officers in the field—needs a ration of booze to get through the day. In Frankfurt Station you get all hot under the collar because of the company the Company keeps. Didn't your Daddy ever teach you that the enemy of your enemy is your friend? And while we're on the subject of your Daddy let me tell you something else. Before he parachuted into Bulgaria he was hanging out in Madrid doing deals with Spanish fascists to get the skinny on German raw material shipments. Hell, your Daddy was made of harder stuff than his son, that's for damn sure. So which way you gonna jump, boy? You gonna go all out for your Joe or you gonna fill our ears with slop about the occasional ex-Nazi in the woodpile?"

In a large corner office in "L" building next to the Reflecting Pool, James Angleton leafed through the day's field reports clamped between the metal covers of the top-secret folder.

"Anything happening I need to write home ab-b-bout, Jimbo?" asked his friend Adrian, the MI6 liaison man in Washington.

Angleton plucked a sheet from the folder and slid it across the blotter. Stirring a whiskey and branch water with one of the wooden tongue depressors he'd swiped from a doctor's office, Kim Philby leaned over the report and sniffed at it. "Smells top secret," he said with a snicker. He read it quickly, then read it a second time more slowly. A whistle seeped through his front teeth. "You want a second opinion? We should have gotten round to this kind of shenanigans months ago. If there really is a Ukrainian resistance movement in the Carpathians we'd be b-b-bloody fools not to hook up with them."

"Do me a favor, Adrian, keep this under your hat until we hear our man's safely on the ground," Angleton said.

"Ayatollah Angleton's every wish is his servants command," Philby shot back, bowing obsequiously toward his friend. They both laughed and, clinking glasses, sat back to polish off their drinks.

SUMMERSAULT had to shout to be heard over the roar of the C-47's engines. "I thank you, I thank President Truman, I thank America for sending me back. If my father sees me now, for sure he turns over in his grave— his son Alyosha comes home in a plane where he is the only passenger."

Ebby had brought SUMMERSAULT to the secret air strip in the American zone of Germany at sunset to meet the two pilots, Czech airmen who had flown Spitfires during the Battle of Britain. The C-47 had been "sheep-dipped"—stripped of all its markings—and fitted with extra fuel tanks under the wings for the round trip to the Ukrainian Carpathians and back. An Air Force sergeant had personally folded the main parachute and the emergency chute into their packs and had shown the young Ukrainian how to tighten the straps over his shoulder blades. "The plane's going to descend to six hundred feet for the drop," he instructed Alyosha, who had seen training films but had never jumped himself. "When the yellow light comes on, you position yourself at the open door. When the green light comes on, you jump. Remember to count to five before you pull the rip cord. Count slow-like. One one-hundredth. Two one-hundredth. Like that, awright?"

"Awright," Alyosha had replied, imitating the sergeant's New York accent. Ebby had helped SUMMERSAULT lug his gear out to the plane— the heavy parachute pack, the small suitcase (containing worn Russian clothing, the shortwave radio and several dozen German wristwatches that could be used to bribe people), a lunchbox with sandwiches and beer. Now, with the engines revving, Ebby carefully removed the poison capsule from a matchbox and forced it through the tiny rip in the fabric under SUMMERSAULT'S collar. He wrapped his arms around his Joe in a bear hug and yelled into his ear, "Good luck to you, Alyosha." He would have said more if he could have trusted himself to speak.

SUMMERSAULT grinned back. "Good luck to both of us and lousy luck to Joe Stalin!"

Moments later the plane climbed into the night sky and, banking as it gained altitude, disappeared into the east. Ebby used a base bicycle to peddle over to the Quonset hut that served as the flight center. If everything went according to plan the C-47 would be droning in for a landing in roughly six hours. The Czech pilots were under strict orders to maintain radio silence; the hope was that the Russians would take the flight for one of the aerial surveillance missions that regularly cut across the "denied areas" in a great rainbow arc. An Air Force duty officer brought Ebby a tray filled with warmed Spam and dehydrated mashed potatoes and offered him the use of a cot in a back room. He lay in the darkness, unable to cat-nap because of the disjointed thoughts tearing through his brain. Had he and Spink overlooked anything? The labels in Alyosha's clothing—they were all Russian. The soles on his shoes—Russian too. The wristwatches—anyone who had served in a Russian unit in Germany (Alyosha's military status book bore the forged signature of an officer who was dead) could explain away a packet of stolen wristwatches. The radio and the one-time pads and the Minox camera—they would be buried immediately after SUMMERSAULT sent word that he had landed safely. But what if he broke an ankle while landing? What if he was knocked unconscious and some peasants turned him in to the militia? Would the legend that Ebby had devised—that Alyosha had worked for two-and-a-half-years at a dam construction project in the northern Ukraine—stand up under scrutiny? The doubts crowded in, one behind the other, a long succession of them jostling each other to reach the head of the line.

An hour or so before dawn Ebby, braving the icy air outside the Quonset hut, thought he heard the distant drone of engines. He climbed on the bicycle and pedaled across the field to the giant hangar, arriving just as two wing lights snapped on and the C-47 touched down at the end of the strip. The plane taxied up to the hangar. Spotting Ebby, one of the Czech pilots slid back a cockpit window and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Ebby, exhilarated, sliced the air with his palm in response. All that remained now was to pick up the first cipher message announcing that the landing had gone off without a hitch.

Back at Frankfurt Station later that morning, Ebby was catnapping on an office cot when Tony Spink shook him awake. Ebby sat straight up. "Did he check in?" he demanded.

"Yeah. The kid said he'd landed, no bones broken. He said he was going to bury the radio and head for the hills to find his friends. He said he was happy to be home. He said he'd get in touch again in a few days. He said... he said 'I love you guys.'"

Ebby searched Spink's face. "What's wrong, Tony? The fist was Alyoshas, wasn't it?"

"The fist was right. My man who taught him Morse swears it was Alyosha sending. But the kid inserted the danger signal in the message—he signed it Alyosha instead of SUMMERSAULT."

Ebby clutched at a straw. "Maybe he forgot—"

"No way, Ebby He's being played back. We'll act as if we don't suspect anything for as long as they want to play him. But the kid is a dead man walking."

4

BERLIN, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1951

JACK'S AFTER-HOURS HAUNT, DIE PFEFFERMUHLE, WAS FILLED WITH what the Vichy police chief in Mr. Humphrey Bogart's motion picture Casablanca would have called "the usual suspects." Freddie Leigh-Asker, the MI6 Chief of Station, sidled up to the bar to chase down a refill. "Two doubles, no rocks," he hollered to the harried bartender. "Heard the latest?" he asked Jack, who was nursing a double with rocks before meandering toward the small dance theater for his semi-weekly session with the agent known as RAINBOW. It was Jack's third double of the afternoon; he was beginning to understand what pushed the Sorcerer to drown his angst in alcohol. Freddie's hot breath defrosted Jack's eardrum. "The psych warfare crazies have come up with a pisser—they want us to bombard Russia with zillions of extra-large condoms."

On the small stage an all-female jazz band dressed in tight lederhosen was belting out number three on the American top ten, "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." "Not sure I follow you," Jack called over what in other circumstances would have passed for music.

"The condoms will all be stamped 'medium' in English'" Freddie explained. "Do I need to draw you a diagram, old boy? It'll demoralize every Russian female of the species who hasn't reached menopause. Never look at their blokes again without wondering what they've been missing out on. Absolutely wizard scheme, what?"

Groping in an inside pocket of his blazer for some loose marks, Freddie flung them on the bar, grabbed his drinks and drifted off into a smog of cigarette smoke. Jack was glad to be rid of him. He knew the Sorcerer couldn't stand the sight of Leigh-Asker; Torriti claimed to be leery of people with hyphenated names but his Night Owl, Miss Sipp, had come up with a better take on the situation.

"It's not the silly little hyphen, oh, dear, no," she had confided in Jack late one night. "Poor Freddie Leigh-Asker had what the Brits call a good fairy. He parachuted into the burning fiery furnace and wasn't even singed. He's absolutely positive that if he hasn't bought it by now he's home free to die of old age. It's said of him that he doesn't know what the word fear means. Mr. Torriti prefers to work with people who are afraid—he feels they have a better chance of staying one jump ahead of the opposition. He likes you, Jack, because he reckons that behind your bravado—behind your 'Once down is no battle' mantra—there's a healthy trepidation."

A lean, muscular man in his mid twenties with short-cropped hair climbed onto the stool next to Jack and lifted a finger to get the attention of the bartender. "Draft beer," he called. He caught sight of Jack's face in the mirror behind the bar. "McAuliffe!" he cried. "Jacko McAuliffe!"

Jack raised his eyes to the mirror. He recognized the young man sitting next to him and wagged a finger at his reflection, trying to dredge up the name that went with the familiar face. The young man helped him. "The European championship? Munich? Forty-eight? I was rowing stroke in the Russian coxed four? You and me we fell crazy in love with Australian peacenik twins but broke off romance when the sun came up?"

Jack slapped his forehead in recognition. "Borisov!" he said. He glanced sideways, genuinely delighted to stumble across an old bar-hopping pal from Munich. "Vanka Borisov! Damnation! What the hell are you doing here?"

The bartender shaved the head off the beer with the back of his forefinger and set the mug down in front of Borisov. The two young men clinked glasses. "I am working for the Soviet import-export commission," the Russian said. "We conduct trade negotiations with the German Democratic Republic. What about yourself, Jacko?"

"I landed a soft job with the State Department information bureau— I am the guy in charge of what we call boilerplate. I write up news releases describing how well our Germans are making out under capitalism and how badly your Germans are faring under Communism."

"The last time I saw you you had a bad case of blood blisters under your calluses."

Jack showed the Russian his palms, which were covered with thick calluses. "When we beat Harvard last Spring I was pulling so hard I thought the bone I cracked in Munich would crack again. The pain was something else."

'What ever happened to your cox? Leon something-or-other?"

A faint current buzzed in Jack's brain. "Leo Kritzky. I lost track of him," he said, a grin plastered on his face. He wondered if the Russian really worked in import-export. "We had a falling out over a girl."

"You always had an eye for the ladies," the Russian said with a broad smile. The two young men talked rowing for a while. The Russians, it seemed, had developed a new slide that ran on self-lubricating ball bearings. Borisov had been one of the first to test it during trial runs on the Moscow River the mechanism worked so smoothly, he told Jack, it allowed the rower to reduce the exaggerated body work and concentrate on blade work. The result, Borisov guessed, was worth one or two strokes every hundred meters. Still smiling, the Russian looked sideways at Jack. "I have never been to the States," he said nonchalantly. "Tell me something, Jacko—what is a lot of money in America?"

The buzzing in Jack's head grew stronger. It depended, he replied evenly, on a great many things—whether you lived in the city or the countryside, whether you drove a Studebaker or a Cadillac, whether you bought readymade suits or had them custom-tailored.

"Give me an approximate idea," Borisov insisted. "Twenty-five thousand dollars? Fifty? A hundred thousand?"

Jack began to think the question might be innocent after all—everybody in Europe was curious about how Americans lived. He allowed as how $25,000 was an awful lot of bucks; $50,000, a fortune. Borisov let that sink in for a moment. When he turned back to Jack the smile had faded from his face. "Tell me something else, Jacko—how much do you earn a year producing boilerplate stories for the State Department?"

"Somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars."

The Russian jutted out his lower lip in thought. "What if somebody was to come up to you—right now, right here—and offer you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash?"

The buzzing in Jack's head was so strong now it almost drowned out the conversation. He heard himself ask, "In return for what?"

"In return for the odd piece of information about a Mr. Harvey Torriti."

"What makes you think I know anyone named Harvey Torriti?"

Borisov gulped down the last of the beer and carefully blotted his lips on the back of a wrist. "If a hundred fifty thousand is not enough, name a figure."

Jack wondered how Vanka had gotten involved with the KGB; probably much the same way he'd gotten involved with the CIA—a talent scout, an interview, several months of intensive training and whoops, there you were, baiting a hook and casting it into the pitchy waters of Die Pfeffermuhle.

"You tell me something," Jack said. "How much is a lot of money in the Soviet Union?" Vanka squirmed uncomfortably on his stool. "Would a Russian with five thousand United States of America dollars stashed in a numbered Swiss bank account be considered rich? No? How about twenty-five thousand? Still no? Okay, let's say somebody walked up to you—right here, right now— and wrote down the number of a secret Swiss bank account in which a hundred and fifty thousand US dollars had been deposited in your name."

The Russian let out an uncomfortable laugh. "In exchange for what?"

"In exchange for the odd bit of information from Karlshorst—import-export data, the names of the Russians who are doing the importing and exporting."

Borisov slid off his stool. "It has been a pleasure seeing you again, Jacko. Good luck to you at your State Department information bureau."

"Nice bumping into you, too, Vanka. Good luck with your import-export commission. Hey, stay in touch."

Lurking in the shadows of a doorway across Hardenbergstrasse, Jack kept an eye on the stage door of the ugly little modern dance theater. He had spent an hour and a half roaming the labyrinthian limbs of the S-Bahn, jumping into and out of trains a moment before the doors closed, lingering until everyone had passed and then doubling back on his route, finally emerging at the Zoo Station and meandering against traffic through a tangle of side streets until he was absolutely sure he wasn't being followed. Mr. Andrews, he thought, would be proud of his tradecraft. At 8 P.M. the street filled with people, their heads angled into the cold air, hurrying home from work, many carrying sacks of coal they had picked up at an Allied distribution center in the Tiergarten; something about the way they walked suggested to Jack that they weren't dying to get where they were going. At 9:10 the first students began coming out of the theater, scrawny teenagers striding off in the distinctive duck-walk of ballet dancers, great clouds of breath billowing from their mouths as they giggled excitedly. Jack waited another ten minutes, then crossed the street and let himself into the narrow hallway that smelled of perspiration and talcum powder. The watchman, an old Pomeranian named Aristide, was sitting in the shabby chair in his glasssnclosed cubbyhole, one ear glued to a small radio; von Karajan, who had played for the Fuhrer and once arranged for audience seating in the form of a swastika, was conducting Beethoven's Fifth live from Vienna. Aristide, his eyes shaded by a visor, never looked up as Jack pushed two packs of American cigarettes through the window. With the wooden planks creaking under his weight, he climbed the staircase at the back of the hallway to the top floor rehearsal hall and listened for a moment. Hearing no other sound in the building, he opened the door.

As she always did after her Tuesday and Friday classes, RAINBOW had lingered behind to work out at the barre after her students had gone. Barefoot wearing purple tights and a loose-fitting washed-out sweat shirt, she leaned forward and folded her body in half to plant her palms flat on the floor, then straightened and arched her back and easily stretched one long leg flat along the barre and then leaned over it, all the while studying herself in the mirror. Her dark hair, which seemed to have trapped some of the last rays of the previous night's setting sun, was pulled back and plaited with strands of wool into a long braid that plunged to the small hollow of her back—the spot where Jack wore his Walther PPK. This was the fifth time Jack had met with her and the sheer physical beauty of her body in motion still managed to take his breath away. At some point in her life her nose had been broken and badly set, but what would have disfigured another woman on her served as an enigmatic ornament.

"What do you see when you watch yourself dance in the mirror?" Jack asked from the door.

Startled, she grabbed a towel from the barre and flung it around her neck, and with her feet barely touching the ground—so it appeared to Jack—came across the room. She dried her long delicate fingers on the towel and formally offered a hand. He shook it. She led him to the pile of clothing neatly folded on one of the wooden chairs lining the wall. "What I see are my faults—the mirror reflects only faults."

"Something tells me you're being too hard on yourself."

She smiled in disagreement. "When I was eighteen I aspired to be a great dancer, yes? Now I am twenty-eight and I aspire only to dance."

The Sorcerer had purchased RAINBOW from a Polish freelancer, a dapper man in a black undertakers suit who pasted the last strands of hair across his scalp with an ointment designed to stimulate defolliculus. Like dozens of others who worked the hypogean world of Berlin, he made a handsome living selling the odd scrap of information or the occasional source who was said to have access to secrets. Warning Jack to be leery of a KGB dangle operation, Torriti—brooding full time over the aborted defection of Vishnevsky—had handed RAINBOW over to his Apprentice with instructions to fuck her if he could and tape record what she whispered in his ear. Tickled to be running his first full-fledged agent, Jack had set up a rendezvous.

RAINBOW turned out to be an East German classical dancer who crossed into West Berlin twice a week to give ballet classes at a small out-of-the-way theater. At their first meeting Jack had started to question her in German but she had cut him off, saying she preferred to conduct the meetings in English in order to perfect her grammar and vocabulary; it was her dream, she had confessed, to one day see Margot Fonteyn dance at London's Royal Ballet. RAINBOW had identified herself only as Lili and had warned Jack that if he attempted to follow her when she returned to the eastern zone of the city she would break off all contact. She had turned her back to Jack and had extracted from her brassiere a small square of silk covered with minuscule handwriting. When Jack took it from her he had discovered the silk was still warm from her breast. He had offered to pay for the information she brought but she had flatly refused. "I am hateful of the Communists, yes?" she had said, her bruised eyes staring unblinkingly into his. "My mother was a Spanish Communist—she was killed in the struggle against the fascist Franco; because of this detail I am trusted by the East German authorities," she had explained at that first meeting. "I loathe the Russian soldiers because of what they did to me when they captured Berlin. I loathe the Communists because of what they are doing to my Germany. We live in a country where phones are allotted on the basis of how often they want to call you; where you think one thing, say another and do a third. Someone must make a stand against this, yes?"

Lili had claimed to be a courier for an important figure in the East German hierarchy whom she referred to as "Herr Professor," but otherwise refused to identify. Back at Berlin Base, Jack had arranged for the patch of silk to be photographed and translated. When he showed the "get" from Lili's Herr Professor (now code-named SNIPER) to the Sorcerer, Torriti had opened a bottle of Champagne to celebrate tapping into the mother lode. For Lili had provided them with a synopsis of the minutes of an East German cabinet meeting, plain-text copies of several messages that had been exchanged between the East German government and the local Soviet military leaders (Berlin Station already had enciphered versions of the same messages, which meant the Americans could work backwards and break the codes that had been used for encryption), along with a partial list of the KGB officers working out of Karlshorst. For the past six months Torriti had been running an East German agent, code-named MELODY, who worked in the Soviet office that handled freight shipments between Moscow and Berlin. Using the shipping registry, MELODY (debriefed personally by Torriti when the agent managed to visit the Sorcerer's whorehouse above a nightclub on the Grunewaldstrasse in Berlin-Schoneberg) had been able to identify many of the officers and personnel posted to Karlshorst by their real names. Comparing the names supplied by Lili with those supplied by MELODY provided confirmation that Lili's Herr Professor was genuine.

"Who the fuck is she, sport?" Torriti had demanded after Jack returned from the second rendezvous with another square of silk filled with tiny handwriting. "More important, who the fuck is her goddamn professor chum?"

"She says if I try to find out the well will go dry," Jack had reminded Torriti. "From the way she talks about him I get the feeling he's some sort of scientist. When I asked her where exactly the Communists were going wrong in East Germany, she answered by quoting the professor quoting Albert Einstein—something about our age being characterized by a perfection of means and a confusion of goals. Also, she speaks of him with great formality, more or less the way someone speaks about a much older person. I get the feeling he could be her father or an uncle. Whoever it is, he's someone close to the summit."

"More likely to be her lover," Torriti had muttered. "More often than not sex and espionage are birds of a feather." The Sorcerer had dropped an empty whiskey bottle into a government-issue wire wastebasket filled with cigarette butts and had reached into an open safe behind him for another bottle. He had poured himself a stiff drink, had splashed in a thimbleful of water, had stirred the contents with his middle finger, then had carefully licked the finger before downing half the drink in one long swallow. "Listen up, sport, there's an old Russian proverb that says you're supposed to wash the bear without getting its fur wet. That's what I want you to do with RAINBOW."

In order to wash the bear without getting its fur wet, Jack had to organize a tedious surveillance operation designed to track RAINBOW back into East Berlin and discover where she lived and who she was. Once they discovered her identity, it would be a matter of time before they found out who SNIPER was. If the Professor turned out to be a senior Communist with access to East German and Soviet secrets, some serious consideration would be given to using him in a more creative way; he could be obliged (under threat of exposure; under threat of having his courier exposed) to plant disinformation in places where it could do the most harm, or steer policy discussions in a direction that did the most good for Western interests. If he really was a member of the ruling elite over in the Soviet zone, the few people above him could be discredited or eliminated and SNIPER might even wind up running the show.

The Sorcerer had given Jack the services of the two Silwans, the Fallen Angel and Sweet Jesus, and half a dozen other Watchers. Each time Jack met with RAINBOW, one of the Silwans would take up position where Lili had last been seen when she headed back toward East Berlin. No single Watcher would follow her for more than a hundred meters. Using walkie-talkies, members of the surveillance team would position themselves ahead of Lili and blending in with the tens of thousands of East Berliners returning home to the Soviet Sector after working in West Berlin, keep her in sight for a few minutes before passing her on to the next Watcher. When the team ran out of agents the operation would be called off for the night. Each time Jack met RAINBOW the radius of the operation would be extended.

On the first night of the operation, Jack's third meeting with RAINBOW, the Fallen Angel had watched Lili buy some sheer stockings in one of the luxury stores on the Kurfurstendamm and tracked her to the gutted Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at the top of West Berlin's six-lane main drag; Sweet Jesus, walking his muzzled lap dog, had kept her in sight until she disappeared in the crowd at Potsdamer Platz, where the four Allied sectors converged. She was last seen crossing into the eastern sector near the enormous electric sign, like the one in Times Square, that beamed news into the Communist-controlled half of the city. The second night of the operation one of the Silwans picked her up in front of the Handelorganization, a giant state store on the Soviet side of Potsdamer Platz, and handed her on to the second Watcher as she passed the battle-scarred Reichstag and the grassy mound over the underground bunker where Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. Two uniformed policemen from the Communist Bereitschaftspolizisten stopped her near the grassy mound to check her identity booklet. Lili, glancing nervously over her shoulder every now and then to make sure she wasn't being followed, turned down a side street filled with four-story buildings gutted in the war; the few apartments where Germans still lived had their windows boarded over and stovepipes jutting through the walls. The Watcher peeled off and the next Watcher, alerted by radio, picked her up when she emerged onto Unter den Linden. He lost her moments later when a formation of Freie Deutsche Jugund, Communist boy scouts wearing blue shirts and blue bandannas and short pants even in winter, came between them; drums beating, the scouts were marching down the center of the Unter den Linden carrying large photographs of Stalin and East German leader Otto Grotewohl and a banner that read: "Forward with Stalin."

On the night of Jack's sixth rendezvous with RAINBOW on the top floor of the ugly little theater, Lili delivered the still-warm square of silk ruled with writing and then offered her hand. "You have never said me your name, yes?" she remarked.

I am called Jack," he said, gripping her hand in his.

"That sounds very American to my ears. Jackknife. Jack-in-the-box. Jack-of-all-trades. "

"That's me," Jack agreed with a laugh. "Jack-of-all-trades and master of none." He was still holding her hand. She looked down at it with a cheerless smile and gently slid her fingers free. "Look," Jack said quickly, "I just happen to have two tickets to a Bartok ballet being performed at the Municipal Opera House in British Sector—Melissa Hayden is dancing in something called The Miraculous Mandarin." He pulled the tickets from his overcoat pocket and offered her one of them. "The curtain goes up tomorrow at six—they begin early so the East Germans can get home before midnight." She started to shake her head. "Hey," Jack said, "no strings attached—we'll watch the ballet, afterwards I'll buy you a beer at the bar and then you'll duck like a spider back into your crack in the wall." When she still didn't take the ticket he reached over and dropped it into her handbag.

"I am tempted," she admitted. "I have heard it said that Melissa Hayden is not restricted by gravity. I do not know..."

The next evening the Watchers, spread strategically through the streets surrounding Humbolt University at the end of the Unter den Linden, picked RAINBOW up coming from the direction of the Gorky Theater, behind the university. Queuing with a crowd of relatively well-dressed Berliners waiting for the Opera House doors to open, Jack was handed a note that read: "We are almost there—tonight should do it."

When the curtain rose the balcony seat next to Jack was still empty. Every now and then he cast a glance at the door behind him. In the darkness he thought he saw a figure slip in. An instant later Lili, looking ravishing in a helmet-like hat made of felt and a threadbare fur coat that dusted the tops of her flat-soled shoes, settled into the seat. Shrugging the coat off her shoulders, she smiled faintly at Jack, then produced ancient opera glasses and gazed through them at the stage. Her lips parted slightly and her chest rose and fell in quiet rapture. When the prima ballerina finally pushed through the curtain and curtsied to the audience, tears appeared in Lili's eyes as she applauded wildly.

Jack steered her through the crowd in the hallway and down the wide steps to a long bar on the ground floor. "I would very much like a Berliner Weisse mit Schuss—a light beer with raspberry syrup," she informed him. She took a small change purse from the pocket of her fur coat. Jack smiled and said, "Please." She smiled back and returned the change purse to her pocket. After he had ordered she leaned toward him and he could feel the feather's weight of her torso against his arm. "In the east raspberries in winter are more expensive than gold," she murmured.

They carried their beers to an empty table. Lili hiked her long skirt and sat down; Jack caught a glimpse of gray cotton stockings and slender ankles. Lili said, "Given your occupation, I am in bewilderment to discover that you are an aficionado of ballet." She cocked her head. "Perhaps you will tell me biographical things of yourself, yes?"

Jack laughed. "Yes, sure." He touched his glass to hers and drank off some of the beer. "I'll start at the start. I was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania—you will never have heard of it—called Jonestown. My parents had a house with a wraparound porch where the town stopped and the fields of corn started. When I was a kid I thought the fields went on forever, or at least until they reached the edge of the flat earth. If the wind was right you could hear the church bells ringing in the convent beyond the corn, beyond a hill. My father made a small fortune producing underwear for the army in his factory up the road from our house. I learned to drive when I was fourteen on his 1937 Pierce Arrow. My father kept saddle horses in the barn next to the house and chickens in a shed behind it. My mother played the organ at the Catholic church in Lebanon, near Jonestown. Twice a year we vacationed in New York City. We stayed at a hotel called the Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue. Every time we visited the city my father disappeared with some of his schoolmates and came back roaring drunk in the middle of the night. My mother took me to the ballet—I remember seeing Prokofiev's Prodigal Son and his Romeo and Juliet performed at the Metropolitan Opera House."

"And how did you become what you are? How did you..."

He took another sip of beer. "There are Americans who understand that we are involved in a life and death struggle with the Communists. When it is over only one side will survive. I was invited by these Americans to join the battle." He reached over and touched the fur on the collar of her coat with his knuckles. "Tell me about yourself, Lili. What is your real name?"

She was immediately wary. "Lili is what my father always called me as a child because my mother often played the song 'Lili Marlene' on the gramophone. As for myself, there is not much to tell—I survived the Nazis, I survived your American bombers, I survived the Russian soldiers who rampaged like crazy people across Germany." She pulled the collar of her fur coat up around her long neck. "With the assistance of these ancient squirrels I even survived the bitter winter of'47."

"At what age did you begin dancing?"

"There was never a time when I was not dancing. As a child I discovered a way to use my body to get outside my body, I discovered the secret places where gravity didn't exist, I discovered a secret language that wasn't verbal. The adults around me said I would become a ballet dancer, but it was years before I understood what they were talking about."

Jack blurted out very softly, "Jesus H. Christ, you are a wonderfully beautiful woman, Lili."

She closed her lids wearily and kept them closed for a moment. "I am not beautiful but I am not ugly either."

Screwing up his courage, Jack asked her if she lived alone or with a man.

"Why do you ask me such a thing?" she demanded angrily. "I have told you, I tell you again, if you try to find out who I am, or who the Professor is, you will never see me again."

"I asked because I was hoping against hope you would say you lived alone, which could mean that there might be room for me in your life."

"My life is too crowded with emptiness for there to be room for you in it, Jack-of-all-trades and master of none." She sipped her raspberry-flavored beer and licked her lips, which had turned the color of raspberry, with her tongue. "Since you live and work in the universe of secrets I will add to your collection of secrets: The moments I treasure the most come when I wake up from a drugged sleep and I do not know where I am or who I am—I drift for a few delicious seconds in a gravity-less void. At such moments I dance like I have never been able to in my earthbound life. I dance almost the way Melissa Hayden danced before our eyes this night."

Returning home after the ballet, RAINBOW was picked up by the Fallen Angel as she turned into a street behind the Gorky Theater lined with vacant lots filled with rubble bulldozed into giant heaps on which children played king of mountain. Dozens of wild cats, meowing furiously, prowled the war-gutted buildings stalking emaciated mice. In the middle of this devastation a single structure stood untouched. Set back from the street, it was planted in the midst of a small park whose trees had all been cut down for firewood. Giant steel girders shored up the side walls that had once been joined to the adjacent buildings. The Fallen Angel watched from the shadows of a deserted kiosk as Lili took a latch key from her purse. She looked back and, seeing the street was deserted, unlocked the heavy front door and let herself into the vestibule.

The building was pitch-dark except for a large bay window on the second floor. The Fallen Angel snapped open a small telescope and focused it on the window. An older man could be seen parting a filmy curtain with the back of his left hand and peering down into the street. He had snow-white hair and wore a shirt with an old-fashioned starched collar, a necktie and a suit jacket with rounded lapels. He must have heard a door opening behind him because he turned back into the room and spread wide his arms. Through the gauzy curtains Lili could be seen coming into them.

Jack burst into the Sorcerer's office the next afternoon, "...right about SNIPER... scientist.. .much older than RAINBOW," he cried excitedly, raising his voice to make himself heard over a grating 78-rpm rendition of Caruso singing an aria from Bizet's Les Pecheurs de Perles.

"Simmer down, sport. I can't understand your jabberwocky."

Jack caught his breath. "I took your advice and tried out the address on your Mossad friend—the Rabbi leafed through some very thick loose-leaf books and came up with two names to go with the address. RAINBOW'S real name is Helga Agnes Mittag de la Fuente. Mittag was her German father; de la Fuente was Mittag's Spanish wife and RAINBOW'S mother. The Rabbi even confirmed there was a Spanish journalist named Agnes de la Fuente who was caught spying for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and put in front of a firing squad."

"What about SNIPER?"

"The Professor is Ernst Ludwig Loftier. He teaches theoretical physics at the Humbolt University Institute of Physics. Before the war, when Humbolt was still known as the University of Berlin, Loffler hung out with Max Planck and Albert Einstein."

Torriti settled back into his chair and stirred a whiskey and water with his forefinger. "A fucking theoretical physicist! Wait'll the Wiz gets wind of this."

"That's only the icing on the cake, Harvey. There's more. Right after the war Grotewohl's Socialist Unity Party let several small parties into the National Front for window dressing—that way he could claim East Germany was a genuine democracy. One of these parties is the Liberal Democratic Party. SNIPER is deputy head of that party and a deputy prime minister of the German Democratic Republic!"

Eureka!" exalted Torriti. "Do me a favor, sport. Put a teardrop in SNIPER'S wall."

'Why do you want to bug him? He's sending you whatever he gets his hands on."

"Motivation, sport. I want to know why he's sending it."

"A teardrop."

"Uh-huh."

5

BERLIN, TUESDAY, MARCH 6, 1951

HIS FACE SCREWED UP IN REVULSION, THE SORCERER SPILLED INTO the whiskey and water the sodium bicarbonate his Night Owl had brought back from an all-night pharmacy. He stirred the mixture with his pinky until the whitish powder dissolved.

"Down the hatch, Mr. Torriti," Miss Sipp coaxed. "It won't kill you. Think of it as one for the road."

Harvey Torriti pinched his nostrils between a thumb and forefinger and drained off the concoction in one long disgruntled gulp. He shivered as he scraped his mouth dry on the wrinkled sleeve of his shirt. Stomach cramps, constipation, loss of appetite, a permanent soreness in his solar plexus, the end of one dull hangover overlapping the beginning of another even when he cut back to one and a half bottles of booze a day—these were the plagues that had afflicted the Sorcerer since the aborted exfiltration of the Russian Vishnevsky. Slivovitz from the water cooler tasted tasteless, cigarette smoke burned the back of his throat; on any given night he would come wide awake before he actually fell asleep, sweating bullets and blinking away images of a heavy caliber pistol spitting hot metal into the nape of a thick neck. The short Russian with his central casting Slavic mask of a face, the mind-scarred veteran of the four brutal winters that took the Red Army from Moscow to Berlin, had deposited his life in the Sorcerer's perspiring hands. Also his wife's. Also his son's. Torriti had put in the plumbing for the defection and come away with zilch. In the days that followed he had agonized over the Berlin end of the operation to see if there could have been a weak link; he had scoured the personnel folders of everyone who had been within shouting distance of the operation: Jack McAuliffe, Sweet Jesus and Fallen Angel, the Night Owl, the code clerk who had enciphered and deciphered the messages to and from Angleton.

If Vishnevsky had bought it because of a leak, it hadn't originated in Berlin.

The Sorcerer had dispatched a discreetly worded message to Mother suggesting he take a hard look at his end of the operation. Angleton's vinegary reply was on his desk the next morning. In two tart paragraphs Angleton informed Torriti that: (1) it wasn't clear the exfiltration had fallen through because of a leak; Vishnevsky could have been betrayed by his wife or son or a friend who had been let in on the secret; alternatively, Vishnevsky could have given himself away by words or actions that aroused suspicions;

(2) if there was a leak it had not originated in Mother's shop, which was uncontaminated, but rather in the Berlin end of the operation. Period. End of discussion.

In plain English: fuck off.

Several days after the debacle the Sorcerer—staggering into the office after another sleepless night—had stumbled across hard evidence that someone had, in fact, betrayed Vishnevsky. Torriti had been rummaging through the "get" from one of his most productive operations: a teardrop-sized high tech electronic microphone secreted in the wall of the communications shack of the Karlshorst rezidentura. The KGB communicated with Moscow Centre using one-time pads which, given the limited distribution of the cipher keys and the fact that they were utilized only once before being discarded, were impossible to break. Very occasionally, to speed up the process, two KGB communications officers did the enciphering—one read out the clear text as the other enciphered. The night of Vishnevsky's aborted exfiltration two KGB officers had enciphered an "Urgent Immediate" message to Moscow Centre that had been picked up by the Sorcerer's minuscule microphone. The translation from the Russian read: "Ref: Your Urgent Immediate zero zero one of 2 January 1951 Stop Early warning from Moscow Centre prevented defection of Lieutenant Colonel Volkov-Vishnevsky his wife and son Stop Berlin Station offers sincere congratulations to all concerned Stop Volkov-Vishnevsky his wife and son being put aboard military flight Eberswalde Air Force Base immediately Stop Estimated time of arrival Moscow zero six forty five."

The reference to an "early warning" in the congratulatory message from Karlshorst to Moscow confirmed that the KGB had been tipped off about the impending defection. The $64,000 question was: tipped off by whom?

Vishnevsky's words came back to haunt the Sorcerer. "I am able to reveal to you the identity of a Soviet agent in Britain," he had said. "Someone high up in their MI6."

Torriti checked out the distribution of the ciphered messages that had passed between Angleton in Washington and Berlin Station but could find no evidence that anyone from MI6—or any Brit, for that matter—had been in on the secret. It was inconceivable that the Russians had cracked Angleton's unbreakable polyalphabetic ciphers. Was it possible... could the Soviet agent high up in MI6 have gotten wind of the defection through a back channel?

Finding the answer to the riddle—avenging the Russian who had trusted Torriti and lost his life because of it—became the Sorcerer's obsession. His mind sprinting ahead, his aching body trailing along behind, he began the long tedious job of walking back the cat on the aborted defection.

He started with the Israeli Mossad agent in West Berlin who had picked up a "vibration" (his shorthand for a possible defection) from East Berlin and immediately alerted Angleton, who (in addition to the counterintelligence portfolio) ran the Company's Israeli account out of his hip pocket. Known to the local spooks as the Rabbi because of his straggly steel wool beard and sideburns, he was in his early forties and wore windowpane-thick glasses that magnified his already bulging eyes so much his face appeared to be deformed. He dressed in what the spook community took to be a Mossad uniform because nobody could recall seeing him wearing anything else: a baggy black suit with ritual zizith dangling below the hem of the jacket, a white shirt without tie buttoned up to a majestic Adam's apple, a black fedora (worn indoors because he was afraid of drafts) and basketball sneakers. "You see before you a very distressed man," the Rabbi confided once Torriti had successfully lowered his bulk into one of the wobbly wooden chairs lining the wall of Ezra Ben Ezra's musty inner sanctum in the French zone of Berlin.

"Try sodium bicarbonate," the Sorcerer advised. He knew from experience that there would be a certain amount of polite prattle before they got down to brass tacks.

"My distress is mental as opposed to physical. It has to do with the trial of the Rosenbergs that began in New York this morning. If the judge was a goy they would get twenty years and be out in ten. Mark my words, Harvey, remember you heard it here first: the miserable protagonists, Julius and Ethel, will be sentenced to the electric chair because the federal judge is a Jew-hating Jew named Kaufman."

"They did steal the plans for the atomic bomb, Ezra."

"They passed on to the Russians some rough sketches."

"There are people who think the North Koreans would never have invaded the south if the Russians hadn't been behind them with the A-bomb.

"Genshoyn, Harvey! Enough already! The North Koreans invaded the south because Communist China, with its six hundred million souls, was behind them, not a Tinkertoy Russian A-bomb that could maybe explode in the bomb rack of the airplane as it rattles down the runway."

The Rabbi stopped talking abruptly as a young man with shaved eyebrows came in carrying a tray with two steaming cups of an herbal infusion. Without a word he cleared a space on the Rabbi's chaotic desk, set down the tray and disappeared.

Torriti gestured with his head. "He's new."

"Hamlet—which, believe it or not, is his given name—is Georgian by birth and my Shabbas goy by vocation. There are things I cannot do because someone in my position, which is to say a representative of the State of Israel, albeit a secret representative, is expected to be observant, so Hamlet turns on the lights and answers the telephone and kills people for me on Saturdays."

The Sorcerer suspected that the Rabbi was passing the truth off as a joke. "I didn't know you were religious, Ezra."

"I live by the Mossad manual: eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."

"But do you actually believe in God? Do you believe in life after death or any of that rigmarole?"

"Definitely not."

"In what sense are you Jewish, then?"

"In the sense that if I should happen to forget, the world will remind me every ten or twenty years the way it is currently reminding the Rosenbergs. Read the New York Times and weep: two dumb but idealistic schleps pass the odd sketch on to the Russians and all of a sudden, Harvey, all of a sudden the number one topic of conversation in the world is the international Jewish conspiracy. There is an international Jewish conspiracy, thanks to God it exists. It's a conspiracy to save the Jews from Stalin—he wants to pack the ones he hasn't murdered off to Siberia to make a Jewish state. A Jewish state on a tundra in Siberia! We already have a Jewish state on the land that God gave to Abraham. It's called Israel." Without missing a beat, the Rabbi asked, "To what do I owe the pleasure, Harvey?"

"It was you who got wind of the Vishnevsky defection and passed it on to Angleton, right?"

"'Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. These fragments I have shored against my ruins.' I am quoting from the gospel according to that major poet and minor anti-Semite, Thomas Steams Eliot. The Company owes me one."

"The exfiltration went sour. There was a leak, Ezra."

The Rabbi sucked in his cheeks. "You think so?"

"I know so. Any chance one of your Shabbas goys moonlights for the opposition?"

"Everyone here has walked through fire, Harvey. Hamlet is missing all the fingernails on his right hand; they were extracted by a KGB pliers when he declined to reveal to them the names of some local anti-Stalinists in Georgia. If there was a chink in my armor I wouldn't be around to guarantee to you there is no chink in my armor. I run a small but efficient shop. I trade or sell information, I keep track of Nazi missile engineers who go to ground in Egypt or Syria, I doctor passports and smuggle them into the denied areas and smuggle Jews out to Israel. If there was a leak, if Vishnevsky didn't give the game away by stammering when he asked for permission to take his family out for a night on the town, it took place somewhere between Mother and you."

"I took a hard look at the distribution, Ezra. I couldn't see a weak link."

The Rabbi shrugged his bony shoulders.

The Sorcerer reached for the herbal tea, took a whiff of it, pulled a face and set the cup back on the desk. "The night I vetted Vishnevsky he told me there was a Soviet mole in Britain's Six."

The Rabbi perked up. "In MI6! That is an earthshaking possibility."

"The Brits were never brought into the Vishnevsky picture. Which leaves me holding the bag. There are eighty intelligence agencies, with a tangle of branches and front organizations, operating out of Berlin. Where do I grab the wool to make the sweater unravel, Ezra? I thought of asking the French to give me a list of SDECE operations blown in the last year or two."

The Rabbi held up his hands and studied his fingernails, which had recently been manicured. After a while he said, "Forget Berlin. Forget the French— they're so traumatized from losing the war they won't give the winners the time of day." Ben Ezra pulled a number two pencil from an inside breast pocket and a small metal pencil sharpener from another pocket. He carefully sharpened the pencil, then scrawled a phone number on a pad open on his desk. He tore off the page, folded it and passed it to Torriti. The Rabbi then tore off the next page and dropped it into a burn bag. "If I were you I'd start in London," he said. "Look up Elihu Epstein—he's a walking cyclopedia. Maybe Elihu can assist you with your inquiries, as our English friends like to say."

"How do I jog his memory?"

"Prime the pump by telling him something he doesn't know. Then get him to tell you about a Russian general named Krivitsky. After that keep him talking. If anyone knows where the bodies are buried it will be Elihu."

Luxuriating in the relative vastness of the British public phone booth, the Sorcerer force fed some coins into the slot and dialed the unlisted number the Rabbi had given him.

A crabby voice on the other end demanded, "And then what?"

Torriti pushed the button to speak. "Mr. Epstein, please."

"Whom shall is say is calling?"

"Swan Song."

Dripping with derision, the voice said, "Please do hold on, Mr. Song." The line crackled as the call was transferred. Then the unmistakable whinny of Torriti's old OSS friend came down the pipe. "Harvey, dear boy. Heard on my grapevine you were hoeing the Company's furrows in Krautville. What brings you to my neck of the British woods?"

"We need to talk."

"Do we? Where? When?"

"Kite Hill, overlooking the bandstand on Hampstead Heath. There are benches facing downtown London. I'll be on one of them admiring the pollution hovering like a cloud over the city. Noon suit you?"

"Noon's wizard."

On the slope below, a very tall man in a pinstripe suit played out the line that trailed off to a Chinese dragon kite, which dipped and balked and soared in the updrafts with acrobatic deftness. An Asian woman stood nearby with one hand on the back of a bench, trying to clean dog droppings off the sole of her shoe by rinsing it in a shoal of rainwater. Somewhere in Highgate a church bell pealed the hour. A shortish, round-shouldered man, his teeth dark with decay, strolled up the hill and settled with a wheeze onto the bench next to Sorcerer.

"Expecting someone, are you?" he asked, removing his bowler and setting it on the bench next to him.

"As a matter of fact, yes," the Sorcerer said. "It's been a while, Elihu."

"Understatement of the century. Glad to see you're still kicking, Harv."

Elihu Epstein and Harvey Torriti had been billeted in the same house for several months in Palermo, Sicily during the war. Elihu had been an officer in one of Britain's most ruthless units, called 3 Commando, which was using the former German submarine base at Augusta Bay as a staging area for raids on the boot of Italy. The Sorcerer, working under the code name SWAN SONG, had been running an OSS operation to enlist the Mafia dons of the island on the side of the Allies. Making use of his private Mafia sources, Torriti had been able to provide Elihu with the German order of battle in towns along the mainland coast. Elihu had given the Sorcerer credit for saving dozens of Commando lives and never forgotten the favor.

"What brings you to London town?" Elihu inquired now.

"The Cold War."

Elihu let fly one of his distinctive whinnies, a bleating that came from having perpetually clogged sinuses. "I have come around to the view of your General W. Tecumseh Sherman when he said that war is hell; its glory, moonshine." Elihu, who was a deputy to Roger Hollis, the head of the MI5 section investigating Soviet espionage in England, sized up his wartime buddy. "You look fat but fit. Are you?"

"Fit enough. You?"

"I have a touch of that upper class malady, gout. I have problems with a quack pretending to be a National Health dentist—he takes the view that tooth decay is a sign of moral degeneracy and advises me to circumcise my heart. Oh, I do wish it were true, Harv! Always wanted to try my hand at moral degeneracy. To square the circle, there is a buzzing in my left ear that refuses to go away unless I drown it out with a louder buzzing. Had it since a very large land mine went off too close for comfort in the war, actually."

"Are you wired, Elihu?"

"Fraid I am, Harv. It's about my pension. I don't mind meeting you away from the madding mob for a confabulation, just don't want it to blow up in my face afterward. You do see what I mean? There's an old Yiddish aphorism: Me ken nit tantzen auftsvai chassenes mit am mol—you can't dance at two weddings at the same time. Our wonky civil service minders take the injunction very seriously. Cross a line and you will be put out to graze without the pound sterling to keep you in fresh green grass. If I can keep my nose clean, twenty-nine more months will see me off to pasture."

"Where will you retire to? What will you do?"

"To your first question: I have had the good luck to snaffle a small gatehouse on an estate in Hampshire. It's not much but then every house is someone's dream house. I shall retire to the dull plodding intercourse of country life where secrets are intended to be spread, like jam over toast, on the rumor mill. The local farmers will touch their hats and call me squire. I'll he so vague about the career I am retiring from they will assume I want them to assume I was some sort of spook, which will lead them to conclude I wasn't. To your second question: I have bought half a gun at a local club. Weather permitting, I shall shoot at anything that beats the air with its wings. With luck I may occasionally pot something. Between shoots I shall come out of the closet. I am a latent heterosexual, Harv. I shall serve myself, and lavishly, instead of the Crown. With any luck I shall prove my dentist right.

A scrawny teenage boy pitched a stick downhill and called, "Go fetch, Mozart." A drooling sheepdog watched it land, then lazily turned an expressionless gaze on his young master, who trotted off to retrieve the stick and try again.

"Old dogs are slow to pick up new tricks," the Sorcerer remarked.

"Heart of the problem," Elihu agreed grumpily.

Torriti badly needed a midday ration of booze. He scratched at a nostril and bit the bullet. "I have reason to believe there may be a Soviet mole in your Six."

"In MI6? Good lord!"

Keeping his account as sketchy as possible, the Sorcerer walked Elihu through the aborted defection: there had been a KGB lieutenant colonel who wanted to come across in Berlin; to establish his bona fides and convince the Americans to take him, he told the Sorcerer he could give them serials that would lead to a Soviet mole in MI6; the night of the exfiltration the Russian had been seen strapped to a stretcher on his way into a Soviet plane. No, the Russian didn't give himself away; the Sorcerer had a communications intercept—surely Elihu would understand if he was not more forthcoming—indicating that the Russian had been betrayed.

Elihu, an old hand when it came to defections, asked all the right questions and Torriti tried to make it sound as if he were answering them: no, the Brits had been deliberately left off the distribution list of the cipher traffic concerning the defection; no, even the Brits in Berlin who had their ear to the ground wouldn't have ticked to it; no, the aborted defection didn't smell like a KGB disinformation op to sow dissension between the American and British cousins.

"Assuming your Russian chap was betrayed," Elihu asked thoughtfully, how can you be absolutely certain the villain of the piece isn't in the American end of the pipeline?"

"The Company flutters its people, Elihu. You Brits just make sure they're sporting the right school tie."

"Your polygraph is about as accurate as the Chinese rice test. Remember that one? If the Mandarins thought someone was fibbing they'd stuff his mouth with rice. Rice stayed dry, meant the bugger was a liar. Oh Jesus, you really do think it was a Brit. Achilles once allowed as how he felt like an eagle which'd been struck by an arrow fledged with its own feathers." Elihu blushed apologetically. "I read what was left of the ancient poets at Oxford when I was a virgin. That's why they recruited me into MI5..."

"Because you were a virgin?"

"Because I could read Greek."

"I'm missing something."

"Don't you see, Harv? The ex-Oxford don who ran MI5 at the time reckoned anyone able to make heads or tails of a dead language ought to be able to bury the enemies of the house of Windsor." Elihu shook his head in despair. "A Brit? Shit! We could muddle through if the Soviet mole were a Yank. If you're right—oh, I hate to think of the consequences. A Brit? A yawning gap will open between your CIA and us."

"Mind the gap," Torriti snapped, imitating the warning the conductor shouted every time a train pulled into a London tube station.

"Yes, we will need to, won't we? We will be consigned to Coventry by your very clever Mr. Angleton. He won't return our calls."

"There's another reason I think the leaky faucet is British, Elihu."

"I assumed there was," Elihu muttered to himself. "The question is: Do I really want to hear it?"

The Sorcerer slumped toward the Englishman until their shoulders were rubbing. Prime the pump by telling him something he doesn't know, the Rabbi had said. "Listen up, Elihu: Your MI5 technical people have come up with an amazing breakthrough. Every radio receiver has an oscillator that beats down the signal it's tuned to into a frequency that can be more easily filtered. Your technicians discovered that this oscillator gives off sound waves that can be detected two hundred yards away; you even have equipment that can read the frequency to which the receiver is tuned. Which means you can send a laundry truck meandering through a neighborhood and home in on a Soviet agent's receiver tuned to one of Moscow Centre's burst frequencies."

Elihu blanched. "That is one of the most closely held secrets in my shop," he breathed. "We never shared it with the American cousins. How in the world did you find out about it?"

"I know it because the Russians know it. Do me a favor, turn off your tape, Elihu."

Elihu hesitated, then reached into his overcoat pocket and removed a pack of Pall Malls. He opened the lid and pressed down on one cigarette. Torriti heard a distinct click. "I fear I shall live to regret this," the Englishman announced with a sigh.

The Sorcerer said, "There is a Soviet underground telephone cable linking Moscow Centre to the KGB's Karlshorst station in the Soviet sector of Berlin. The KGB uses this so-called Ve-Che cable, named for the Russian abbreviation for 'high frequency,' vysokaya. chastota. Russian technicians invented a foolproof safety device—they filled the wires inside the cable with pressurized air. Any bug on the wire would cause the current going through it to dip and this dip could be read off a meter, tipping off the Russians to the existence of a bug. Our people invented a foolproof way to tap into the wire without causing the pressurized air to leak or the current to dip."

"You are reading Soviet traffic to and from Karlshorst!"

"We are reading all of the traffic. We are deciphering bits and pieces of it. One of the bits we managed to decipher had Moscow Centre urgently warning Karlshorst that its agents in the Western sectors of Germany could be located by a new British device that homed in on the oscillator beating down the signal bursts out of Karlshorst."

"My head is spinning, Harv. If what you say is true—"

Torriti finished the sentence for his British pal. "—the Russians have a mole inside the British intelligence establishment. I need your help, Elihu."

"I don't see what exactly—"

"Does the name Walter Krivitsky ring a gong?"

Elihu's brow crinkled up. "Ah, it does indeed. Krivitsky was the Red Army bloke who ran Soviet military intelligence in Western Europe during the thirties out of the Holland rezidentum. Defected in '36, or was it '37? Wound up killing himself in the States a few years later, though the Yanks did give us a crack at him before they lured him across the Atlantic with their fast cars and their fast ladies and their fast food. All happened before my time, of course, but I read the minutes. Krivitsky gave us a titillating serial about a young English journalist code-named PARSIFAL. The Englishman had been recruited somewhere down the line by his then wife, who was a rabid Red, and then packed off to Spain during the Spanish dustup by his Soviet handler, a legendary case officer known only by the nickname Starik."

"Were you able to run down the serial?"

"'Fraid the answer to that is negative. There were three or four dozen dozen young Englishmen from Fleet Street who covered the Spanish War at one time or another."

"Did your predecessors share the Krivitsky serial with the Americans?"

"Certainly not. There was talk of having another go at Krivitsky but that was when he bought it—a bullet in the head, if memory serves me—in a Washington hotel room in 1941. His serial died with him. How could anyone be sure Krivitsky wasn't inventing serials that would inflate his importance in our eyes? Why give our American cousins grounds to mistrust us? That was the party line at the time."

The Sorcerer scraped some wax out of an ear with a fingernail and examined it, hoping to find a clue to why good PX whiskey all of a sudden tasted tasteless. "Krivitsky wasn't inventing serials, Elihu. I worked with Jim Angleton in Italy after the war," he reminded him. "We rubbed each other the wrong way but that's another story. In those days we had an understanding with the Jews from Palestine—they were desperately trying to run guns and ammunition and people through the British blockade. We didn't get in their way, in return for which they let us debrief the Jewish refugees escaping from East Europe. One of the Jews from Palestine was a Viennese joker named Kollek. Teddy Kollek. Turned out he'd been in Vienna in the early thirties. I remember Kollek describing a wedding—it stuck in my head because the bridegroom had been Angleton's MI6 guru at Ryder Street during the war; he'd taught him chapter and verse about counterintelligence."

Elihu tossed his head back and bleated like a goat. "Kim Philby! Oh, dear, I can feel my pension slipping through my fingers already."

"Happen to know him personally, Elihu?"

"Good lord, yes. We've been trading serials on the Bolsheviks for eons, much the way children trade rugby cards. I talk with Kim two, three times a week on the phone—I've more or less become the go-between between him and my chief, Roger Hollis."

"The marriage Kollek described took place in Vienna in 1934. Philby, then a young Cambridge grad who'd come to Austria to help the socialists riot against the government, apparently got himself hitched to a Communist broad name of Litzi Friedman. Kollek had a nodding acquaintance with both the bride and the groom, which is how he knew about the wedding. Marriage didn't last long and people never attached much importance to it. Philby was only twenty-two at the time and everyone assumed he'd married the first girl who gave him a blow job. He eventually returned to England and talked himself into an assignment covering Franco s side of the war for The Times of London."

Elihu set the balls of the fingers of his right hand on his left wrist to monitor his racing pulse. "God, Harv, do you at all grasp what you're suggesting—that the head of our Section IX, the chap who until quite recently ran our counterintelligence ops against the Russians, is actually a Soviet mole!" Elihu's eyelids sagged and he seemed to go into mourning. "You simply cannot be serious."

"I've never been seriouser."

"I will need time to digest all this. Say twenty-nine months."

"Time is what's running out on us, Elihu. The Barbarians are at the gate just as surely as they were when they crossed the frozen Rhine and clobbered what passed for civilized Europe."

"That happened before my time, too," Elihu muttered.

"The Iron Curtain is our Rhine, Elihu."

"So people say. So people say."

Elihu leaned back and closed his eyes and turned his face into the sun. "'Move him into the sun—Gently, its touch awoke him once,"' he murmured. "I am a great admirer of the late Wilfred Owen," he explained. Then he fell silent, neither speaking nor moving. A couple of men Torriti tagged as homosexuals ambled up the walkway to the crest of the hill and down the other side, whispering fiercely in the way people did when they argued in public. Elihu's eyes finally came open; he had come to a decision. "I could be keel-hauled for telling you what I'm going to tell you. As they say, in for a penny, in for a pound. Years before Kim Philby became involved in Soviet-targeted counterintelligence ops he was an underling in Section V, which was tracking German ops on his old London Times stamping ground, the Iberian peninsular. MI6 had and has a very secret Central Registry with source books containing the records of British agents world-wide. The source books are organized geographically. On a great number of occasions Philby signed out the Iberian book, which was consistent with his area of expertise. One day not long ago I went down to Central Registry to take a look at the source book on the Soviet Union, which was consistent with my area of expertise. While the clerk went off to fetch it I leafed through the logbook—I was curious to see who had been exploring that sinkhole before me. I was quite startled to discover that Philby had signed out the source book on the Soviet Union long before he became chief of our Soviet Division. He was supposed to be chivvying Germans in Tipsin, not reading up on British agents in Russia."

"Who beside me knows about your source book saga, Elihu?"

'I've actually only told it to one other living soul," Elihu replied.

"Let me climb out on a limb—Ezra Ben Ezra, better known as the Rabbi."

Elihu was genuinely surprised. "How'd you guess?"

"The Rabbi once told me there was an international Jewish conspiracy and I believed him." Torriti shook with quiet laughter. "Now I understand why Ben Ezra sent me to see you. Tell me something—why didn't you take your suspicions to Roger Hollis?"

The suggestion appalled Elihu. "Because I am not yet stark raving, that's why. And what does it all add up to, Harv? A KGB defector who tries to whip up some excitement by claiming he can finger a Soviet mole in MI6, a marriage in Austria, a Russian General who dropped dark hints about a British journalist in Spain, some easily explainable Central Registry logs—Philby could have been gearing up for the Cold War before anyone else felt the temperature drop. Hardly enough evidence to accuse MI6's next ataman of being a Soviet spy! Dear me, I hate to think what would happen to the poor prole who dropped that spanner into the works. Forget about being put out to pasture, he'd be disemboweled, Harv. Oh, dear me, his entrails would be ground up and fed to the hogs, his carcass would be left to rot in some muddy ha-ha."

"Pure and simple truth carries weight, Elihu."

Elihu retrieved his bowler from the bench and fitted it squarely onto his nearly hairless head. "Oscar Wilde said that truth is rarely pure and never simple and I am inclined to take his point." He gazed toward London in the hazy distance. "I was born and raised in Hampshire, in a village called Palestine—had the damnedest time convincing the mandarins not to post me to the Middle East because they assumed I had an affinity for the miserable place." Elihu pursed his lips and shook his head. "Yes. Well. What you could do is feed out a series of barium meals. We did it once or twice during the war."

"Barium meals! That's something I haven't thought of."

"Yes, indeed. Tricky business. Can't feed out junk, mind you—the Russian mole will recognize it as junk and won't be bothered to pass it on. Got to be top-grade stuff. Takes a bit of nerve, it does, giving away secrets in order to learn a secret." Climbing to his feet, Elihu removed a slip of paper from his fob pocket and handed it to the Sorcerer. "I take supper weekdays at the Lion and Last in Kentish Town. Here's the phone number. Be a good fellow, don't call me at the office again. Ah, yes, and if anybody should inquire, this meeting never took place. Do I have that right, Harv?"

Torriti, lost in the myriad tangle of barium meals, nodded absently. "Nobody's going to hear any different from me, Elihu."

"Ta-ta."

"Ta-ta to you."

6

WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1951

FIFTEEN EARNEST YOUNG SECTION HEADS HAD SQUEEZED INTO BILL Colby's office for the semi-weekly coffee-and-doughnut klatsch on the stay-behind networks being set up across Scandinavia. "The infrastructure in Norway is ninety per cent in place," reported a young woman with bleached blonde hair and painted fingernails. "Within the next several weeks we expect to cache radio equipment in a dozen pre-selected locations, which will give the leaders of our clandestine cells the capability of communicating with NATO and their governments-in-exile when the Russians overrun the country."

Colby corrected her with a soft chuckle. "If the Russians overrun the country, Margaret. If." He turned to the others, who were sprawled on radiators and green four-drawer government-issue filing cabinets or, like Leo Kritzky, leaning against one of the pitted partitions that separated Colby's office from the warren of cubbyholes around it. "Let me break in here to underscore two critical points," Colby said. "First, even where the local government is cooperating in setting up stay-behind cells, which is the case in most Scandinavian countries, we want to create our own independent assets. The reason for this is simple: No one can be sure that some governments won't accept Soviet occupation under pressure; no one can be sure that elements in those governments won't collaborate with that occupation and betray the stay-behind network. Secondly, I can't stress too much the matter of security. If word of the stay-behind networks leaks, the Russians could wipe out the cells if they overrun the country. Perhaps even more important, the public gets wind of the existence of a stay-behind network, it would undermine morale, inasmuch as it would indicate that the CIA doesn't have "much faith in NATO's chances of stopping a full-fledged Soviet invasion."

"But we don't have much faith," Margaret quipped.

"Agreed," Colby said. "But we don't have to advertise the fact." Colby in shirtsleeves and suspenders, swiveled his wooden chair toward Kritzky. "How are you doing with your choke points, Leo?"

Leo's particular assignment when he turned up for duty in Colby's shop on the Reflecting Pool had been to identify vulnerable geographic choke points—key bridges, rail lines, locomotive repair facilities, canal locks, hub terminals—across Scandinavia, assign them to individual stay-behind cells and then squirrel away enough explosives in each area so the cells could destroy the choke points in the event of war. "If the balloon goes up," Leo was saying, "my team reckons that with what we already have on the ground, we could bring half the rail and river traffic in Scandinavia to a dead stop."

"Half is ten percent better than I expected and half as good as we need to be," Colby commented from behind his desk. "Keep at it, Leo." He addressed everyone in the room. "It's not an easy matter to prepare for war during what appears to be peacetime. There is a general tendency to feel you have all the time in the world. We don't. General MacArthur is privately trying to convince the Joint Chiefs to let him bomb targets in China. The final decision, of course, will be Truman's. But it doesn't take much imagination to see the Korean War escalating into World War III if we send our planes north of the Yalu and bomb China. We're on track with our stay-behind nets but don't ease up. Okay, gentlemen and ladies, that's it for today."

"Want to put some salve on the whip marks on your back, Leo?" his "cellmate" inquired when Leo returned to his corner cubbyhole. Maud was a heavyset, middle-aged woman who chain-smoked small Schimelpenick cigars. Four large filing cabinets and the drawers of her desk were overflowing with documents "liberated" from the Abwehr in 1945. New piles were brought in almost daily. Maud, a historian by training who had served as an OSS researcher during the war, pored over the documents looking for the telltale traces of Soviet intelligence operations in the areas that had been occupied by German troops. She was hoping to discover if any of the famous Soviet spy rings had had agents in England or France during the war— agents who might still be loyal to the Kremlin and spying for Russia.

Leo settled down behind his second hand wooden desk and stared for a long moment at the ceiling, which was streaked with stains from the rain and snow that had seeped through the roof. "No matter how much we give Colby, he wants more," he griped.

"Which is why he is the leader and you are a follower," Maud observed dryly.

"Which is why," Leo agreed.

"Courier service left this for you," Maud said. She tossed a sealed letter into his desk and, lighting a fresh Schimelpenick, went back to her Abwehr documents.

Leo ripped open the envelope and extracted a tissue-thin letter, which turned out to be from Jack.

"Leo, you old fart,"

it began.

"Thanks for the note, which arrived in yesterday's overnight pouch. I'm rushing to get this into tonight's overnight so excuse the penmanship or lack of same. Your work in Washington sounds tedious but important. Regarding Colby, the word in Germany is that he's headed for big things, so hang on to his coattails, old buddy. There's not much I can tell about Berlin Base because (as we say in the trade) you don't need to know. Things are pretty feverish here. You see a lot of people running around like chickens without heads. Remember the OSS lawyer-type we met at the Cloud Club—'Ebby' Ebbitt? He got the old heave-ho for saying out loud what a lot of people (though not me) were thinking, which is that the honcho of Berlin Base drinks too much. Ebby was palmed off on Frankfurt Station and I haven't heard hide nor hair since. The Sorcerer, meanwhile, is going up the wall over a defection that turned sour—he is sure the opposition was tipped off. Question is: by whom? As for yours truly, I've been given my first agent to run. Luck of the draw, she's what you'd call a raving beauty. Enormous sad eyes and long legs that simply don't end. My honcho wants me to seduce her so he can tune in on the pillow talk. I am more than willing to make this sacrifice for my country but I can't seem to get to first base with her. Which is a new experience for me. Win some, lose some. Keep in touch. Hopefully our paths will cross when I get home leave."

There was a postscript scrawled down one side of the letter.

"Came across an old comrade (the term, as you'll see, is appropriate) in a Berlin bar the other night. Remember Vanka Borisov? He was the bruiser rowing stroke for the Russians at the European championships in Munich in 48. You, me, and Vanka spent a night bar-hopping, we picked up those Australian sisters—peaceniks who told us with tears in their eyes that our friendship was beautiful because it was sabotaging the Cold War. After you went back to the hotel the sisters took turns screwing us as their contribution to world peace. I had a broken rib so the girls had to do everything. Imagine a vast peace movement made up of gorgeous nymphets fucking to stop the Cold War! Vanka, who's put on weight, knew about my working for the Pickle Factory, which makes him KGB. Looked around the bar but there are no Australian girls in sight!"

Leo clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back into them. He almost wished he had landed an assignment in someplace like Berlin. Washington seemed tame by comparison. Still, this was the eye of the storm — he had been given to understand that this was where he could contribute the most. His gaze fell on the framed copy of National Security Council Memorandum 68, which had been drafted by Paul Nitze and called for a national crusade against global Communism. Leo wondered if the knights starting on the long trek to the Holy Land nine centuries earlier had been spurred on by equivalent papal memoranda. His gaze drifted to the government executive calendar tacked to the wall. Like all Fridays, March 30 was circled in red to remind him that it was payday; it was also circled in blue to remind him to take his dog to the vet when he got off from work for the day.

With the ancient arthritic dog hobbling alongside, Leo pushed through the door into the waiting room of the Maryland Veterinary Hospital and took a seat. The dog, mostly but not entirely German Shepherd, slumped with a thud onto the linoleum. Reaching down, Leo stroked his head.

"So what's wrong with him?"

He glanced across the room. A young woman, slightly overweight, on the short side with short curly hair that fell in bangs over a high forehead, was watching him. Her eyelids were pink and swollen from crying. She was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater, faded orange overalls with a bib top and tennis shoes. A tan-and-white Siamese cat stained with dried blood lay limply across her knees.

"He's starting to lead a dog's life, which is a new experience for him," Leo said morosely. "I've decided to put him out of his misery."

"Oh," the young woman said, "you must be very sad. How long have you had him?"

Leo looked down at the dog. "Sometimes it seems as if he's been with me forever."

The woman absently laced her fingers through the fur on the cat's neck. "I know what you mean."

There was an awkward silence. Leo nodded toward the cat on her knees. "What's its name?"

"Her full name is Once in a Blue Moon. Her friends call her Blue Moon for short. I'm her best friend."

"What happened to Once in a Blue Moon?"

The story spilled out; she seemed eager to tell it, almost as if the telling would dull the pain. "Blue Moon was raised on my Dad's farm in the Maryland countryside. When I got a job in Washington and moved to Georgetown last year, I took her with me. Big error. She hated being cooped up—she would gaze out the window hours on end. In the summer she used to climb out the open window and sit on a sill watching the birds fly and I knew she wanted to fly. I sleep with my bedroom window open even in winter—I could have sworn I'd closed it when I left for work this morning but I guess I must have forgotten." The young woman couldn't speak for a moment. Then, her voice grown husky, she said, "Blue Moon forgot she was a cat and decided to fly like a bird but she didn't know how, did she? You hear all these stories about cats jumping off tall buildings and landing unharmed on their feet. But she jumped from the fourth floor and landed on her back. She seems to be paralyzed. I'm going to have them give her an injection—"

The vets took Leo first. When he came back to the waiting room ten minutes later carrying the still-warm corpse of his dog in a supermarket paper bag, the young woman was gone. He sat down and waited for her. After a while she pushed through the door holding a paper bag of her own. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Leo stood up.

She looked at the paper bag in her hands. "Blue Moon is still warm," she whispered.

Leo nodded. "Do you have a car?" he asked suddenly.

She said she did.

"What are you going to do with Once in a Blue Moon?"

"I was planning to drive out to Daddy's farm—"

"Look, what if we were to stop by that big hardware store on the mall and buy a shovel, and then drive into the country and find a hill with a great view and bury the two of them together?" Leo shifted his weight from foot to foot in embarrassment. "Maybe it's a crazy idea. I mean, you don't even know me—"

"What sign are you?"

"I was born the day of the great stock market crash, October twenty ninth, 1929. My father used to joke that my birth brought on the crash. I could never work out how my being born could affect the stock market but until I was nine or ten I actually believed him."

October twenty-ninth—that makes you a Scorpio. I'm a Gemini." The young woman regarded Leo through her tears. "Burying them together strikes me as a fine idea," she decided. Clutching her paper bag under her left arm, she stepped forward and offered her hand. "I'm Adelle Swett."

Somewhat clumsily, Leo clasped it. "Leo. Leo Kritzky."

'I am glad to make your acquaintance, Leo Kritzky."

He nodded. "Likewise."

She smiled through her tears because he had not let go of her hand. The smile lingered in her normally solemn eyes after it had faded from her lips. He smiled back at her.

Leo and Adelle had what the screen magazines referred to as a whirlwind romance. After they buried his dog and her cat on a hill in Maryland he took her to a roadside tavern he knew near Annapolis. Dinner—fried clams and shrimps fresh from the Maryland shore—was served on a table covered with the front page of the Baltimore Sun bearing a banner headline announcing that the Rosenbergs had been convicted of espionage. Leo sprinted up a narrow flight of steps to the smoke-filled bar and came back with two giant mugs of light tap beer. For a time he and Adelle circled each other warily, talking about the Rosenberg trial, talking about books they'd read recently: James Jones's From Here to Eternity (which he liked), Truman Capote's The Grass Harp (which she liked), J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (which they both loved because they shared the hero's loathing of phonies). After that first date they fell easily into the habit of talking on the phone almost daily. Adelle had earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and had found work as a legislative assistant to a first term senator, a Texas Democrat named Lyndon Johnson who was considered a comer in Democratic circles. Johnson spent hours each day on the phone working the Washington rumor mill, so Adelle always had a lot of hot political gossip to pass on. Leo, for his part, claimed to be a junior researcher at the State Department but when she tried to pin him down about what exactly he researched, he remained vague, which convinced Adelle, wise in the ways of Washington, that he was engaged in some sort of secret work.

Two weeks after they met Leo took Adelle to see a new film called The African Queen, starring Hepburn and Bogart, and afterward, to a steakhouse in Virginia. Over medium-rare inch-thick sirloins Adelle inquired with great formality whether Leo's intentions were honorable. He asked her to define the word. She flushed but her eyes never strayed from his. She told him she was a virgin and only planned to sleep with the man she would marry. Leo promptly proposed to her. Adelle promised to think about it seriously. When dessert came she reached across the table and ran her fingers over the back of his wrist. She said she had given the matter a great deal of thought and had decided to accept.

"Long about now you should be inviting me home with you," she announced.

Leo allowed as how he was kind of frightened. She asked if he was a virgin and when he said no, he had lived for a time with a girl some years older than he was, she asked: Then where's the problem? Leo said he was in love with her and didn't want it to go wrong in bed. She raised a wine glass and roasted him across the table. Nothing can go wrong, she whispered.

And nothing did.

There was still one height to scale: her Daddy, who turned out to be none other than Philip Swett, a self-made St. Paul wheeler-dealer who had moved to Chicago and earned a fortune in commodity futures. More recently he had become a heavy hitter in the Democratic Party and a crony of Harry Truman's, breakfasting with the President twice a week, sometimes striding alongside him on his brisk morning constitutionals. To drive home that the young man courting Adelle was out of his depth, Swett invited Leo to one of his notorious Saturday night Georgetown suppers. The guests included the Alsop brothers, the Bohlens (just back from Moscow), the Nitzes, Phil and Kay Graham, Randolph Churchill and Malcolm Muggeridge (over from London for the weekend), along with several senior people Leo recognized from the corridors of the Company—the Wiz was there with his wife, as well as the DD/0, Allen Dulles, who most Washington pundits figured would wind up running the CIA one day soon. Leo found himself seated below the salt, a table-length away from Adelle, who kept casting furtive looks in his direction to see how he was faring. Dulles, sitting next to her, wowed the guests with one yarn after another. Phil Graham asked Dulles if his relationship with Truman had improved any.

"Not so you'd notice," Dulles said. "He's never forgiven me for siding with Dewey in forty-eight. He likes to pull my leg whenever he can. I stood in for Bedell Smith at the regular intelligence meeting this week. As I was leaving, Truman called me over and said he wanted the CIA to provide a wall map for the Oval Office with pins stuck in it showing the location of our secret agents around the world. I started to sputter about how we couldn't do anything like that because not everyone who came into the Oval Office had the appropriate security clearance." Dulles smiled at his own story. "At which point Truman burst out laughing and I realized he was having fun at my expense."

After dinner the guests retired to the spacious living room, pushed back the furniture and began dancing to Big Band records blasting from the phonograph. Leo was trying to catch Adelle's eye when Swett crooked a forefinger at both of them.

"Join me in the study," he ordered Leo. He waved for Adelle to follow them.

Fearing the worst, Leo trailed after him up the carpeted stairs to a paneled room with a log fire burning in the fireplace. Adelle slipped in and closed the door. Opening a mahogany humidor, Swett motioned Leo into a leather-upholstered chair and offered him a very phallic-looking Havana cigar.

"Don't smoke," Leo said, feeling as if he were admitting to an unforgivable lapse of character. Adelle settled onto the arm of his chair. Together they confronted her father.

"By golly, you don't know what you're missing," Swett said. Half sitting on the edge of a table, he snipped off the tip with a silver scissor, struck a match with his thumbnail and held the flame to the end of the cigar. Great clouds of dusky smoke billowed from his mouth. Swett's raspy sentences seemed to emerge from the smoke. "Grab the bull by the horns, that's what I say. Adelle tells me she's been seeing a lot of you." Leo nodded carefully. "What do you do? For income, I mean."

"Daddy, you've seen too many of those Hollywood movies."

"I work for the government," Leo replied.

Swett snickered. "When a man round here says something fuzzy like he works for the government, that means he's Pickle Factory. You with Allen Dulles and the Wiz over at Operations?"

Leo dug in his heels. "I work for the State Department, Mr. Swett." He named an office, a superior, an area of expertise. His offer to supply a telephone number was backhanded away.

Swett sucked on his cigar. "What's your salary, son?"

"Daddy, you promised me you wouldn't browbeat him."

"Where I come from man's got the right to ask a fellow who's courting his daughter what his prospects are." He focused on Leo. "How much?"

Leo sensed that more was riding on the manner in which he answered Swett's question than the answer itself. Adelle was impulsive but he doubted she would marry someone against her father's will. He needed to be smart; to grab the bull by the horns, as Swett put it. "How much do you earn a year, sir?"

Adelle held her breath. Her father took several staccato puffs on his cigar and scrutinized Leo through the smoke. "Roughly one point four million, give or take a couple of dozen thousand. That's after taxes."

"I make six thousand four hundred dollars, sir. That's before taxes."

A weighty silence filled the room. "Tarnation, I'm not one to pussyfoot around, son. It's not the money that worries me—when I got hitched I was making forty a week. Here's where I stand: I'm dead blast set against mixed marriages. Mind you, I got nothing against Jewish people but I figure Jews should marry Jews and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants need to go and marry white Anglo-Saxon Protestants."

"When you get right down to it, all marriages are mixed," Leo said. "One male, one female."

Adelle rested a hand on his shoulder. "They sure are. Daddy. Look at you and mom. More mixed, you'd melt."

"Sir," Leo said, leaning forward, "I'm in love with your daughter. I wasn't aware that we were asking your permission to marry." He reached over and laced his fingers through Adelle's. "We're informing you. We'd both prefer to have your blessing, me as much as Adelle. If not"—he tightened his grip on Adelle—"not."

Swett eyed Leo with grudging respect. "I'll give you this much, young fellah—you have better taste than my little gal here."

"Oh, Daddy!" cried Adelle, "I knew you'd like him." And she bounded across the room into her father's arms.

The wedding was performed by a female justice of the peace in Annapolis on the young couple's first anniversary, which was to say one month to the day after they had met in the waiting room of the veterinary hospital. Adelle had squirmed and wriggled into one of her kid sister s lace Mainbochers for the occasion. Adelle's sister, Sydney, was the maid of honor. Bill Colby stood up for Leo. Adelle's employer, Lyndon Johnson, gave away the bride when Philip Swett, who had been dispatched by Truman to mend political fences in Texas, couldn't make it back in time for the ceremony. Adelle's mother broke into tears when the justice of the peace pronounced the couple man and wife until death did them part. Colby broke open a bottle of New York State Champagne. As Leo was kissing his mother-in-law goodbye she slipped an envelope into the pocket of his spanking new suit jacket. In it was a check for $5,000 and a note that said, "Live happily ever after or I'll break your neck." It was signed: "P. Swett."

The couple had a one-night honeymoon at an inn with a majestic view of the sun rising over Chesapeake Bay. The next morning Leo reported back to work; there were choke points in Norway waiting to be classified according to their vulnerability and assigned to stay behind cells. Adelle had been given three days off by Lyndon Johnson. She used the time to shuttle back and forth, in her two-door Plymouth, between her apartment in Georgetown and the top floor of the house that Leo had rented on Bradley Lane, behind the Chevy Chase Club in Maryland. The last thing she brought over was the wedding present from her boss, the Senator. It was a baby kitten with a gnarled snout. Adelle had instantly dubbed her new pet Sour Pickles.

In short order the newlyweds settled into a rut of routines. Mornings, Leo caught a lift to the Campus with Dick Helms, a Company colleague who lived down Bradley Lane. Helms, another OSS alumnus who was working in clandestine operations under the Wiz, always took a roundabout route to the Reflecting Pool, crossing Connecticut Avenue and going up the Brookville Road in order to mask his destination. On the drives into town they talked shop. Leo filled Helms in on Colby's stay behind operation. Helms told him about a chief of station in Iran who was "ringing the gong"—warning that an Arab radical named Mohammed Mossadegh was likely to take over as premier in the next few weeks; Mossadegh, the head of the extremist National Front, was threatening to nationalize the British owned oil industry. If that happened. Helms said, the Company would have to explore ways of pulling the rug out from under him.

One night every two weeks Leo pulled the graveyard shift, reporting to work on the Reflecting Pool at four in the morning as the Clandestine Service's representative to the team producing the President's Daily Brief. For the next three hours he and the others sifted through the overnight cables from bases overseas and culled the items that ought to be brought to Mr. Truman's attention. The Book, as it was called—an eight or ten-page letter size briefing document arranged in a newspaper column format and marked "For the President's Eyes Only"—was delivered by the senior member of the Daily Brief committee to the White House every morning in time for Mr. Truman to read it over his oatmeal breakfast.

One Sunday morning not long after Leo's marriage the officer who was supposed to deliver the Book got a last minute phone call from his wife. Labor pains had begun and she was on her way to the hospital. The officer asked Leo to stand in for him and raced off to witness the birth of his first child. Leo's Company credentials were checked at the south gate of the White House. A secret service officer led him through the First Family's entrance under the South Portico and took him up in a private elevator to the President's living quarters on the second floor. Leo recognized the only person in sight from photographs he'd seen in Life magazine; it was Mr. Truman's daughter, Margaret, just back from a concert she'd given in New York. Of course she'd be glad to take the book in to the President, she said. Leo settled onto a couch in the corridor to wait. Soon the door to what turned out to be the President's private dining room opened a crack and a short man wearing a double-breasted suit and a dapper bow tie gestured for him to come on in. Quite startled to be in the presence of the President himself Leo followed Truman into the room. To his surprise he saw Philip Swett sitting across from Margaret Truman at the breakfast table.

"So you work for the Pickle Factory after all," Swett growled, his forehead wrinkling in amusement.

"You two gents know each other?" Mr. Truman inquired, a distinctly Midwestern twang to his nasal voice.

"He's the fellow who upped and married my girl, which I suppose makes him my son-in-law," Swett told the President. "First time we talked he had the gumption to ask me how much I earned a year."

Mr. Truman looked at Leo. "I admire a man with mettle." There was a playful twinkle in the President's eye. "What did Phil reply?"

"I'm afraid I don't remember, sir."

"Good for you!" Mr. Truman said. "I am a great admirer of discretion, too."

The President took out a fountain pen, uncapped it and started to underline an item in the briefing book. "When you get back tell Wisner I want a personal briefing on this Mossadegh fellow." Truman scribbled cryptic questions in the margin as he talked. "Want to know where he comes from. What the heck do these Islam fundamentalists want anyhow? What kind of support does he have in the country? What kind of contingency plans are you fellows working up if he takes over and tries to nationalize British Petroleum?"

The President closed the cover and handed the briefing book to Leo. "Adelle's a fine woman," Mr. Truman said. "Know her personally. You're a lucky young man."

From the table, Swett observed in a not unkindly tone, "Lucky is what he sure as shooting is."

7

WASHINGTON, DC, THURSDAY, APRIL 5, 1951

IN THE SMALL PITCHED-CEILING ATTIC STUDIO ABOVE KAHN'S WINE AND Beverage on M Street at the Washington side of Key Bridge, Eugene Dodgson, the young American recently returned from backpacking in Scandinavia, clipped one end of the shortwave antenna to a water pipe. Unreeling the wire across the room, he attached the other end to a screw in the back of what looked like an ordinary Motorola kitchen radio. Pulling up a wooden stool, he turned on the radio and simultaneously depressed the first and third buttons—one ostensibly controlled the tone, the other tuned the radio to a pre-set station—transforming the Motorola into a sophisticated short wave receiver. Checking the Elgin on his wrist, Eugene tuned the radio dial to Moscow's 11 P.M. frequency and waited, hunched over the set, a pencil poised in his fingers, to see if the station would broadcast his personal code phrase during the English language cultural quiz program. The woman emcee posed the question. "In what well-known book would you find the lines: 'And the moral of that is—The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours?'" The literature student from Moscow University thought a moment and then said, "Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". Eugene's heart literally started pounding in his chest. Suddenly he felt connected to the Motherland; he felt as if he were on one end of a long umbilical cord that reached from the Motorola across continents and seas to remind him that he was not alone. He jotted down the winning lottery number that was repeated twice at the end of the program. A feeling of elation swept through Eugene—he leapt from the stool and stood with his back flat against a wall that smelled of fresh paint, breathing as if he'd just run the hundred-meter dash. He held in his hand the first message from Starik!

Laughing out loud, shaking his head in awe—all these codes, all these frequencies actually worked!—Eugene tuned the radio to a popular local AM music station, then carefully coiled the antenna and stashed it in the cavity under the floorboard in the closet. He retrieved the "lucky" ten-dollar bill (with "For Eugene, from his dad, on his eighth birthday" scrawled across it in ink) from his billfold and subtracted the serial number on it from the lottery number in the Moscow broadcast.

What he was left with was the ten-digit Washington telephone number of his cutout to the rezident. When he dialed the number from a pay phone at the stroke of midnight, the cutout, a woman who spoke with a thick Eastern European accent, would give him the home phone number of the Soviet agent he had come to America to contact and conduct: the high-level mole code-named PARSIFAL.

The Atlantic crossing—eleven days from Kristiansand to Halifax on a tramp steamer bucking the Brobdingnagian swells of the North Atlantic—had not been out of the ordinary, or so the ship's bearded captain had explained the single time his young American passenger managed to join the officers for supper in the wardroom. The tablecloth had been doused with water to keep the dishes from sliding with each roll and pitch of the ship's rusted hull; Eugene Dodgson's plate hadn't moved but on one wild pitch the boiled beef and noodles on it had come cascading down into his lap, much to the amusement of the ship's officers. When Eugene finally staggered down the gangway in Halifax, it took several hours before the cement under the soles of his hiking boots ceased to heave and recede like the sea under the vessel.

Strapping on his backpack, Eugene had hitched rides with truckers from Halifax to Caribou, Maine in four days. At the frontier a Canadian officer had stuck his head into the cab and had asked him where he was from.

"Brooklyn," Eugene had replied with a broad smile.

"Think the Giants will take the pennant this year?" the Canadian had asked, testing Eugene's English as well as his claim to be from Brooklyn.

"You are not being serious," Eugene had burst out. "Look at the Dodger lineup—Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese cover the infield like a blanket, Roy Campanella has the MVP in his sights, Don Newcombe's fast ball is sizzling, the way Carl Furillo is going he's bound to break .330. The pennant belongs to Brooklyn, the Series, too."

From Caribou, Eugene had caught a Greyhound bus to Boston and another to New York. He had taken a room at the Saint George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights. From a nearby phone booth he had dialed the number Starik had obliged him to memorize before he left Moscow. The disgruntled voice of someone speaking English with an accent came on the line. "Can I speak to Mr. Goodpaster?" asked Eugene.

"What number you want?"

Eugene read off the number he was calling from. "You got a wrong number." The line went dead.

Seven minutes later, the time it took for the man on the other end to reach a pay phone, the telephone rang in Eugene's booth. He snatched it off the hook and said, "If you dine with the devil use a long spoon."

"I was told to expect you three days ago," the man complained. "What took you so long?"

"The crossing took eleven days instead of nine. I lost another day hitchhiking down."

"Ever hear of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden?"

"Sure I have."

"I'll be sitting on the fourth bench down from the main entrance off Eastern Parkway at ten tomorrow morning feeding the pigeons. I will have a Leica around my neck and a package wrapped in red-and-gold Christmas paper on the bench next to me."

"Ten tomorrow," Eugene confirmed, and he severed the connection. Eugene instantly recognized the thin, balding, hawk-faced man, a Leica dangling from a strap around his neck, from the photograph Starik had shown him; Colonel Rudolf Ivanovich Abel had entered the United States the previous year and was living under deep cover somewhere in Brooklyn. The colonel, tearing slices of bread and scattering the crumbs to the pigeons milling at his feet, didn't look up when Eugene slumped onto the park bench next to him. The Christmas-wrapped package—containing the Motorola, an antenna and a flashlight that worked despite a hollowed-out battery concealing a microdot reader; the passport, drivers license and other documents for Legend B in case Eugene needed to adopt a new identity; a hollowed-out silver dollar with a microfilm positive transparency filled with Eugene's personal identification codes, one-time cipher pads and phone numbers in Washington and New York to call in an emergency; along with an envelope containing $20,000 in small denomination bills—was on the bench between them.

Eugene started to repeat the code phrase: "If you dine with the devil— but Abel, raising his eyes, cut him off.

"I recognize you from your passport photograph." A forlorn smile appeared on his unshaven face. "I am Rudolf Abel," he announced.

"Starik sends you warm comradely greetings," Eugene said.

"No one can overhear us but the pigeons," Abel said. "How I hate the little bastards. Do me a favor, talk Russian."

Eugene repeated his message in Russian. The Soviet espionage officer was eager for news of the homeland. What had the weather been like in Moscow when Eugene left? Were there more automobiles on the streets these days? What motion picture films had Eugene seen recently? What books had he read? Was there any truth to American propaganda about shortages of consumer goods in the state-owned stores? About bread riots in Krasnoyarsk? About the arrest of Yiddish poets and actors who had been conspiring against Comrade Stalin?

Twenty minutes later Eugene got up and offered his hand. Colonel Abel seemed loath to see him leave. "The worst part is the loneliness," he told Eugene. "That and the prospect that the Motherland will attack America and kill me with one of its A-bombs."

Eugene spent ten days at the Saint George Hotel, roaming through Crown Heights to familiarize himself with the neighborhood, drinking egg creams in the candy store he was supposed to have hung out in, visiting the laundromat and the Chinese restaurant he was supposed to have frequented. One drizzly afternoon he took the F train out to Coney Island and rode the great Ferris wheel, another time he caught the IRT into Manhattan and wandered around Times Square. He purchased two valises at a discount store on Broadway and filled them with used clothing— a sports jacket and trousers, a pair of loafers, four shirts, a tie, a leather jacket and a raincoat—from Gentleman's Resale on Madison Avenue. On April Fools Day, Starik's newest agent in America packed his valises and sat down on one of them to bring him luck for the trip ahead. Then he settled his bill at the Saint George in cash, took the subway to Grand Central and boarded a train bound for Washington and his new life as a Soviet illegal. From Washington's Union Station, Eugene made his way by taxi to the Washington end of Key Bridge and arrived at the liquor store just as Max Kahn was locking up for the night.

A short stocky man in his early fifties with a mane of unruly white hair, Kahn looked startled when he heard someone rapping his knuckles on the glass of the front door. He waved an open palm and called, "Sorry but I'm already—" Then his expression changed to one of pure delight as he caught sight of the two valises. He strode across the store and unlocked the door, and wrapped Eugene in a bear hug. "I thought you would be here days ago," he said in a hoarse whisper. "Come on in, comrade. The upstairs studio is at your disposal—I repainted it last week so it would be ready for your arrival." Plucking one of Eugene's valises off the floor, he led the way up the narrow staircase at the back of the store.

When he talked about himself, which was infrequently, Kahn liked to say that his life had been transformed the evening he wandered into a Jewish intellectual discussion group on upper Broadway in the early 1920s. At the time enrolled under his father's family name, Cohen, he had been taking accounting courses in Columbia University night school. The Marxist critique of the capitalist system had opened his eyes to a world he had only dimly perceived before. With a degree from Columbia in his pocket, he had become a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party and had joined the staff of the Party's newspaper, The Daily Worker, selling subscriptions and setting type there until the German attack on the USSR in June, 1941. At that point he had "dropped out": Acting under orders from a Soviet diplomat, he had ceased all Party activity, broken off all Party contacts, changed his name to Kahn and relocated to Washington. Using funds supplied by his conducting officer, he had bought out an existing liquor franchise and had changed its name to Kahn's Wine and Beverage. "Several of us were selected to go underground," he told Eugene over a spaghetti and beer supper the night he turned up at Kahn's store. "We didn't carry Party cards but we were under Party discipline—we were good soldiers, we obeyed orders. My control pointed me in a given direction and I marched out, no questions asked, to do battle for the motherland of world socialism. I'm still fighting the good fight," he added proudly.

Kahn had been told only that he would be sheltering a young Communist Party comrade from New York who was being harassed by FBI. The visitor would be taking night courses at Georgetown University; days he would be available to deliver liquor in Kahn's beat-up Studebaker station wagon in exchange for the use of the studio over the store.

"Can you give me a ballpark figure how long he'll be staying?" Kahn had asked his conducting officer when they met in a men's room at Washington's Smithsonian Institution.

"He will be living in the apartment until he is told to stop living in the apartment," the Russian had answered matter-of-factly. "I understand," Kahn had replied. And he did.

"I know you are under Party discipline," Kahn was saying now as he carefully poured what was left of the beer into Eugene s mug. "I know there are things you can't talk about." He lowered his voice. "This business with the Rosenbergs—it makes me sick to my stomach." When Eugene looked blank , he added "Didn't you catch the news bulletins—they were sentenced today. To the electric chair, for God's sake! I knew the Rosenbergs in the late thirties—I used to run across them at Party meetings before I dropped out. I can tell you that Ethel was a complete innocent. Julius was the Marxist. I bumped into him once in the New York Public Library after the war. He told me he'd dropped out in forty-three. He was being controlled by a Russian case officer working out of the Soviet Consulate in New York. Later I heard on the grapevine that they used Julius as a clearing house for messages. He was like one of us—a soldier in the army of liberation of America. He would receive envelopes and pass them on, sure, though I doubt he knew what was in them. Ethel cooked and cleaned house and took care of the kids and darned socks while the men talked politics. If she grasped half of what she heard, I'd be surprised. Sentenced to death! In the electric chair. What is this world coming to?"

"Do you think they'll actually carry out the sentences?" Eugene asked.

Kahn reached back under his starched collar to scratch between his shoulder blades. "The anti-Soviet hysteria in the country has gotten out of hand. The Rosenbergs are being used as scapegoats for the Korean War. Someone had to be blamed. For political reasons it may become impossible for the President to spare their lives." Kahn got up to leave. "We must all be vigilant. Bernice will bring you the newspapers tomorrow morning."

"Who is Bernice?"

Kahn's face lit up as he repeated the question to emphasize its absurdity. "Who's Bernice? Bernice is Bernice. Bernice is practically my adopted daughter, and one of us—Bernice is a real comrade, a proletarian fighter. Along with everything else she does, Bernice opens the store. I close it. Good night to you, Eugene."

"Good night to you, Max."

Eugene could hear Max Kahn laughing under his breath and repeating "Who's Bernice?" as he padded down the steps.

Shaving in the cracked mirror over the sink in the closet-sized bathroom the next morning, Eugene heard someone moving cartons in the liquor store under the floorboards. Soon there were muffled footfalls on the back steps and a soft rap on the door.

"Anyone home?" a woman called.

Toweling the last of the shaving cream from his face, Eugene opened the door a crack.

Hi," said a young woman. She was holding the front page of the Washington Star up so he could see the photograph of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

"You must be Bernice."

"Right as rain."

Bernice turned out to be a lean, dark Semitic beauty with a beaklike nose and bushy brows and deep-set eyes that flashed with belligerence whenever she got onto the subject that obsessed her. "Purple mountain majesty, my ass " she would cry, knotting her thin fingers into small fists, hunching her bony shoulders until she looked like a prizefighter lowering his profile for combat; "America the Beautiful was built on two crimes that are never mentioned in polite conversation: the crime against the Indians, who were driven off their lands and practically exterminated; the crime against the Negroes, who were kidnapped from Africa and auctioned off to the highest bidder like so many cattle."

It didn't take Eugene long to discover that Bernice's rebellion against the capitalist system had sexual implications. She wore neither makeup nor undergarments and laughingly boasted that she considered stripping to the skin to be an honest proletarian activity, since it permitted her to shed, if only for a while, the clothes and image with which capitalism had tarred and feathered her. She described herself as a Marxist feminist following in the footsteps of Aleksandra Kollontai, the Russian Bolshevik who had abandoned a husband and children to serve Lenin and the Revolution. Bernice, too, was ready to abandon the bourgeois morality and offer her body to the Revolution—if only someone would issue an invitation.

Bernice was nobody's fool. Eugene made such a point about having been born and raised in Brooklyn that she began to wonder if he was really American; several times she thought she caught trivial slips in grammar or pronunciation that reminded her of the way her grandfather, a Jewish immigrant from Vilnus, had talked even after years of living in the States. She found herself drawn to what she sensed was Eugene's secret self. She assumed that he was under Party discipline; she supposed he was on a mission, which made him a Warrior in the Party's struggle against the red-baiting McCarthyism that had gripped America.

"Oh, I have your number, Eugene," she told him when he parked the station wagon in the alley behind the liquor store after a round of deliveries and slipped in the back door. She was wearing flowery toreador pants and a torso-hugging white jersey through which the dark nipples of her almost nonexistent breasts were plainly visible. She sucked on her thumb for a moment, then came out with it: "You are a Canadian Communist, one of the organizers of those strikes last year where the longshoremen tried to stop Marshall Plan aid from leaving Canadian ports. You're on the lam from those awful Mounted Police people. Am I right?"

"You won't spill the beans?"

"I'd die before I'd tell anyone. Even Max."

"The Party knows it can count on you."

"Oh, it can, it can," she insisted. She came across the store and kissed him hungrily on the mouth. Reaching down with her left hand, she worked her fingers between the buttons of his fly. Coming up for air she announced, "Tonight I will take you home with me and we will do some peyote and fuck our heads off until dawn."

Eugene, who had spurned one Jewess in Russia only to find himself in the arms of another in America, didn't contradict her.

Eugene discovered the X chalked in blue on the side of the giant metal garbage bin in the parking lot behind Kahn's Wine and Beverage the next morning. After class that evening (on the American novel since Melville) he drifted over to the Georgetown University library reading room, pulled three books on Melville from the stacks and found a free seat at a corner table. He pulled a paperback edition of Melville's Billy Budd from his cloth satchel and began to underline passages that interested him, referring now and then to the reference books he had opened on the table. From time to time students in the reading room would drift into the stacks to put back or take down books. As the clock over the door clicked onto 9 P.M., a tall, thin woman with rust-color hair tied back in a sloppy chignon slid noiselessly out of a chair at another table and made her way into the stacks carrying a pile of books. She returned minutes later without the books, worked her arms into the sleeves of a cloth overcoat and disappeared through the exit.

Eugene waited until just before the 10:30 closing bell before making his move. By that time the only people left in the reading room were the two librarians and a crippled old man who walked with the aid of two crutches. One of the librarians caught Eugene's eye and pointed with her nose toward the wall clock. Nodding, he closed Billy Budd and put it away in his satchel. With the reference books under his arm and the satchel slung over one shoulder, he made his way back into the stacks to return what he had borrowed. Sitting on the shelf in the middle of the Melville section was a thick book on knitting. Checking to be sure no one was observing him, Eugene dropped the knitting book into his satchel, retrieved his leather jacket from the back of his chair and headed for the door. The librarian, peering over the rims of reading glasses, recognized him as a night school student and smiled. Eugene opened the satchel and held it up so she could see he wasn't making off with reference material.

The librarian noticed the knitting book. "You must be the only student in the night school studying Melville and knitting," she said with a laugh.

Eugene managed to look embarrassed. "It's my girlfriend's—"

"Pity. The world would be a better place if men took up knitting."

Max had loaned Eugene the store's station wagon for the evening. Instead of heading back to the studio over the store, he drove into Virginia for half an hour and pulled into an all-night gas station. While the attendant was filling the tank, he went into the office and fed a dime and a nickel into the slots of the wall phone. Bell Telephone had recently introduced direct long-distance dialing. Eugene dialed the Washington number that Starik had passed on to him over the shortwave radio. A sleepy voice answered. "Hullo?"

Eugene said, "I'm calling about your ad in the Washington Post—how many miles do you have on the Ford you're selling?"

The man on the other end, speaking with the clipped inflections of an upper-class Englishman, said, "I'm afraid you have the wrong p-p-party. I am not selling a Ford. Or any other automobile for that matter."

"Damn, I dialed the wrong number."

The Englishman snapped, "I accept the apology you didn't offer" and cut the connection.

The order for four bottles of Lagavulin Malt Whisky was phoned in at mid-morning the next day. The caller said he wanted it delivered before noon. Was that within the realm of possibility? Can do, Bernice said and she jotted down the address with the stub of a pencil she kept tucked over one ear.

Piloting the store's station wagon through the dense mid-morning Washington traffic, Eugene took Canal Road and then headed up Arizona Avenue until it intersected with Nebraska Avenue, a quiet tree-lined street with large homes set back on both sides. Turning onto Nebraska, he got stuck behind a garbage truck for several minutes. A team of Negroes dressed in white overalls was collecting metal garbage cans from the back doors and carrying them down the driveways to the sidewalk, where a second crew emptied the contents into the dump truck. Eugene checked the address on Bernice's order sheet and pulled up to number 4100, a two-story brick building with a large bay window, at the stroke of eleven. The customer who had ordered the Lagavulin must have been watching from the narrow vestibule window because the front door opened as Eugene reached for the bell.

"I say, that's a spiffy wagon you have out at the curb. Please d-d-do come in."

The Englishman in the doorway had long wavy hair and was wearing a snapppy blue blazer with tarnished gold buttons and an ascot around his neck in place of a tie. His eyes had the puffy look of someone who drank a great deal of alcohol. Drawing Eugene inside the vestibule, he remarked in an offhand way, "You are supp-p-posed to have a calling card."

Eugene took out the half of the carton that had been torn from a package of Jell-O (it had been in the hollowed-out knitting book he'd retrieved from the stacks the night before). The Englishman whipped out from his pocket the other half. The two halves matched perfectly. The Englishman offered a hand. "Awfully glad," he mumbled. A nervous tic of a smile appeared on his beefy face. "To tell the truth, didn't expect Starik to send me someone as young as you. I'm P-P-PARSIFAL-but you know that already."

Eugene caught whiff of bourbon on the Englishman's breath. "My working name is Eugene."

"American, are you? Thought Starik was going to fix me up with a Russian this time round."

"I speak English like an American," Eugene informed him. "But I am Russian." And he recited his motto in perfect Russian: "Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!"

The Englishman brightened considerably. "Don't speak Russian myself. Like the sound of it, though. Much prefer to deal with Starik's Russians than one of those antsy American Commies." He took four exposed Minox cartridges from his pocket and handed them to Eugene. "April Fool's present for Starik—do pass the stuff on as quickly as you can. Took some awfully good shots of some awfully secret documents spelling out which Soviet cities the Americans plan to A-bomb if war starts. Got some goodies for me in exchange?"

Eugene set the bottles of Lagavulin down on the floor and took out the other items that had been in the hollowed-out knitting book: a dozen cartridges of 50-exposure film for a Minox miniature camera, new one-time cipher pads printed in minuscule letters on the inside cover of ordinary matchbooks, a new microdot reader disguised as a wide-angle lens for a 35 millimeter camera and a personal letter from Starik enciphered on the last of the Englishman's old one-time pads and rolled up inside a hollowed-out bolt.

"Thanks awfully," the man said. "Will you be getting in touch with the rezident anytime soon?"

"I can."

"I should think you had b-b-better do that sooner rather than later. Tell him we have a bit of a headache looming. Angleton has been on to the fact that we have had a mole in the British Foreign Service, code-named HOMER, for donkey's years." The Englishman's stutter dissipated as he became caught up in his tale. "Yesterday he told me that his cryptoanalyst chaps have broken an additional detail out of some old intercepts: when HOMER was posted to Washington he'd meet twice a week in New York with your predecessor, his cutout. It won't take Angleton long to work out that this pattern corresponds' to Don Maclean—he used to go up to New York twice a week to see his wife Melinda, who was pregnant and living there with her American mother. Maclean's running the FO's American Department in London now. Someone has got to warn him the Americans are getting warmer; someone has got to set up an exfiltration if and when. Can you remember all that?"

Eugene had been briefed by Starik about Angleton and HOMER and Maclean. "Where is Burgess hanging his hat these days?" he asked, referring to Philby's old Trinity College sidekick, the long-time Soviet agent Guy Burgess, who originally recruited Philby into MI6 during the war.

"He's been using me as a B and B, which has come to mean bed and booze, since he was posted to the British embassy in Washington. Why do you ask'"

"Burgess is an old buddy of Maclean's, isn't he?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact."

"Starik said that in an emergency you might want to think about sending Burgess back to warn Maclean."

Philby saw the advantages instantly. "Wizard idea! What could be more natural than the two of them going for a pub crawl? If things get cheesy I suppose Guy could tear himself away from his poofter DC friends long enough to head home and give Maclean a warning holler."

"Cover your trail—if Maclean runs for it someone might work backward from Maclean to Burgess, and from Burgess to you."

The Englishman's shoulders heaved in resignation. "Guy can bluff his way out of a tight corner," he guessed. "Besides which I have a sensible line of defense—last thing I'd do if I were really spying for the Russians would be to give bed and booze to another Russian spy."

Eugene had to smile at the Englishman's nerve. "You ought to pay me for the whiskey," he said, handing him the invoice.

Kim Philby counted out bills from a woman's change purse. "B-b-by all means keep the change," he suggested, his stutter back again and, along with it, the brooding filmy gaze of a tightrope artist trying to anticipate missteps on the high-wire stretched across his mind's eye.

8

HEIDELBERG, MONDAY, APRIL 9, 1951

FROM THE NARROW STREET, THE PROPYLAEN, AN INN NAMED AFTER THE periodical founded by the German poet Goethe, looked dark and deserted. A stone's throw from Heidelberg's austere time-warped university, its restaurant normally offered students a city-subsidized potato-and-cabbage menu. Now its metal shutters were closed, the naked electric bulb over its sign was extinguished and a hand-lettered notice tacked to the door read, in German, English and French, "Exceptionally Not Open Today." Ebby had rented out the inn's dining room for a farewell banquet for his Albanian commando unit and supplied the alcohol and canned meat from the Company's PX in Frankfurt. In a back room flickering with candlelight and warmed by a small coal-burning stove, he sat at the head of the long table, refilling brandy glasses and passing out filter-tipped cigarettes. The thin clean-shaven faces of the seven young Albanians and two female translators on both sides of the table glistened with perspiration and pride. At the other end of the table, Adil Azizi, the commando leader, a beautiful young man with smooth skin and long fine blond hair, was peeling an orange using a razor-sharp bayonet. The man next to him, who wore a black turtleneck sweater, made a comment and everyone laughed. The translator sitting at Ebby's elbow explained: "Mehmet tells Adil not to dull his blade on orange skin but save it for Communist skin."

A grandfather clock near the door struck midnight. One of the candles, burned down to its wick, sizzled and died. Kapo, at twenty-four the oldest member of the commando and the only one to speak even broken English, pushed himself to his feet and raised his brandy glass to Ebby. The second translator repeated his words in Albanian for the others. "I can tell you, Mr. Trabzon, that we will not fail you or our American sponsors or our people for sure," he vowed. Mehmet coached him in Albanian and Kapo rolled his head from side to side, which in the Balkans meant he agreed. "I can tell you again of my father—a member of the before-war regime who was trialed; decided culpable and locked in cage like wild animal and thrown from deck of ship at sea. All here tell alike stories."

Adil murmured to Kapo in Albanian. Kapo said, "Adil tells that his brother called Hsynitk was trialed for listening American music on radio and shot dead in parking lot of Tirane soccer stadium half of one hour later. Our blood enemy is Enver Hoxha, for sure."

Kapo pulled a small package wrapped in newspaper and string from th pocket of the leather jacket hanging over the back of his chair. He held it aloft. Everyone smiled. "Me and everyone, we want give you present so you remember us, remember time we spending together in great German city of Heidelberg."

The package was passed from hand to hand until it reached Ebby. He flushed with embarrassment. "I don't know what to say—"

"So don't say nothing, Mr. Trabzon. Only open it," Kapo called. The others laughed excitedly.

Ebby tore off the string and pulled away the paper. His face lit up when he saw the present; it was a British Webley Mark VI revolver with a date-1915—engraved in the polished wood of the grip. The weapon looked to be in mint condition. "I am very pleased to have this beautiful gun," Ebby said softly. He held the gun to his heart. "I thank you."

At the head of the table, Adil said something in Albanian. The translator said: "Adil tells that the next present they bring you will be the scalp of Enver Hoxha." Around the table everyone nodded gravely. Adil tossed back his glass of brandy. The others followed suit, then drummed their glasses on the table in unison. No one smiled.

Ebby stood up. The translator next to him rose to her feet. When she translated Ebby's words, she unconsciously imitated his gestures and even some of his facial expressions. "It has been an honor for me to work with you," Ebby began. He paused between sentences. "A great deal is riding on this commando raid. We are sure that the death of Hoxha will lead to an uprising of the democratic elements in Albania. The anti-Communist Balli Kombetar forces in the north can put thousands of armed partisans in the field. An uprising in Albania could ignite revolts elsewhere in the Balkans and the other countries of Eastern Europe and eventually—why not?—in the Ukraine and the Baltics and the Central Asian Republics. The Soviet states are like a set of dominoes—topple the first one and they will all come tumbling down " Ebby peered the length of the table at the eager faces. "You will have the honor and the danger of toppling the first domino." He added "For sure." The young Albanians roared with laughter. When they had quieted down, Ebby added solemnly: "Good luck and Godspeed to you all."

9

BERLIN, THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 1951

ROCKING ON A PAINTED HOBBYHORSE THAT ONE OF THE BERLIN BASE officers had bought on the black market and parked in the hallway, the Fallen Angel was a-twitter over "Dennis the Menace," the new comic strip that had recently turned up in the pages of Die Neue Zeitung, an American newspaper written in German. Leaning against the water cooler filled with slivovitz across from the Sorcerer's partly open door, Miss Sipp and Jack were engrossed in the newspaper's front page that Silwan II had passed on to them; there was the usual box score of how many East German Volkespolizei had defected in the past twenty-four hours (an office pool was riding on the number), and banner-headlines above the lead story on Truman's decision to relieve Douglas MacArthur of his command in Korea after the General publicly called for air strikes on Chinese cities. Absorbed as they were in various pages of the newspaper, the Fallen Angel, the Sorcerers Apprentice and Torriti's Night Owl were oblivious to the bleating hullabaloo emanating from the Sorcerers office, clearly audible over an orchestral version of Bellini's Norma.

"Even the French come up with better intelligence than you," the Company's Chief of Station in Germany, General Lucian Truscott IV, was complaining in a raucous bellow.

The Sorcerer could be heard retorting with a lewd doggerel. "The French are a creative race—they talk with their hands and fuck with their face."

"Last week they came up with the Soviet order of battle in Poland."

"Their numbers are flaky."

"At least they have numbers."

"We have our triumphs."

"Name one recent one."

"I got my hands on a sample of Walter Ulbrecht's shit—we sent it back to Washington for analysis."

"Oh, cripes, next thing you'll tell me that the rumors about Ulbrecht being allergic to ragweed are true!"

In the hallway the Fallen Angel glanced up from "Dennis the Menace" and caught Miss Sipp's eye. She hiked her shoulders and curled out her lower lip. Since he'd come on board, General Truscott, a tough cookie who could turn abusive after three or four whiskeys, had cleaned up the Company's act in Germany: a lot of the dumber clandestine service ops (like the idea of bombarding Russia with extra-large condoms stamped "medium") had been permanently shelved, some of the more amateur officers had been sent to the boondocks. But despite the occasional verbal shootout, Truscott—a gruff soldier from the old school who had once spilled a pitcher of water over the head of a CIA officer to "cool him down"—seemed to have a healthy respect for the Sorcerer. Ulbrecht's excrement wasn't the only thing Torriti had come up with, and the General knew it.

" 'Nother thing," the General was shouting over the music, his words strung together with a slurred grumpiness. "Air Force people've been bellyaching 'bout having to identify bombing targets from old German World War II Abwehr files. Can't we supply them with some up-to-date targeting, Torriti?"

Miss Sipp thought she heard another empty bottle crash land in her boss's wastebasket. Jack must have heard it, too, because he asked, "How many today?"

"If you love," the Night Owl pointed out with a sheepish grin, "you don't count."

"I thought you hated him," Silwan II said from the hobbyhorse.

"I hate him but I don't dislike him."

Ah," he said, nodding as if he understood, which he didn't. He went back to the saner world of "Dennis the Menace."

"Not my fault if there's a demon cloud cover over East Europe," the Sorcerer was telling Truscott.

"Its because of the demon cloud cover that we need more agents on the ground, damn it."

The door to Torriti's office flew open and the two men, both clutching tumblers half-filled with whiskey, stumbled into the corridor. Truscott was bringing the Sorcerer up to date on the latest nightmare scenario from the Pentagon war gamers: the Russians would block off the 100-mile-long umbilical corridor between the Western sectors of Berlin and West Germany; French, British and American units drawn from the 400,000 allied troops in West Germany would start down the Autobahn to test Soviet mettle; local Russian commanders would panic and blow up a bridge in front of them and another behind; rattled, the West would send in a tank division to rescue the stranded units; someone, somewhere would lose his nerve and pull a trigger; the shot would be heard 'round the world.

Torriti closed one very red eye to sooth a twitching lid. "Bastards won't take me alive. General," he boasted, and he nicked a fingernail against the poison-coated pin he kept stuck in the whiskey-stained lapel of his shapeless sports jacket.

With his hand on the knob of the heavy fire door leading to the staircase, Truscott suddenly spun around. "What's this I hear about you walking back a cat?"

"Who told you that?"

"I keep my ear to the ground."

The Sorcerer suddenly got the hiccups. "Fact is... I had an exfiltration that turned... turned sour," he moaned.

"Spoonful of sugar—it works every time," the General suggested.

Torriti looked confused. "For an exfiltration?"

"For the hiccups, damn it."

Miss Sipp looked up from the newspaper. "Try drinking water out of a glass with a spoon in it," she called.

"Maybe slivovitz in a glass with a... spoon might work," Torriti called, pointing to the water cooler. He turned back to Truscott. "The Russians were... tipped off. If it's the last... thing I do, I'm gonna find... find out where the tip... tip came from."

"How?"

"Barium... meals."

"Barium meals?" Jack repeated to Miss Sipp. "What the hell is that?"

"Not something you'll find at one of those fast food kiosks on the Kurfurstendamm," she said with a knowing frown.

"Barium what?" Truscott demanded.

"Meals. I'm gonna feed... feed stuff back to a single addressee at a time. It will be radioactive, in a manner of speaking—I'll be able to trace... it and see who saw what, when. I'll stamp everything... ORCON—dissemination controlled by originator. All copies numbered. Then we'll... we'll see which operations get blown and... figure out from that who's betraying us... us."

"You're giving away some of the family jewels," Truscott noted uneasily.

"Goddamn mole will give away more of them if we don't catch him."

"I suppose you know what you're doing," the General mumbled.

"I suppose... I do," the Sorcerer agreed.

The Sorcerer had begun the arduous process of walking back his cat with the distribution list on the Vishnevsky exfiltration. As far as he could figure there had been nine warm bodies on the Washington end who were party to the operation: the director of Central Intelligence and his deputy director, four people in the Operations Directorate, the cipher clerk who had deciphered the Sorcerer's cables, the routing officer in Communications who controlled the physical distribution of traffic inside Cockroach Alley, and of course Jim Angleton, the counterintelligence swami who vetted all would-be defectors to weed out the "bad 'uns."

The permutations weren't limited to the people on the in-house distribution list. Kim Philby, as MI6's broker in Washington, was known to have access to all the top Company brass, up to and including the director, whose door was always open to the official nuncio from the British cousins. Any of them might have confided in Philby even though he wasn't on the distribution list. If someone had whispered in Philby s ear, he might have passed on to the head of MI6 the information that the Yanks were bringing across a defector who claimed to be able to finger a Soviet mole in MI6. "C," as the chief was called, might then have convened a small war council to deal with what could only be described as a seismic event in the secret Cold War struggle of intelligence services. If Philby wasn't the culprit—Torriti understood that the evidence pointing to him was only circumstantial—the mole could be anyone who learned of the Vishnevsky affair on a back channel.

Philby was also known to be bosom buddies with Jim Angleton, his sidekick from their Ryder Street days. According to what the Sorcerer had picked up (during casual phone conversations with several old cronies toiling in the dungeons on the Reflecting Pool), the birds of a feather, Philby and Angleton, nocked to a Georgetown watering hole for lunch most Fridays. Angleton obviously trusted Philby. Would he have passed on the meat of a "Flash" cable to his British pal? Would his pal have quietly passed it on to "C?" Would "C" have let the cat out of the bag to prepare for the worst?

Torriti meant to find out.

Burning midnight oil, devouring quantities of PX whiskey that had even Miss Sipp counting the empties in the wastebasket, Torriti meticulously prepared his barium meals.

Item: The Sorcerer had recently managed to have a hand-carved wooden bust of Stalin delivered to an office in the Pankow headquarters of the East German Intelligence Service. Hidden inside the base of the bust was a battery-operated microphone, a tiny tape machine and a burst-transmitter that broadcast, at 2 A.M. every second day, the conversations on the tape. The initial "get" from the microphone revealed that the East Germans had initiated a program, code-named ACTION J, to discredit the Allied-zone Germans by sending threatening letters purporting to come from West Germany to Holocaust survivors. The letters, signed "A German SS officer" would say: "We didn't gas enough Jews. Some day we'll finish what we started." Revealing ACTION J would blow the existence of the microphone hidden in the room in which the operation was being planned.

Item: The Rabbi had traded the names of two KGB case officers working under diplomatic cover out of the Soviet embassy in Washington for the whereabouts of a former Nazi germ warfare specialist in Syria, which the Sorcerer had acquired from the Gehlen Org (which, in turn, had purchased the information from a member of the Muhabarat, the Egyptian Intelligence Service). Judging from past experience, if the identity of the KGB officers fell into the hands of the Soviet mole, the Russians would find excuses (a death in the family, a son broke a leg skiing) to quickly pull the two back to the Soviet Union. If the two remained in Washington it would mean the Sorcerer's cable containing the names had not been blown.

Item: The Sorcerer had organized a phone tap in the office of Walter Albrecht's closest collaborator, his wife, Lotte, who worked in the Central Committee building at the intersection of Lothringerstrasse and Prenzlauer Alice in the center of East Berlin. One of the barium meals would contain a transcript of a conversation between Ulbricht and his wife in which Ulbricht said rude things about his Socialist Unity Party rival Wilhelm Zaisser. The Russians, if they got wind of the tap via the Soviet mole, would make a "routine" security check on Lotte's office and discover the phone tap.

Item: An East German agent who had fled West with the tens of thousands of East German emigres streaming across the open border had eventually landed a job working for the Messerschmidt Company. Berlin Base had stumbled across his identity while debriefing a low level Karlshorst defector and Gehlen's Org had "doubled" the agent, who now delivered to his East German handlers technical reports filled with disinformation. The East German agent was debriefed by his Karlshorst handlers during monthly visits to his aging mother in East Berlin. A barium meal from the Sorcerer identifying the doubled agent would blow the operation; the agent in question would undoubtedly fail to return to West Berlin the next time he visited his mother.

Item: The Sorcerer had personally recruited a maid who worked at the Blue House the East German government dacha in Prerow, which was the Security Ministy's official resort on the Baltic coast. The maid turned out to be a sister of one of the prostitutes in the West German whorehouse above the nightclub Berlin-Schoneberg that Torriti visited whenever he had a free hour to debrief he hookers. If a barium meal reporting snippets of conversation from bigwigs vacationing at the Blue House was passed on to the Soviets by their mole, the maid would certainly be arrested and her reports would dry up.

Item: The Sorcerer had a Watcher in an attic taking photographs with a lone telephoto lens of the personnel who appeared at the windows in the KGB base in the former hospital at Karlshorst on the outskirts of Berlin. Using these photos, Berlin Base was compiling a "Who's Who in Soviet Intelligence" scrapbook. A barium meal status report on this operation that fell into Soviet hands would lead to the arrest of the photographer and the end of Berlin Base's scrapbook project.

Item: The Sorcerer had seen a copy of a field report prepared by E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, the CIA officer he'd kicked out of Berlin Base for shooting off his mouth about Torriti's medicinal alcohol habit. Ebbitt, now working out of Frankfurt Station, had recently been put in charge of Albania ops because of some obscure qualification relating to Albania. He was currently training a group of Albanian emigres in a secret base near Heidelberg. In the next few days, Ebbitt planned to fly his commando group to the British base near Medina on Malta and then sneak them onto the Albanian coast near Durres from a sailing yacht. From there they were supposed to work their way inland to Tirane and assassinate Enver Hoxha, the malevolent Stalinist leader of the Peoples Republic of Albania. Torriti's barium meal would take the form of a private "Eyes Only" cable to the Special Policy Committee that coordinated British-American operations against Albania; Kim Philby, as the ranking MI6 man in Washington, happened to be the British member of this committee. The Sorcerer would warn the committee that Ebbitt had gotten his priorities ass-backward. Hoxha lived and worked in "Le Bloc," a sealed compound in Tirane. He was said to pass between his villa and his office through a secret tunnel. A far better (not to mention more realistic) target, Torriti would suggest, would be the submarine pens that the Soviets were constructing at the Albanian port of Saseno which, if completed, would give the Russians control of the Adriatic. If Ebbitt's commando found a reception committee waiting for them on the beach when they came ashore, it would indicate that this Message had leaked, via the mole, to the Russians in Washington.

Item: Last but not least, he would send off a barium meal to Angleton giving details of the latest "get" that the courier code-named RAINBOW had delivered from her source, known as SNIPER. One of the items particularly intriguing: SNIPER was important enough in the East German hierarchy to have been invited to hear a pep talk given by none other than Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov during a recent visit to Berlin; in the course of the talk, Zhukov—who had masterminded the Soviet assault on Berlin in 1945—let slip that, in the event of war, senior troop commanders expected to reach the English Channel on the tenth day of hostilities. If the Russians got wind of a leak at this level of the East German superstructure, the SNIPER source would dry up very quickly, and RAINBOW would fail to turn up for her dance course in the small theater on Hardenbergstrasse in West Berlin.

10

BERLIN, TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1951

IN ORDER TO HAVE DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY, JACK—LIKE ALL COMPANY officers in Berlin—was carried on the books as a Foreign Service officer working out of the American consulate. With Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the architect of America's policy of containing Soviet expansionism, passing through Berlin on a hit-and-run tour of front line consulates and embassies, Jack received one of the ambassadors notorious "your presence is requested and required" invitations to a "happy hour" pour in the Secretary's honor. Milling around with the other junior CIA officers, Jack listened as one of the Company's Technical Service Division "elves," recently back from Washington, described the new Remington Rand Univac computer being installed in the Pickle Factory. "It's going to revolutionize information retrieval," the technician was explaining excitedly. "The disadvantage is that Univac s not very portable—as a matter of fact it fills a very large room. The advantage is that it can swallow all the phone books of all the cities in America. You punch in a name, the rotors whir and four or five minutes later it spits out a phone number."

Damn machines," someone cracked, "are going to take all the fun out of spying."

Jack laughed along with the others but only halfheartedly; his thoughts were on tonight's rendezvous in the rehearsal hall with RAINBOW, his sixteenth meeting with her since their paths first crossed two months before. For some time the snatches of conversation between them had turned into a kind of coded shorthand; the things left unspoken loomed larger than the things said, and they both knew it. Tonight Jack meant to screw up his courage and say what was on his mind; in his guts. He wasn't sure she would stand still long enough to hear him out; if she heard him out, he didn't kn, if she would sock him in the solar plexus or melt into his arms.

Drifting away from the group, Jack wandered over to the bar and help himself to a fistful of pretzels and another whiskey sour. Turning back toward the room, rehearsing in his head what he would say to Lili if she gave him an opening, he suddenly found himself eyeball to eyeball with the austere Secretary of State.

"Good afternoon, I'm Dean Acheson."

The American ambassador (who had helicoptered in from the embassy in Bonn), the consul general from Berlin, two senators and a bevy of highranking State Department political officers crowded around. "Sir, my name is John McAuliffe."

"What do you do here?"

Jack cleared his throat. "I work for you, Mr. Secretary," he said weakly.

"I didn't catch that."

"I work for you. In the embassy."

The ambassador tried to take Acheson's elbow and steer him toward the buffet of popcorn and open sandwiches but the Secretary of State wasn't finished quizzing Jack. "And what do you do in the embassy, Mr. McAuliffe?"

Jack looked around for help. The two senators were staring off into space. The political officers were concentrating on their fingernails. "I work in the political section, sir."

Acheson was starring to get annoyed. "And what precisely do you do in the political section, young man?"

Jack swallowed hard. "I write reports, Mr. Secretary, that I hope will be useful..."

Suddenly the penny dropped. Acheson's mouth fell open and he nodded. "I think I see. Well, good luck to you, Mr. McAuliffe." The Secretary of State mouthed the words "Sorry about that" and turned quickly away.

RAINBOW had come to look forward to her twice weekly meetings with Jack; living as she did in the bleak Soviet side of the city, locked into a relationship with a man twenty-seven years her senior, she savored the brief encounters during which she was made to feel desirable, and desired. For the past several weeks Lili had no longer turned modestly away when she reached under her sweat shirt and into her brassiere to pull out the small square of silk filled with minuscule handwriting. Now, for the first time, Jack snatched the silk, warm from her breast, and pressed it to his lips. Lili, startled, lowered her eyes for an instant, then looked up questioningly into his as Jack grazed one of her small breasts with his knuckles and kissed her softly on the corner of her thin lips. "Please, oh please, understand that you have arrived at the frontier of our intimacy," she pleaded, her voice reduced to a husky whisper. "There can be no crossing over. In another world, in another life..." She managed a forlorn smile and Jack caught a glimpse of what her face would look like when she had grown old. "Jack the Ripper," she murmured. "Jackhammer. Jack rabbit."

"Jesus H. Christ, where do you discover all these Jacks?"

"Herr Professor has a wonderful dictionary of American slang, yes? It has long been my habit to learn several new words every day. I was up to grab forty winks when I met you. I skipped ahead to the Jacks."

"Have you told Herr Professor about me?"

"He has never asked me and I have not raised the subject. What he does—the information he sends to you—it is out of an antique idealism. Herr Professor wears shirts with studs instead of buttons, and old-fashioned starched collars that he changes daily; he is clearly ill at ease with the latest fashions in clothing and political ideas. He gathers the information and writes it out meticulously on the silk in order to turn the clock back. He counts on me take care of the details of the delivery."

"We could become lovers," Jack breathed.

"In mysterious ways we are already lovers," Lili corrected him.

"I want you—"

"You have as much of me as I can give to you—"

"I want more. I want what any man wants. I want you in bed."

"I say it to you without ambiguity—this can never be."

"Because of Herr Professor?"

"He saved my life at the end of the war. In my dictionary gang-rape comes before grab forty winks. I was what you call gang-raped by drunken Russian soldiers. I filled the pockets of my overcoat with bricks in order to throw myself into the Spree, I could not wait for the dark waters to close over my head. Herr Professor prevented me... through the night he talked to me of another Germany... of Thomas Mann, of Heinrich Boll... at dawn he took me to the roof of the building to watch the sun rise. He convinced me that it was the first day of the rest of my life. I do not pretend, Jack, to be... indifferent to you. I only say that my first loyalty is to him. I say also that this loyalty takes the form of sexual fidelity..."

Lili stepped into a skirt and peeled off her dancing tights from under it. She folded them into her satchel and reached to turn out the lights in the rehearsal hall. "I must begin back, yes?"

Jack gripped her shoulder. "He lets you run risks."

Lili pulled away. "That is unfair—there is a hierarchy to the world I live in. Because he considers some things more important does not mean needs me less."

"I need you more."

"You do not need me as he needs me. Without me—" She looked away her face suddenly stony.

"Finish the sentence, damnation—without you what?"

"Without me he cannot remain alive. You can."

"You want to spell that out?"

"No."

"You owe it to yourself—"

"Whatever I owe to myself, I owe more to him. Please let me go now, Jack-o'-lantern."

Sorting through emotions that were not familiar to him, Jack nodded gloomily. "Will you come again Friday?"

"Friday, yes. Depart ahead of me, if you please. We should not be seen coming out of the theater together."

Jack put a hand on the back of her neck and drew her to him. She let her forehead rest for a moment against his shoulder. Then she stepped back and turned off the lights and opened the door and waited at the top of the staircase while he descended the steps.

He looked back once. Four floors above him Lili was lost in the shadows of the landing. "Lily of the valley?" he called. When she didn't respond he turned and, hurrying past Aristide dozing in his glass-enclosed cubbyhole, fled from the theater.

"Do me a favor, sport," the Sorcerer had said as casually as if he'd been asking Jack to break some ice cubes out of the office fridge. "Put a teardrop in SNIPER'S wall."

Bugging the Professor's house had turned out to be easier said than done. Jack had dispatched some German freelancers to scout the street behind the Gorky Theater. It was filled with war-gutted buildings and rubble and the single house standing in the middle of what had once been a garden. It took them ten days to work out when both RAINBOW and SNIPER were away from home. As a deputy prime minister, Lili's Herr Professor went to a government office weekday mornings and taught seminars in particle and plasma physics at Humbolt University in the afternoons. Two mornings a week Lili took the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz, where she had classical dance classes at one of the last private schools in the Soviet Union. Three afternoons a week she spent in a windowless Gorky Theater rehearsal hall taking lessons from a crippled Russian woman who had danced with the Kirov before the war. Even when both RAINBOW and SNIPER were away, there was still a stumbling block to the planting of a microphone: Herr Professor had a caretaker living in two gloomy ground floor rooms of the house, an old woman who had once been his nanny and now, confined by arthritis to a wicker wheelchair, spent most of her waking hours staring through the windowpane at the deserted street.

Jack had brought the problem to the Sorcerer: how to get the caretaker out of the house long enough for a team to break into her rooms and install a bug in the ceiling?

The Sorcerer, sorting through barium meals and the people to whom they would be addressed, had grunted. His eyes were puffier than usual, and heavy-lidded; he looked as if had come out second best in a street brawl, which in itself defied logic. Jack couldn't imagine the Sorcerer coming out second best in anything.

"Kill her?" the Sorcerer had suggested.

For an instant Jack had actually taken him seriously. "We can't just up and kill her, Harvey—we're the good guys, remember?"

"Don't you know a joke when you hear one, sport? Lure her out of the house with a free ticket to a Communist Party shindig. Whatever."

"She's an old lady. And she's tied to a wheelchair."

The Sorcerer had shaken his head in despair. "I got problems of my own," he had grumbled, his double chins quivering. "Use your goddamn imagination for once."

It had taken Jack the better part of a week to figure out the answer, and three days to lay in the plumbing. One morning, soon after Herr Professor and Lili had left the apartment, an East German ambulance with two young men in white coats sitting on either side of a muzzled lap dog had eased up to the curb in front of the house. The men had knocked on the caretaker's door. When she opened it the width of the safety chain, they had explained that they had been sent by the Communist Party's Ministry of Public Health to transport her to a doctor s office off Strausberger Platz for a free medical examination. It was part of a new government social program to aid the elderly and the infirm. If she qualified—and judging from the wheelchair they suspected she might—she would be given the latest Western pills to alleviate her pain and a brand new Czech radio. The caretaker, her peasant eyes narrowing in suspicion, had wanted to know how much all this would cost. Silwan II had favored her with one of his angelic smiles and had assured her that the service was free of charge. Scratching the hair on her upper lip, the caretaker had thought about this for a long time. Finally she had removed the safety chain.

No sooner had Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel carted the caretaker to visit the doctor (hired for the occasion) than a small pickup truck with the logo of the East German Electrical Collective on its doors drew up in front of the house. Three of the Company's "plumbers," dressed in blue coveralls, carrying a wooden ladder and two wooden boxes filled with tools and electrical equipment, went up the walkway and let themselves into the caretaker's rooms; a fourth plumber waited in the drivers seat. The pickup's radio was tuned to the East German police frequency. A fist-sized radio transmitter on the seat buzzed into life. "We are operational," a voice speaking Hungarian said, "and starting the work."

The team inside used a silent drill—the sound of the bit working its way into the ceiling was muted by a tiny spray of water—in case the KGB had planted microphones in SNIPER'S apartment. Jack's people worked the bit up to within a centimeter of the surface of the floor, then switched drills to one that turned so slowly it could punch a pinhole in the floor without pushing any telltale sawdust up into the room. A tiny microphone the size of the tip of one of those new-fangled ballpoint pens was inserted into the pinhole and then wired up to the electric supply in the caretakers overhead lighting fixture. The small hole in the ceiling was filled with quick-drying plaster and repainted the same color as the rest of the ceiling with quick-drying paint. A miniature transmitter was fitted inside the fixture so that it was invisible from below, and hooked up to the house's electricity. The transmitter, programmed to be sound-activated, beamed signals to a more powerful transmitter buried in the crest of the rubble in the vacant lot next door. This second transmitter, which ran on a mercury dry-cell battery, broadcast in turn to an antenna on the roof of a building in the American sector of Berlin.

"Did you work something out, sport?" Torriti mumbled when he bumped into Jack in the Berlin-Dahlem PX.

"As a matter of fact I did, Harvey. I sent in your Hungarian plumbers—"

The Sorcerer held up a palm, cutting him off. "Don't give me the details, kid. That way I can't give your game away if I'm ever tortured by the Russians.

Torriti said it with such a straight face that Jack could only nod dumbly in agreement. Watching the Sorcerer lumber off with a bottle of whiskey under each arm, he began to suspect that the honcho of Berlin Base had been putting him on. On the other hand, knowing Torriti, he could have been serious.