11

FRANKFURT, MONDAY, APRIL 23, 1951

LOOKING LIKE WITNESSES AT A WAKE, EBBY, TONY SPINK AND HALF A dozen other officers from the Soviet/Eastern Europe Division crowded around the bulky reel-to-reel tape machine on Spink's desk. The technician, who had recorded the special radio program from Tirane earlier that afternoon, threaded the tape through the capstan and locked it into the pickup spool. Spink looked at the translator who had been sitting next to Ebby the night of the farewell dinner for the Albanian commandoes in the Heidelberg inn. "Ready?" he asked. She nodded once. He hit the "Play" button. At first there was a great deal of static. "We had trouble tuning in the station," the technician explained. "We had to orient our antenna. Here it comes."

Ebby could hear the high-pitched voice of a man speaking in Albanian. He seemed to be delivering a tirade. "So he is what we call the Procurator and you call the Prosecutor," announced the translator, a short, middle-aged woman with short-cropped hair. "He sums up the prosecution case against the accused terrorists. He says that they landed on the coast from two small, motorized rubber rafts immediately after midnight on April the twenty. He says a routine border patrol stumbled across them as they were deflating and burying the rafts in the sand." The translator cocked her head as another voice called out a question. "The chief judge asks the Procurator what the terrorists did when the border soldiers attempted to apprehend them. The Procurator says that the terrorists opened fire without warning, killing three border soldiers, wounding two additional border soldiers. In the change of gunfire four of the terrorists were killed and the three, on trial today, were apprehended." The translator wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her finger. "Now the judge asks if incriminating evidence was captured with the terrorists."

"They sound like they're reading from a goddamn script," Spink muttered angrily.

"The Procurator puts into evidence objects labelled with the letters the alphabet. The labels arrive at the letter V for Victor. Items A and B consist of two American manufacture rafts and seven American air force inflatable life jackets. In addition there are five British manufacture Lee-1 Enfield rifles, two American manufacture Winchester Model 74 rifles fitted with British manufacture Parker-Hale silencers and Enfield telescopic sights, three American manufacture Browning pistols fitted with primitive home-made silencers, one small leather valise containing a British manufacture Type A dash Mark Roman numeral two radio transmitter and receiver with Morse key and earphones, a map of Albania and another of Tirane printed on cotton and sewn into the lining of a jacket, seven cyanide vials in small brass containers that were attached by safety pins to the insides of lapels... Here the chief judge interrupts to ask if communications codes were discovered on the terrorists. The Procurator says the terrorists arrived to destruct the envelope containing the codes before they were captured. He goes on to explain that the envelopes were coated with a chemical that made them burn immediately a match was touched to the paper. He says also..."

The Procurators shrill voice, trailed by the muted voice of the translator, droned on. Spink pulled Ebby away from the tape recorder. "You mustn't blame yourself," he whispered. "Its a dirty game. These things happen all the time." He patted Ebby on the shoulder. Together they turned back to the tape and the translator.

"...asks if the terrorists have anything to say."

A growl of anger from the public attending the trial could be heard on the tape. Then someone breathed heavily into the microphone. A young man began to speak in a robot-like voice. "He says—" The translator sucked in her breath. She unconsciously brought a hand to her breast as she forced herself to continue. "He says his name is Adil Azizi. He says he is the leader of the commando group. He says he and his comrades were trained in the secret base near Heidelberg, Germany by agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency. Their mission was to land on the coast of the Albanian Democratic Republic, bury their rubber boats, work their way across country to the capitol of Tirane and, with the help of local terrorist cells, assassinate comrade Enver Hoxha, who holds the post of Premier and Foreign Minister. The chief judge asks the terrorist Azizi if there are mitigating circumstances to be taken into consideration before the court passes sentence. Azizi says there are none. Adil Azizi says that he and the two surviving terrorists deserve the supreme penalty for betraying the motherland... The sounds you hear in the background are from people in the courtroom demanding the death sentence."

The technician punched the fast-forward button and kept an eye on the counter. When it reached a number he had marked on a slip of paper, he started the tape again. "The radio station played twelve minutes of patriotic music while the judges deliberated," the translator explained. "Now is the sentence. The chief judge orders the three terrorists to stand. He says to them that they have been convicted of high treason and terrorism against the People's Republic of Albania and its supreme leader, Enver Hoxha. He says them that the court sentences the three terrorists to execution. Ah, I cannot continue—"

"Translate, damn it," Ebby snapped.

"He says them there is no appeal in capital crimes. He orders that the sentence is carried out immediately."

"When they say 'immediately,' they mean immediately," the technician warned. Several of the CIA officers drifted away from the table and casually lit cigarettes. Ebby noticed that the hands of one officer trembled.

"Now is the voice of the radio announcer," the translator went on very quietly. "He describes the three terrorist as shaking with fear when their wrists are bound behind their backs and they are led by soldiers from the courtroom. He describes—" The translator bit her lip. "He describes following them down two flights of steps to the rear door of the courthouse which opens onto the parking lot. He describes that there are no cars parked in the parking lot this day. He describes that a large crowd is assembled at the edge of the parking lot, that above his head all the windows are filled with people watching. He describes that the three terrorists are tied to iron rings projecting from the wall that were once used to attach horses when the building was constructed in the previous century. He describes a man in civilian clothing giving each terrorist a sip of peach brandy. He describes now the peloton of execution charging their rifles and one of the terrorists begging for mercy."

Unable to continue, sobbing into her sleeve, the translator stumbled away from the table.

From the tape machine came the crackle of rifle fire, then three sharp reports from smaller caliber weapons.

"Revolvers," Spink said professionally. "Twenty-two caliber, by sound."

"They were kids," Ebby said tightly. His right hand dipped into bit jacket pocket and closed over the wooden grip of the antique Webler revolver the young Albanians had given him in Heidelberg. "They never had time to liberate Albania, did they?"

Spink shrugged fatalistically. "To their everlasting credit at least they tried. God bless them for that."

"God bless them," Ebby agreed, and he came up with a sliver of a Byron poem that had once lodged in his brain at Yale:

Let there be light! said God, and there was light! Let there be blood! says man, and there's a sea!

12

FRANKFURT, WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 1951

JACK HAD HITCHED A RIDE INTO FRANKFURT ON AN AIR FORCE film exchange run to hand-deliver the Sorcerer's "For Your Eyes Only" envelope into the fleshy hands of General Truscott, after which he was supposed to personally burn the contents in the Frankfurt Station incinerator and return to Berlin with Truscott's yes or no. The General, in one of his foul moods, could be heard chewing out someone through the shut door of his office as Jack cooled his heels outside. The two secretaries, one typing letters from a dictaphone belt, the other manicuring her fingernails, acted as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. "And you have the gumption," Truscott could be heard bellowing, "to stand there and tell me you launched five hundred and sixteen balloons into Russian air space and only managed to retrieve forty?"

A muffled voice could be heard stumbling through an explanation. The General cut it off in mid-sentence. "I don't give a flying fart if the prevailing winds weren't prevailing. You were supposed to send reconnaissance balloons fitted with cameras and take photos of Soviet installations. Instead you seem to have spilled eight hundred thousand of the taxpayers' greenbacks down the proverbial drain. From where I'm sitting that looks suspiciously like unadulterated incompetence." The door opened and a drawn Company officer emerged from the General's office. Truscott's wrath trailed after him like a contrail. "Goddamn it, man, I don't want excuses, I want results. If you can't give 'em to me I'll send people who can. You out there, Miss Mitchel? Send in the Sorcerer's goddamn Apprentice."

The young woman working on her nails nodded toward the General's door. Jack rolled his eyes in mock fright. "Is the front office in friendly hands?" he asked.

The secretary bared her teeth in a nasty smile. "His bark is nothing compared to his bite," she remarked.

"Thanks for the encouragement," Jack said.

"Oh, you're very welcome, I'm sure."

"What's the Sorcerer cooking up that it needs to be hand-delivered?" Truscott demanded when he caught sight of Jack in the doorway.

"Sir, I am not familiar with the contents."

He gave the sealed envelope to the General, who slit it open with the flick of a finger and pulled out the single sheet of yellow legal paper. He flattened the page on the blotter with his palms, put on a pair of spectacles and frowning, began to read the message, which had been handwritten by Torriti. Glancing around the vast office, Jack took in the framed photographs showing Truscott with various presidents and prime ministers and field marshals. He thought he heard Truscott mutter under his breath as he jotted something on the blotter; it sounded like "Thirty, twelve, forty-five."

Truscott looked up. "Here's what you tell him: The answer to his barely legible bulletin from Berlin is affirmative."

"Affirmative," Jack repeated.

"While you're at it, remind him I'd take it as a personal favor if he'd learn to typewrite."

"You would like him to typewrite future messages," Jack repeated.

"Make tracks," Truscott snapped. He brayed through the open door, "Goddamn it, Miss Mitchel, haven't they deciphered the overnight from the Joint Chiefs yet?"

"They said it'd be another twenty minutes," the secretary called back.

"What are they doing down in the communications shack," the General groaned, "taking a coffee break between each sentence?"

Jack retrieved the Sorcerer's message from Truscott's desk and made his way down a staircase to the second-level sub-basement incinerator room. The walls and doors had been freshly painted in battleship gray, and smelled it. In the corridor outside the "Central Intelligence Agency Only" door, curiosity got the best of Jack and he sneaked a look at Torriti's note. "General," it said, "I've decided to send out one last barium meal to my prime suspect saying Torriti knows the identity of the Soviet mole who betrayed the Visnei exfiltration. At which point, if I've hit the nail on the head, my suspect willl get word to his KGB handlers and the Russians will try to kidnap or kill me. If they succeed you'll find a letter addressed to you in the small safe in the corner of my office. The combination is: thirty, then left past thirty to tvelve, then right to forty-five. Copy the numbers on your blotter, please. The letter will identify the mole and spell out the evidence, including my last bariu meal. If the attempt to murder or kidnap me fails I'll fly to Washington and drive home the spike myself. Okay? Torriti."

Jack folded the Sorcerer's letter back into the envelope and went into the burn room. An Army staff sergeant with sixteen years worth of hash marks on the sleeve of his field jacket hanging on the back of the door glanced at the laminated ID card Jack held up, then pointed to a metal trash bin. "Throw it in—I'll take care of it."

"I've been ordered to burn it personally," Jack told him.

"Suit yourself, chum."

Jack crumbled the envelope, opened the grate of the furnace and dropped it in. "Talk about balls," he said as the envelope went up in flames.

"Beg pardon?"

"No, nothing. I was just thinking out loud."

With an hour and a quarter to kill before he could catch a ride back to Berlin on the film-exchange plane, Jack wandered up to the fifth floor cubbyhole occupied by Ebby. Finding the door ajar, he rapped on it with his knuckles and pushed through to discover Ebby sitting with his feet propped up on the sill. He was staring gloomily out over the roofs of Frankfurt as he absently spun the cylinder of what looked like an antique revolver. Ebby's occasional office mate, a young CIA case officer named William Sloane Coffin, assigned at the time to a leaflet distribution project, was on his way out. "Maybe you can cheer him up," Coffin told Jack as they brushed past each other.

Ebby waved Jack into Bill Coffin's chair. "Hey, what brings you down to Frankfurt?"

Jack noticed that the lines around Ebby's eyes had deepened, making him look not only grimmer but older. "Needed to ferry some 'Eyes-Only' stuff to your general." Jack scraped Coffin's vacated seat over to Ebby's desk. You look like death warmed over," he said. "Want to talk about it?"

Ebby gnawed on a lip. "I was the case officer for a team going into Albania," he finally said. He shook his head disconsolately. "My Albanians, all seven of them, bought it—four were gunned down on the beach, the other three were hauled in front of judge and treated to a mock trial, then put up against a wall and shot."

Im sorry to hear that, Ebby. Look, I don't mean to soft-pedal your sense of loss—"

"—of failure. Use the right word."

"What I want to say is that we all take hits," Jack said softly. He was thinking of the would-be Russian defector Vishnevsky and his wife strapped onto stretchers. He was thinking of Vishnevsky s boy being pulled up the ramp onto a plane sobbing and crying out "papa." "It comes with the territory."

"I lost the two guys I parachuted into Poland—we never heard from them again. I lost a kid named Alyosha whom we parachuted into the Carpathians. He radioed back using the danger signal. He still checks in every week or two, but he always uses the danger signal—we figure he's being played back. When they get tired of the radio game they'll shoot him, too."

Ebby heaved himself out of the chair and walked over to the door and slammed it shut so hard the empty coffee cups on his desk rattled in their saucers. "It's one thing to put your own life at risk, Jack," he went on, settling onto the sill, leaning back against the windowpanes. "It's another to send simple young men into harm's way. We seduce them and train them and use them as cannon fodder. They're expendable. I don't mean to wax corny, honest to God, I really don't but I, feel—oh, Christ, I feel awful. I feel I've somehow let them down."

Jack heard Ebby out—he knew there weren't many people his friend could talk to, and talking was good for him. From time to time Jack came up with what he thought would be a comforting cliche: You're not the only one in this situation, Ebby; if you didn't do it someone else would have to; we'll only know if our efforts to roll back Communism are quixotic when they write about this period in the history books.

Eventually Jack glanced at his Bulova. "Oh, shit, I gotta run if I don't want to miss the flight back."

Ebby walked him down to the lobby "Thanks for stopping by," he said.

"Misery loves company," Jack said.

"Yeah, something along those lines," Ebby admitted. They shook hands.

Back at Berlin Base late in the afternoon, Jack tore down the steps to the Sorcerer's bunker only to be brought up short by the Night Owl standing in front of Torriti's closed door with her arms folded across her imperious chest. From inside came the melodic strains of a soprano coughing her way through the Traviata end game. "He's in a funk," she announced; the way she said it made it sound as if the funk were terminal.

"How can you tell?" Jack asked.

"He's drinking V-8 Cocktail Vegetable juice instead of whiskey."

"What caused it?" Jack asked.

"I brought him a couple of bottles with his afternoon messages."

"I mean, what caused the funk?"

"I'm not really sure. Something about barium meals giving him stomach cramps. You're his Apprentice, Jack. You have any idea what that could mean?"

"Maybe." He motioned for her to let him pass and knocked on the door. When Torriti didn't answer, he knocked louder. Then he opened the door and let himself into the room. Miss Sipp hadn't been exaggerating about the Sorcerer s funk: his thinning hair was drifting off in all directions, the tails of his shirt were trailing out of his trousers, his fly was half-unbuttoned, one of his cowboy boots was actually on the desk and the grips of two handguns were protruding from it. Traviata came to an end. Gesturing for Jack to keep silent until the music started again, Torriti swiveled around to his Victrola and fitted a new record onto the turntable. Then, angling his head and squinting, he cautiously lowered the needle onto the groove. There was a skin-tingling scratchy sound, followed by the angelic voice of Galli-Curci singing "Ah! non credea mirarti " from La Sonnambula.

Sighting along the top of an outstretched index finger, Torriti—looking like an antiaircraft gun tracking a target—swiveled his bulk around in the chair. Jack turned out to be the target. "So what'd the General have to say?"

"He said affirmative. He said you ought to typewrite your messages from now on."

"Hunt and peck is not my style, sport." He refilled a glass with V-8 juice and drank half of it off in one long painful swallow. Then he shivered. "How the mighty have fallen," he moaned. "When my Night Owl brought up the subject of vegetable juice, I thought the V-8 she was talking about was the new, improved German V-2 buzz bomb. What's going on in Frankfurt that I ought to know about?"

Jack described the dressing-down Truscott had delivered to a hapless subordinate who had been playing with balloons over the Soviet Union but Torriti, who normally relished Company gossip, didn't crack a smile. Jack mentioned having looked in on Ebby. "You remember Elliott Ebbitt—he spent a month or two here before being reassigned to Frankfurt Station."

"He wasn't reassigned to Frankfurt," Torriti snapped. "He was sent packing by yours truly for shooting off his goddamn mouth about alcohol consumption. Good thing he's not here now—he'd be shooting off his goddamn mouth about vegetable juice consumption. What's the fucker up to these days?"

He was in mourning," Jack reported. "The Soviet-East Europe folks just infiltrated a bunch of emigre agents and lost every one of them. Ebby is the case officer."

The Sorcerer, shuffling absently through file cards in a folder labelled Barium Meals," looked up, an ember of interest burning in his pupils. "Where did this happen? And when?"

"Albania. Nine days ago."

Torriti mouth slowly slackened into a silly grin. "Albania! Nine days ago. How come nobody tells me these things?"

"It was a Frankfurt operation, Harvey."

"You're sure the emigres bought it?"

"That's what the man said. Four died on the beach, three in front of a firing squad."

"Eureka!" cried Torriti. "That narrows it down to the Special Policy Committee that coordinates operations against Albania." He drew his handguns out of the cowboy boot and fitted one into his shoulder holster, the other into his ankle holster. He pulled on the boot, combed his hair with his fingers tucked his shirt back into his trousers, swept the V-8 bottle into the burn basket and produced a bottle of PX whiskey from the seemingly bottomless bottom drawer of his desk. "This needs to be anointed," he exclaimed, splashing alcohol into two glasses. He pushed one across to Jack. "Here's to the beauty of barium, sport," he declared, hiking his hand in a toast.

"Harvey, people were killed! I don't see what there is to celebrate." The Sorcerer checked his wristwatch. "London's two hours earlier or later than us?"

"Earlier."

"An Englishman worth his salt would be sitting down to supper in a pub right about now," he said. Torriti flailed around in a frantic search of his pockets, turning some of them inside out until he found what he was looking for—a slip of paper with a number on it. He snatched the interoffice phone off its hook. "Have the Fallen Angel bring my car around to the side door," he ordered Miss Sipp. Knocking back his whiskey, he waved for Jack to come along and headed for the door.

"Uh-oh—where we off to in such a panic, Harvey?"

"I need to narrow it down ever further. To do that I need to make a phone call."

"Why don't you use the office phone—the line is secure."

"Russians thought their lines out of Karlshorst were secure, too," he muttered, "until I figured out how to make them insecure. This is fucking earthshaking—I don't want to take any chances."

Torriti sat on the edge of an unmade bed in a top-floor room of the whorehouse on the Grunewaldstrasse in Berlin-Schoneberg, the old-fashioned phone glued to his ear as he drummed on the cradle with a finger. From somewhere below came the muffled echo of a singer crooning in the nightclub. One of the prostitutes, a reedy teenager wearing a gauzy slip and nothing under it, peeked in the door. She had purple-painted eyelids and frowzy hair, tinted the color of chrome. When Jack waved her away, the prostitute pouted. "But Uncle Harvey always has his ashes hauled—"

"Not tonight, sweetheart," Jack told her. He went over and shooed her out and closed the door and stood with his back to it, gazing up at the Sorcerer's upside-down reflection in the mirror fixed to the ceiling over the bed.

"The Lion and Last in Kentish Town?" the Sorcerer was shouting into the phone. "Can you hear me? I need to speak to a Mr. Epstein. Elihu Epstein. He eats supper in your pub weekday nights. Yeah, I'd certainly appreciate that, thanks. Could you shake a leg? I'm calling from a very long distance."

The Sorcerer drummed his fingernails on the table top. Then the drumming stopped. "Elihu, you recognize my voice? I'm the chum you didn't meet on Hampstead Heath. Ha-ha-ha. Listen up, Elihu—you remember who we were talking about that day... the joker who got hitched to the Communist broad in Austria... I need to get a news bulletin to him but I don't want it to come from me... you told me you speak to him on the phone two or three times a week... yeah, people have been heard to say I got a memory like an elephant's... could you sort of slip my bulletin into the conversation next time you talk to him... tell him an old pal from your old Commando days in Sicily called you to pick your brain, he wanted to know how the apparatchiks at MI5 would react if he delivered an atomic bomb of a serial into their hot hands. Your man in Washington will ask if you have any idea of the contents of the serial. You hem and haw, you swear him to secrecy, you tell him its way off the record, you tell him that your pal—be absolutely sure to give him my name—your pal says he can identify the Soviet mole who tipped the KGB off to the Vishnevsky exfiltration... Of course it's a barium meal, Elihu... Me too, I hope I know what I'm doing... Sorry to interrupt your supper... Shalom to you, Elihu."

The Sorcerer's people had gone on a war footing. Torriti's automatic weapons had been taken down from the wall racks and set out neatly on a makeshift table in the corridor; Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel stuffed bullets into clips and taped them back to back so the weapons could be reloaded rapidly. Jack and Miss Sipp tried out a spanking new miniature walkie-talkie system that employed a tiny microphone attached to the inside of their collars and a hearing-aid-size speaker in their respective auricles. "Testing ten, nine, eight, seven, six," Jack whispered, speaking into the collar of his shirt. The Night Owl's voice, sounding as if it originated at the bottom of a mineshaft, camel back tinny but crystal clear. "Oh, swell, Jack. I am reading you loud and clear. "

Several of the newer Berlin Base recruits who happened on the sub-basement preparations wondered if it meant the Russians were about to invade. "Sir, how will we know when to set off the thermite bombs in the safes?" one of them asked Jack. The Sorcerer, washing down his grub with some water-cooler slivovitz, overheard the question. "Loose lips sink ships " he bellowed down the corridor. "Don't forget to jab yourself with a poison needle so you won't be taken alive." The recruit nodded dumbly.

"He is making a joke," Jack said.

"Un-huh." The young Company officer, a Yale midterm graduate who had turned up at Berlin Base only days before, beat a hasty retreat from the sub-basement madhouse.

For two days and two nights Torriti and his people—catnapping on couches and cots, surviving on sandwiches the Night Owl brought down from the canteen, shaving at the dirty sink in the small toilet at the end of the corridor—waited. The Sorcerer kept his office door ajar; aria after aria reverberating through the corridor and up the staircase. Every time the phone rang Jack would duck his head into the office to discover Torriti talking into the receiver while he fussed with his pearl-handled revolver, twirling it on a trigger finger, cocking and uncocking it, sighting on a bird painted on a wall calendar. "That wasn't it," he would say with a shake of his head when he had hung up.

"How will you know which one is it?" Jack asked in exasperation.

"My goddamn nose will twitch, sport." And then, at the start of the third day, it did.

"Otto, long time no see," Torriti muttered into the phone he had just plucked from its hook. When Jack turned up at the door, he waved excitedly for him to pick up the extension. "Where have you been hiding yourself?" the Sorcerer asked the caller.

Jack eased the second phone off its hook. "...phone line secure?" said the voice at the other end.

"You are actually asking me if my line is secure? Otto, Otto, in your wildest imagination do you think you could reach me on a line that wasn't?

"I may have something delicious for you, my dear Harv."

"Ach so?" Torriti said, and he laughed into the phone.

Otto laughed back. "You are again—how do you say it?—pulling my leg with your terrible German accent."

"I am again pulling your leg, right. What's the something delicious you have for me?"

"One of my people is only just back from a highly successful mission in he East. You have heard of the poisoning of seven thousand cows at a cooperative dairy near Furstenberg, have you not? That was the work of my agent."

"Heartfelt congratulations," Torriti gushed. "Another blow struck against fucking international Communism."

"You are being ironical, correct? No matter. You fight your war your way, my dear Harv, we fight our war our way. Before returning to the West my agent spent the night with a cousin. The cousin has a female cousin on his wife's side who works as a stenographer in the office of the chief of the Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit, what you call the Stassi. She takes dictation from Anton Ackermann. She must raise money quickly to send her husband to the West for an expensive eye operation. She is offering to sell Thermofax copies of all of Ackermann's outgoing letters for the past three months."

"Why don't you act as the middleman, Otto? Middlemen clean up in this dry rotted city."

"Two reasonments, my dear Harv. Reasonment number one: She wants many too many US dollars. Reasonment number two: She flatly refuses to deal with a German. She will only talk with the chief of the American CIA in Berlin. With Herr Torriti, Harv. And only if you come alone."

"How come she knows my name?"

"Ackermann knows your name. She reads Ackermann's mail."

"How many US dollars does the lady want, Otto?"

"Twenty-five thousand of them in small and very used bank notes. She offers to come across tonight and meet you in the British sector, she offers to supply you with a sample. If you like the quality of what she is selling, you can arrange a second meeting and conclude the deal."

Looking over at Jack, Torriti twanged at the tip of his nose with a finger. "Where? When?"

Otto suggested a small Catholic church off Reformations Platz in Spandau, not far from the Spandau U-Bahn station.

"Say about eleven. If this works out I'll owe you," Torriti told the caller.

"Harv, Harv, it is already in the ledger books."

Using his thumb and forefinger, the Sorcerer lowered the phone back int0 the cradle as if a sudden gesture would cause it to explode. "Harv, Harv, its already in the goddamn ledger books," he cheeped, mimicking Otto's voice. "I fucking know what's in the ledger books." A flaccid smile of bliss plastered itself across his limp jowls. He took a deep breath, peered at the wallclock, then rubbed his hands together in anticipation. "All hands on deck!" he bawled.

"What is it about Otto that makes your nose twitch?" Jack wanted know.

The Sorcerer was happy to fill in the blanks. "My friend Otto is Herr Doktor Otto Zaisser, the second in command of an organization calla Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit—Fighting Group against Inhumanities —set up, with a little financial help from their friends in the Pickle Factory maybe two, maybe three years back. They work out of two tumbledown stucco houses in a back street"—Torriti waved his hand in the general direction of the American Sector—"crammed with packing crates. The packing crates are filled with index cards; each card contains the name of someone who's gone missing behind the Iron Curtain. If we need to get a line on someone in particular, Kampfgruppe can be useful. Otto himself specializes in pranks. Last year he counterfeited goddamn postage stamps bearing the portrait of Joe Stalin with a noose around his neck and stuck them on thousands of goddamn letters mailed eastward. On quiet months Kampfgruppe sends in agents to blow up the occasional Communist railroad bridge or poison the occasional herd of Communist cows."

"You still haven't explained why your nose twitched," Jack noted.

"If Otto could really put his hands on Thermofax copies of Anton Ackermann's outgoing letters, he would have begged or borrowed the twenty-five thousand and bought them himself, then turned around and peddled the collection to the Rabbi for a cool fifty grand. The Rabbi would have passed the stuff on to us for a modest seventy-five grand; he would have offered to give it to us free if we could tell him where in South America he he could put his paws on Israel's Public Enemy Number One, the former head of the Gestapos Jewish section named Adolf Eichmann."

"The Thermofaxes could be real—you won't know for sure until you see one."

With a twinkle in his eye, the Sorcerer shook his head. "I happen to know that Comrade Ackermann doesn't dictate his letters to a secretary—he is paranoid about microphones, he is paranoid about leaks, so he writes them out in longhand and seals them in envelopes that leave traces if they are tampered with."

"So your friend Otto is not your friend?"

"Knowingly or unknowingly, he's baiting a trap."

"What do you do now, Harvey?"

"I walk into it, sport."

Torriti, the tradecraft shaman capable of blending into a nonexistent crowd shed the lazy pose of a fat man who drowned his sense of doom and gloom in booze and swung into action. The two Silwans and the four others chosen for the mission, along with Jack, were convoked. Miss Sipp provided a large map of Spandau, located in the British zone of Berlin, and taped it to a wall.

"We have six hours to play with," Torriti told them. "All hardware will be carried out of sight. When it gets dark you will trickle one at a time into the area and take up positions. The Silwans, dressed in sackcloth and ashes, sawed-off shotguns hidden under their scapulars, will be inside the church; when I turn up I expect to see you on your knees praying for my salvation. You four will install yourselves in the darkest doorways you can find on the four corners outside the church. Jack, wearing a beat-up leather jacket and a cloth cap so that anyone spotting him will not mistake him for a Yale graduate, will drive the taxi. You'll drop me off at the door and pick me up if and when I come out. You'll have an M3 and a pile of clips on the seat next to you covered with a raincoat. Everyone will be connected to everyone by the gizmos that Miss Sipp, bless her delicate hands, will now attach to your lapels. Questions?"

Sweet Jesus wanted to know if he could take his lap dog with him. "Priests don't usually go around with dogs on a leash," Torriti told him.

"Are we going to draw hazardous duty bonuses for this operation?" Sweet Jesus inquired.

"If there is gunfire."

Sweet Jesus persisted. "For the purposes of the bonus, will the gunfire be considered gunfire if we shoot and they don't?"

"You're squandering your natural talents in espionage," the Sorcerer told him. "You're cut out to be a lawyer who chases ambulances."

"I completed three years of law studies in Bucharest before the Communists came to power and I ran for it," Sweet Jesus reminded him.

"So much for my elephant's memory," Torriti told Jack. But nothing could dampen his high spirits.

Jack eased the taxi to the curb in front of the Catholic church as the bells in the tower began tolling eleven. He angled his jaw down to his shirt collar and said, "Whiskey leader—everyone outside set?" One by one the Watchers in the street reported in.

"Whiskey one, roger." "Whiskey two, roger." "Whiskey three and four, on station."

"How about inside?" Jack asked.

There was a burst of static. "Whiskey five and six, ditto."

Torriti, wearing an old loose-fitting raincoat and clutching a bottle of gin in a paper bag, pushed open the back door of the small taxi and stumbled onto the sidewalk. He tilted his head, downed what was left in the bottle, tossed it into the back seat and slammed the car door shut with his foot. Jack leaned over and rolled down the passenger window. Torriti dragged a wallet from the hip pocket of his trousers and, holding it close to his eyes counted out some bills. "Wait for me," he barked, gesturing with a palm.

Jack asked, "Um wieviel Uhr?"

"Later, goddamn it. Later." Torriti straightened and belched and, walking as if he were having trouble keeping his balance, staggered toward the double door of the church.

Pulling his cap down low over his eyes, resting his hand on the stock of the M3 hidden under the raincoat on the next seat, Jack settled back to wait; from under the visor he had a good view of the two side view mirrors and the rear view mirror. From the tiny earphone he heard the progress reports:

"Whiskey two—he's gone in," one of the Americans across the street said.

"Whiskey five—I see him," Sweet Jesus was heard to mutter. "Whiskey six—me, too, I see him," said the Fallen Angel.

Inside, the Sorcerer stopped at the shell-shaped font to dip the fingers of both hands in and splash water on his face. Shuddering, he started down the center aisle. There were a dozen or so people scattered around on the benches, praying silently. Two slender men in cowls and scapulars could be seen rocking back and forth in prayer, kneeling on either side of the aisle beside the last row; Torriti made a mental note to tell them that their style of communing with God made them look more like Hasidic Jews than Roman Catholics. As the Sorcerer headed toward the altar, a woman bundled into a man's faded green loden coat, wearing a scarf over her head and sturdy East German walking shoes, started back up the aisle. When they came abreast of each other the woman whispered, "Herr Torriti?"

The Sorcerer mimicked answering a telephone. "Speaking," he said. "Sprechen Sie Englisch?"

The woman said, "I am speaking some little English. Where can we go to be talking?"

Tugging at the elbow of her coat, Torriti led her into the shadows of an altar at the side of the church. He surveyed the people praying on the benches; only the two cowled figures in the back row seemed to be paying attention to them.

The Sorcerer said, "A mutual friend told me you might have some delicious goodies for sale."

"I will exhibit you zvei samples," the woman said. She seemed very ill at ease and anxious to get through the business at hand as quickly as possible. "You are liking what you see, we are meeting again and performing the exchange—my letters, your twenty-five thousand American dollars."

"How can you be sure I won't take the letters and refuse to pay you?"

The woman puckered her lips. "You are doing such, you are never seeing more letters, ja?" She thought a moment, then added, "Twenty-five thousand American dollars billig for what I bringing you."

"Cheap my balls," Torriti grunted, but he said it with a humorless smile and the woman half-smiled back.

Reaching under her coat, she pulled two folded sheets of paper from the folds of her thick skirt and handed them to Torriti. He glanced around again, then opened one and held it up to the light of a candle burning before the statue of the Madonna. He could make out a clean typescript that began with a businesslike salutation to Comrade Ulbricht and ended with the German for "Comradely greetings." The name A. Ackermann was typed at the bottom of the letter. Over the typed name was Ackermann's clearly legible signature. The second letter was addressed to the deputy Soviet rezident at Karlshorst, Comrade Oskar Ugor-Molody, and ended with the same comradely greetings over Ackermann's signature.

"Smells kosher to me," the Sorcerer said, pocketing the two letters. He looked around again and saw two older gentlemen leave their seats and start up the center aisle toward the back of the church. The two Silwans must have noticed them at the same moment because they began fingering the stiff objects hidden under their scapulars; Torriti knew it wasn't erections they were caressing. When the two older men reached the last row, they turned to face the altar, genuflected and crossed themselves and then, whispering intently to each other, left the church. Torriti said to the woman, "Where? When?" He scraped the bottom of the barrel for some high school German. "Wo? Wann?"

Hier," she replied, pointing to the Madonna. "Tomorrow nacht. Okay? Do you comprehend?"

"I comprehend," Torriti said. He blinked rapidly and put a hand on the statue as if to steady himself.

The woman wasn't sure what to do next, which led the Sorcerer to conclude she was a neophyte; someone hired for a one-shot mission. She backed away, then stepped forward and offered her gloved hand. The Sorcerer scooped it up to his lips and kissed it. The woman appeared stunned. Giggling nervously, she fled between the benches and disappeared out a side door. In the back row, Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel looked at each other uncertainly.

The tiny speaker buried in the Sorcerers ear purred. "Whiskey three— a female just now came out the side entrance. Subject is walking very rapidly in the direction of Breitestrasse. Wait—an old Mercedes has turned in from Breitestrasse and pulled up alongside her—she's gotten in, the car's making a U-turn, it's picking up speed, it's turned into Breitestrasse. Okay, I've lost it."

"Whiskey leader —what's next on the menu?"

The Sorcerer muttered into his collar: "This is Barfly—if something's going to happen, now is when. Stay on your toes."

He reached under his raincoat and patted the pearl handle of his revolver for luck, then ambled a bit drunkenly across the stone floor toward the double door of the church. He didn't bother to look behind him; he knew the two Silwans would be covering his back. In his ear he could hear one of the Watchers burst on the air. "Whiskey one—two males have turned in from Carl Schurzstrasse," he reported breathlessly. Jack's voice, unruffled, came over the earpiece. "Whiskey leader—everyone keep calm. I see them in my sideview, Harvey. They're passing under a street light. One is wearing a long leather coat, the other a leather jacket. They're walking toward the church very slowly."

The Sorcerer remembered Jack's jittery comportment the night they were waiting for Vishnevsky to turn up in the safe house over the movie theater. He'd ripened on the vine in the four months since then; Torriti's original judgement—that Jack was a cut above the usual cannon fodder that came out from Washington—had been on the money. Torriti growled softly into his microphone: "Whiskey three and four—come around behind them but don't crowd them. I want them to make the first move."

Pushing through the doors into the darkened street, Torriti saw the two men passing under another vapor lamp about fifty yards down the road; light glinted off the bald crown of one of them. They must have spotted the Sorcerer because they separated slightly and quickened their pace. Shuffling his feet, Torriti drifted toward the taxi parked at the curb. He could make out Jack; he seemed to be asleep behind the wheel but his right arm was reaching for something on the seat next to him. Whiskey Three and Four turned the corner and appeared behind the two figures coming up the street.

The two men were only yards away when the Sorcerer arrived at the rear door of the taxi. As he grasped the door handle one of the two pulled something metallic from his belt and lunged clumsily toward him. Moving with the grace and lightness of a fat man who had survived more street brawls than he could count, Torriti bounded to one side and melted into a crouch. The pearl-handled beauty of a revolver materialized in his fist and kicked back into it as he pulled the trigger. The shot, amplified by the darkness, reverberated through the cobblestone street as the bullet punched into his attacker's shoulder, sending him sprawling. A butcher's knife clattered to the gutter at Jack's feet as he came around the back of the taxi, running low with the M3 under an armpit, and sighted on the second man, who had the good sense to freeze in his tracks. Whiskey Three and Four, pistols drawn, came up on the run. One of them kicked the knife away from the wounded man, who was sitting with his back against the bumper, whimpering. The other frisked the bald man, standing stock-still with his hands raised over his head, and relieved him of a handgun and a small walkie-talkie.

"This was the attack, Harvey?" Jack shook his head in disbelief. "It was amateur hour—"

A small car with a blue police light flashing on its roof suddenly appeared at the end of the street. It sped toward the taxi and, with a screech of brakes, came to a stop a dozen yards away. Two doors were flung open and two men wearing the dark blue uniforms of West German Polizei came toward them. Both had Schmeisser submachine pistols tucked under their arms and their fingers on the triggers.

"How'd they know to get here so fast?" Jack whispered.

"Maybe it's not amateur hour after all," Torriti said under his breath.

"You having trouble?" one of the policemen called.

Jack would forever be proud of the fact that he noticed they weren't speaking German at the same instant the Sorcerer, with incredible laziness, remarked, "They're talking the King's English, sport. Shoot them."

Jack's M3 and Torriti's revolver opened fire as the two policemen, separating their feet to absorb the kick of their Schmeissers, started shooting. Jack's bullets cut down one of them, Torriti's single shot took out the other. The bald attacker standing with his hands over his head grasped his stomach and sank to his knees, hit by a stray bullet from a Schmeisser. Along the street shutters clanged open.

Was ist hier los?" someone shouted.

"Schliesse die Fensterladen—das geht uns nichts an," a woman cried. "Rufen Sie die Polizei," a man yelled.

"Das ist ein Polizeiauto," a teenage girl in another window yelled back

"Time to skedaddle," the Sorcerer ordered, an elated smile spreading across his face. "

"Why do you look so pleased with yourself?" Jack demanded.

"Don't you get it, kid? The fuckers tried to kidnap me!" He threw himself onto the front seat alongside Jack as the taxi sped away from the curb and, skidding around the corner, vanished into the ghostly stillness of the Berlin night.

13

BERLIN, FRIDAY, MAY 11, 1951

HOLDING THE FORT IN THE SORCERER'S ABSENCE, JACK HAD TO RAISE his voice to be heard over the aria playing on the phonograph. He was describing the showdown in the street outside the church to two newcomers who had reported for duty in Berlin Base. "It's an old East German ruse that you should know about," he was saying. He pushed two tumblers filled with Torriiti's PX whiskey across the desk, raised his glass to salute them and downed his drink in one go. "Some heavies menace you, you fight them off or beat a hasty retreat, then a police car or a taxi or an ambulance arrives on the scene, you naturally run over to it for help, they pick you up—and that's the last anybody sees of you in the Western sector. Next thing we know you are appearing before a news conference in the Soviet zone, your eyes glassy from drugs, to tell the world you have asked for political asylum in Joe Stalin's proletarian Shangri-la."

"I never came across anything like this in the newspapers," remarked one of the new recruits, his eyes wide in wonder.

"There are too many kidnappings for the newspapers to cover them all—dozens every month in Berlin alone. And they almost always follow the same pattern."

"Will that thermonuclear reaction we just set off at Eniwetok change anything in Berlin?" the other recruit asked.

The Russians broke our monopoly on the atomic bomb," Jack said. "It won't take them long to break our monopoly on the H-bomb. Don't worry, The Cold War's not going to end before you've gotten your feet wet."

"How long you been here?" the first recruit inquired respectfully.

Jack loosened his tie and let his sports jacket fall open as he sank back into the Sorcerer s chair. He had recently taken to wearing a shoulder holster in addition to the one in the small of his back. The mahogany grip of the Beretta projected from it. "A week shy of six months." He shook his head. "Damnation, time does have a way of flying here in Berlin. "

"Are there any... you know, distractions," the first recruit asked.

"There are some night clubs on the Kurfurstendamm but you want to watch your ass-the place is crawling with Russians and East Germans."

Miss Sipp came in with the morning's transcripts from the sheets monitoring assorted microphones scattered around East Berlin from a call house near Checkpoint Charlie. "If you have questions, problems, whatever, my door is always open," Jack offered. As the two recruits departed he ran through the transcripts, looking for the take from the teardrop the plumbers had embedded in Herr Professor's floorboards. There had been some rambling SNIPER trap every morning since the microphone went into service twelve days before; of limited value from an intelligence point, the transcripts had come out of the Watchers' typewriters looking vaguely interestingly so far. This morning there was nothing from SNIPER. Jack sat up straight and went through the transcripts again.

"How come there's nothing from the SNIPER microphone?" he hollered out to Miss Sipp.

"I was curious t00, s0 I got one of the Watchers on the horn-he said that particular teardrop has dried up."

"Check again, huh?"

"Still no joy," Miss Sipp reported later in the morning. "They're telling me there are two possibilities. Possibility number one: Someone discovered it and removed it. P0ssibility number two: RAINBOW and/or SNIPER may be in the hands of the KGB."

"The sons of bitches left out possibility number three," Jack blurted out, his words infused with seething irritability. "The microphone and/or one of the transmitters may be defective."

"They tested the material before they installed it," Miss Sipp said quietly. Ironing out the wrinkles in her skirt with a palm, she came around the desk and touched her finger tips to the back of Jack's wrist in a sisterly way. "Face the music Jack. You've become emotionally involved with your courier. This is definitely not a healthy situation."

Jack shook off her hand. "I never figured out why Harvey wanted me to bug them in the first place—he s getting everything SNIPER knows spelled out on pieces of silk. "

"Mr. Torriti is a very methodical person, Jack. Count on him to cover angles others dont know exist."

Tack turned up early at the rehearsal hall on Hardenbergstrasse for the pillar Friday night rendezvous with Lili, only to discover a hand-printed note taped to Aristide's cubbyhole. It announced that Lili's dance classes had heen cancelled until further notice. At wit's end, Jack dispatched an all-points enquiry to Berlin Base's army of informers asking if anyone had gotten wind of an important arrest in the Soviet sector. The answers that came filtering back reassured him slightly: There had been no visible signs of any earthshaking arrests. The KGB officers at Karlshorst were preoccupied with a new Moscow Centre regulation requiring officers being rotated back to the Motherland to pay a stiff duty on furniture, clothing, automobiles, motor scooters and bicycles imported from the German Democratic Republic; there even had been some talk of circulating a petition but the rezident. General Ilichev, had chewed out the ringleaders and nipped the proto-rebellion in the bud. Still not satisfied. Jack got hold of the Berlin Base listening-station logs recording radio traffic into and out of Karlshorst. Again, there was nothing out of the ordinary. He read through the last few days of reports from Watchers keeping an eye on Soviet airports. There were the usual nights, all scheduled. Jack even had the Fallen Angel check the private dance school on Alexanderplatz where Lili taught mornings; a note on the concierge's window said that, until further notice, Fraulein Mittag's class would be taught by Frau Haeckler. On the way back to the American zone the Fallen Angel had dropped by the caretaker's flat under the Professor's apartment to see if her spanking new Czech radio was functioning properly; to see, also, if he could pry out of her news of the whereabouts of the couple who lived overhead. The radio, the Fallen Angel told Jack, had been tuned to the Radio Liberty wavelength in Munich. The arthritis medicine hadn't had much of an effect on the pain. The people who lived upstairs were away. Period.

Hoping against hope that there was an innocent explanation for RAINBOW'S dropping from sight, Jack went to the Tuesday night rendezvous. The sign posted on Aristide's cubbyhole cancelling dance lessons was gone. As suddenly as she had disappeared, Lili reappeared. Watching from the shadows of the doorway across from the stage entrance, Jack monitored her arrival. Nobody seemed to be following her. Two hours later her students duck-walked off after the class. Rushing into the narrow corridor that reeked of sweat and talcum powder, taking the steps three at a time, Jack burst into the top floor rehearsal hall to discover Lili standing with her back arched and one long leg stretched out along the barre.

Gripping her wrist, he pried her away from the barre. "Where have you been?" he demanded harshly.

"Please, you are hurting me—"

"I was afraid you'd been—"

"I could not think of how to get word to you—"

"If you'd been arrested—

Jack let go of her wrist. They both took a deep breath. "Jack-in-the-box," Lili whispered. She placed the flat of her palm on his solar plexus and pushed him back and shook her head once and then, sighing like a child folded herself into his arms. "Herr Professor's brother died suddenly. We had to go to Dresden for the funeral. We stayed a few days in order to help his wife put things in order... there were bank accounts, there was an insurance policy. Oh, Jack, this is not possible. What are we to do?"

"Give me time," he said. "I'll think of something."

"What permits you to hope that time exist for us?" she murmured, breathing words into his ear that were as moist and as warm as a square of silk.

Jack crushed her to him. "Spend a night with me, Lili," he pleaded. "Only one."

"No," she said, clinging to him. "I must not..." Her voice trailed off weakly.

Lili twisted in the narrow wooden bed so that her back was toward Jack. Pressing into her, he buried his mouth in the nape of her neck and ran a calloused palm along the curve of her hip. Her voice, husky from hours of love-making, drifted back over a lean shoulder. "Did you ever notice how, when a train goes very quickly, everything close to the tracks becomes blurred? But if you blink your eyes rapidly you can stop the motion for an instant, you can freeze the images. You are going by me tonight with the speed of light, Jacklight. In the eye of my mind—"

"In your mind's eye—"

"Yes, in my mind's eye I blink to stop the motion and freeze the images of us copulating."

Jack could feel the sleekness and hardness of a dancer's muscles along her thigh. "Describe what you see."

"I have, of course, experienced physical love before... but it has been a long long while since..."

Jack thought of the Fallen Angel snapping open his small telescope and seeing Lili fall into the embrace of an older man with snow-white hair. "Start at the start," Jack said. "We'll relive tonight together."

Lili shuddered. "I consent, the last time we see each other in the rehearsal hall, to meet you at this small hotel for voyagers in the French Quarter. I tell Herr Professor I am spending the night with my childhood girlfriend in Potsdam; I am surprised not so much by the lie as the fact that it passes effortlessly through my lips. I do as you instructed me—I walk the wrong way down single-direction streets to be positive I am not being followed. Then, my heart beating wildly, I walk directly here."

Jack laughed into her neck. "I also made sure you weren't being followed."

"The clerk at the desk smiles knowingly when she gives me the key but I do not feel embarrassed. The opposite is true—I feel proud... proud that someone as beautiful as you, Jackstraw, has so much desire for me."

"Desire is a weak word, Lili."

"I wait in the room until I hear the sound of your steps on the landing. I have listened for them so many times in the theater that I recognize them immediately. I open the door. This is the precise point at which things began to move quickly... to blur."

"Blink. Describe the snapshots."

"Snap? Shots?"

"That's what cameras do—they freeze images. We call them snapshots."

"I will attempt it. I see me, unable to find words with which to greet you, reaching up to unfasten my earrings."

"The gesture took my breath away, Lili. It seemed to me that all life can offer in the way of intimacy begins with you taking off your earrings."

"I see you pulling your shirt over your head. I see you removing an ugly object from your belt and sliding it under the pillow. I watch you unbuttoning my dress. I fold my garments as you take them off and place them carefully on a chair, which amuses you—I can suppose, in the style of Americans, you would prefer to have me throw them on the floor. I feel the back of your hand brush against the skin of my breast. Oh, I see the melting together of our clothes-less bodies, I see your eyes wide open as you press your mouth against my mouth—"

"Your eyes must have been open to notice."

"I did not want to miss any part of the ballet."

"Give me more images, Lili."

'More snapshots, yes. I possess images for a lifetime of remembering. You carry me to this bed, you loom over me in the faint light coming from the left-open door of the closet, you caress my unused body with your enormous hands and your famished mouth." Lili sighed into the pillow. "You enter slowly into me, you manipulate me this way and that, now you are facing me, now you are behind me, now I am on top of you or alongside you. You are very good at this business of love-making."

"It is the woman who makes the man good at the business of love-making, " Jack said, discovering a truth when he heard himself say it. "We are good lovers with a very few, unremarkable lovers with most and lousy lovers with some. It is not something to be taken for granted, being a good lover. It is never for sure "

"We do not have a long time together," Lili warned him.

"Whatever time we have is enough to persuade me that your images are more powerful than my fantasies."

They dozed for a while, then came awake as the first sounds of traffic reached their ears and the first gray streaks of dawn reached their eyes. Jack started to make love to her again but she murmured that she was sore and he was hurting her and he stopped. Lili got out of bed and washed at the bidet behind the screen in the corner of the room and dressed. They had breakfast, stale rolls and margarine and jelly and hot chocolate made with powdered milk, in the small room behind the concierge's office.

Out on the sidewalk, Lili's face darkened. "And how shall we say goodbye?"

"We won't," Jack said. "When I was a kid my mother used to take me to Atlantic City every Thanksgiving. I remember standing on the beach at the edge of the ocean, my knickerbockers pulled up above my knees, watching as the tide washed the sand out from under my bare feet each time it receded. It left me feeling dizzy, lightheaded. Your going, like the tide's, gives me the same feeling."

"I am the sand under your bare feet." Lili turned away to look at men with blackened faces, who were carting sacks of coal from a truck into the basement of an apartment building. "Life is an accumulation of small mistakes," she said suddenly.

"Why do you speak of mistakes?" Jack asked in annoyance. "To tell me that our night together was a mistake?"

"That is not at all what I meant. It is my way of telling you in one or two sentences the story of my life," she explained. "I have concluded that the problem is not so much the accumulation of small mistakes but the big ones we make trying to correct them."

Later that night the teardrop planted in SNIPER'S floorboards detected the sound of voices, activating the transmitter hidden in the lighting fixture below. In the morning a transcript arrived on Jack's desk. It was filled with half-garbled fragments of sentences from people walking into and out of the room, rumors of a famous marriage on the rocks, a hurried declaration of undying devotion from an older man to a younger woman, the punch line an anti-Soviet joke, a flowery tribute to someone's cooking. It was pretty much what the microphone had been picking up from the start: the inconsequential prattle of a couple in the privacy of their own apartment, as apposed to intelligence secrets, which SNIPER collected at the university or his government offices. After a while there was a long silence, followed by a quiet and intense conversation between what sounded like a German (obviously SNIPER) and a Pole talking in the only language they had in common, which was English.

It was the transcription of this conversation that intrigued Jack. The text contained details of bacteriological warfare testing on the Baltic island of Rüeen, uranium production in the Joachimstal area of the Harz Mountains and the latest Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia. Then the two men chatted about friends they had in common and what had happened to them over the years; one had died of colon cancer, another had left his wife for a younger woman, still another had defected to the French and now lived in Paris. Suddenly the Pole mentioned that he supposed the Russians had an important spy in British intelligence. How could he know such a thing, asked the older man, obviously surprised. The conversation broke off when a woman's footsteps came back into the room. There was some murmured thanks for the brandy, the clink of glass against glass. The microphone picked up the woman's cat-like footfalls as she quit the room. The older man repeated his question: how could his guest possibly know the Russians had a spy in British intelligence. Because the Polish intelligence service, the UB, was in possession of a highly classified British intelligence document, the Pole said. He had seen the document with his own eyes. It was a copy of the British MI6's "watch list" for Poland. What is a watch list? the older man inquired. It was a list of Polish nationals that MI6's Warsaw Station considered potential assets and worth cultivating. The list could have been stolen from British intelligence agents in Warsaw, the older man suggested. No, no, the Pole maintained. The copy he had seen bore internal routing marks and initials indicating it had been circulated to a limited number ofMI6 intelligence officers, none of whom was serving in Warsaw.

The conversation moved on to other things—news of friction between the Polish Communists and the Russians, the suppression of a Warsaw magazine for publishing an article about the massacre of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1943, a spirited discussion of whether the Germans or the Russians had killed the Poles (both men agreed it had been the Russians), a promise to keep in touch, a warning that letters were likely to be opened. Then RAINBOW'S voice could be heard saying goodbye to the Pole. There were heavy footsteps on the stair case, followed by the sound of glasses being cleared away and a door closing.

Looking up from the transcript, Jack produced a new series of snapshots: he could see SNIPER removing his old-fashioned starched collar and the studs from his shirt; he could see RAINBOW reaching up to take off her earrings, he could see the smile on her lips as she remembered the effect the small gesture had had on Jack; he could see her coming back from the toilet in a shapeless cotton nightdress; he could see her turning down the cover of the four poster bed and slipping under the sheets next to the man to whom she owed so much.

Shaking off the images. Jack reread the passages concerning the Soviet spy in MI6. If the Sorcerer wasn't already on his way to Washington to flaunt his barium meals in Mother's face and unmask the Soviet mole, he would have delivered this new serial to him right away. No matter. The gist of the conversation would turn up in SNIPER'S distinctive handwriting on the warm silk that Jack would extract with his own fingers from Lili's brassiere.

14

ARLINGTON, SUNDAY, MAY 20, 1951

WEARING A SOILED GARDENER'S APRON OVER AN OLD SHIRT AND washed-out chinos, James Jesus Angleton was sweeping the aisles of the greenhouse he had recently installed in the back yard of his suburban Arlington house, across the Potomac from the District of Columbia and the Pickle Factory on the Reflecting Pool. "What I'm doing," he said, a soggy cigarette glued to his lower lip, a hacking cough scratching at the back of his throat, a dormant migraine lurking under his eyelids, "is breeding a hybrid orchid known as a 'Cattleya cross.' Cattleya is a big corsage orchid that comes in a rainbow of colors. If I succeed in crossings new Cattleya, I plan to call it the Cicely Angleton after my wife."

The Sorcerer loosened the knot of his tie and slung his sports jacket over the back of a bamboo chair. He shrugged out of his shoulder holster, and hung it and the pearl-handled revolver from the knob of a ventilation window. "I'm a goddamn Neanderthal when it comes to flowers, Jim. So I'll bite—how does someone cross an orchid?"

"For God's sake, don't sit on it," Angleton cried when he saw Torriti starting to back his bulky body into the chair. "The bamboo won't hold your weight."

" Sorry. Sorry."

"It's all right."

"I am sorry."

Angleton went back to his sweeping. Out of the corner of his eye he kept track of Torriti, who began meandering aimlessly around the aisles, running his finger tips over clay pots and small jars and gardening t00ls set out on a bamboo table. "Crossing orchids is a very long and very tedious process," Angleton called across the greenhouse, "not unlike the business ofcounterespionage."

"You don't say."

Angleton abruptly stopped sweeping. "I do say. Trying to come up with a hybrid involves taking the pollen from one flower and inseminating it into another. Ever read any of Rex Stout's mystery novels? He's got a detective named Nero Wolfe who breeds orchids in his spare time. Terrific writer, Rex Stout. You ought to get hold of him."

"I'm too busy solving goddamn mysteries to read goddamn mystery novels," Torriti remarked. "So what makes crossing orchids like counterespionage?"

Leaning on the broom handle, Angleton bent his head and lit a fresh cigarette from the embers of the one in his mouth. Then he flicked the butt into a porcelain spittoon overflowing with cigarette stubs. "It can take twelve months for the seedpod to develop," he explained, "at which point you plant the seed in one of those small jars there. Please don't knock any of them over, Harvey. It takes another twelve months for the seed to grow an inch or two. The eventual flowering, if there is a flowering, could take another five years. Counterespionage is like that—you nurture seeds in small jars for years, you keep the temperature moist and hot, you hope the seeds will flower one day but there's no guarantee. You need the patience of a saint, which is what you don't have, Harvey. Orchid breeding and counterintelligence are not your cup of tea."

Torriti came around an aisle to confront Angleton. "Why do you say that, Jim?"

"I remember you back in Italy right after the war. You were guilty of the capital crime of impatience." Angleton's rasping voice, the phrases he used, suddenly had a whetted edge to them. "You were obsessed about getting even with anybody who was perceived to have crossed you—your friends in the Mafia, the Russians, me."

"And people say I have the memory of an elephant!"

"Remember Rome, Harvey? Summer, nineteen forty-six? You lost an agent, he turned up in a garbage dump with his fingers and head missing. You identified him from an old bullet wound that the doctors who performed the autopsy mistook for an appendicitis scar. You were quite wild, you took it personally, as if someone had spit in your face. You didn't sleep for weeks while you walked back the cat on the affair. You narrowed the suspects down to eight, then four, then two, then one. You decided it had been the mistress of the dead man. Funny thing is you may have been right. We never got a chance to question her, to find out whom she worked for, to play her back. She drowned under what the cambinieri described as mysterious circumstances—she apparently stripped to the skin and went swimming off a boat at midnight. Curious part was she didn't own a boat and couldn't swim."

"She couldn't swim because there was a goddamn chunk of scrap iron tied to her goddamn ankle," Torriti said. He laughed under his alcoholic breath. "I was young and impetuous in those days. Now that I've grown up I'd use her. When she'd been used up, that's when I'd tie the goddamn iron her goddamn ankle and throw her overboard."

Torriti hiked up his baggy users, which tapered and came to a point at the ankles; Angleton caught glimpse of another holster strapped to one ankle.

"There's a bond between agent and his handler, an umbilical cord, the kind of thing that exists between a father and a son," Torriti was saying. "You're too analytical to get a handle on it, Jim. You've got dazzling theories into which you fit everything. I don't have theories. What I know I pick up the hard way—I get my hands and knees dirty working in the goddamn field."

"You operate on the surface of things. I dig deeper." Angleton wearied of the sparring. "What did you have to tell me that couldn't wait until Monday morning?"

"I'm in the process of writing a memorandum to the Director laying out the case that your pal Philby is a Soviet spy. Has been since the early thirties. As you're the Company's counterintelligence honcho, I thought it was only fair to give you some advance warning. On top of that, I thought we ought to take precautions to make sure Philby doesn't blow the coop."

"You'll only make a fool of yourself, Harvey."

"I have the son-of-a-bitch by the balls, Jim."

"You want to lay out the case for me."

"That's what brought me across the goddamn Potomac on a drizzly Sunday afternoon when I could be drinking in my goddamn hotel room."

Angleton leaned the broom against the side of the greenhouse and produced a small pad from his hip pocket. "Mind if I make notes?"

"No skin off my goddamn nose."

Pulling the bamboo chair up to the bamboo table, pushing aside his gardening tools to make room for the pad, Angleton fingered the pencil he used for filling in his gardening log and looked up, the barest trace of a condescending smile on his lips.

The Sorcerer, patrolling behind him, began with the story of Philby's membership in the Cambridge Socialist Society in the early thirties, his pilgrimage to riot-torn Vienna, his marriage to a rabid Red (Angleton's Israeli friend, Teddy Koliek, had known about the wedding), his efforts after he returned to England to paper over his left-wing leanings by turning up at German embassy parties and nursing a reputation for being pro-German. Then came the Times assignment to cover Franco's side during the Spanish Civil War.

Angleton glanced up. "Adrian has been vetted a dozen times over the years—none of this breaks new ground."

Torriti rambled on, raising the Krivitsky serial which, according to Elihu Epstein, the Brits had never shared with their American cousins.

"Krivitsky was debriefed when he reached this side of the Atlantic," Angleton remembered. He closed his eyes and quoted the serial from memory. "There is a Soviet mole, code named PARSIFAL and handled by a master spy known by the nickname Starik, working in British intelligence. The mole worked for a time as a journalist in Spain during the Civil War." Opening his eyes, Angleton snickered. "Krivitsky was telling us there was a needle in the haystack in the hope we'd take him seriously."

"Somebody took him seriously—he was murdered in Washington in 1941."

"The official police report listed his death as a suicide." Torriti turned in a complete circle, as if he were winding himself up, then asked if Angleton was aware that Philby had signed out MI6 Source Books on the Soviet Union long before he became involved in Soviet counterespionage.

"No, I didn't know that but, knowing Adrian, knowing how thorough he is, I would have been surprised if he hadn't signed out those Source Books."

"Which brings us to Vishnevsky," the Sorcerer said, "the would-be defector who told us he could finger a Soviet mole in MI6."

"Which brings us to Vishnevsky," Angleton agreed.

"The night of the aborted exfiltration," Torriti plunged on, KGB Karlshorst sent Moscow Centre an Urgent Immediate—the Sorcerer happened to have a copy of the clear text—thanking Moscow for the early warning that prevented the defection of Lieutenant Colonel Volkov/Vishnevsky, his wife and his son. "Once Vishnevsky claimed he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6," Torriti said, "I was careful not to include any Brits on the Vishnevsky distribution list. So tell me something, Jim. I'm told you hang out with Philby at La Nicoise, not to mention that he drops by your office whenever he shows up at the Pickle Factory. Did you mention Vishnevsky to your British pal? Spill the beans, Jim. Did you tell him we had someone claiming he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6?"

Angleton set down his pencil. He appeared to be talking to himself. "To begin with, there is no hard evidence that there is a Soviet mole in MI6—"

"Vishnevsky claimed there was—"

"Vishnevsky wouldn't have been the first defector to make himself appear valuable by claiming to have a gold ingot."

"All the pieces fit," Torriti insisted.

"All the pieces are circumstantial," Angleton said coolly; he was talking clown to Torriti again. "All the pieces could point to any one of two or three Brits." Sucking on his cigarette, he twisted in the bamboo chair until he was facing Torriti. "I know Adrian as well as I know anyone in the world," he announced with sudden vehemence. "I know what makes him tick, I know what he's going to say, the attitude he'll take in a given situation, before he opens his mouth and starts to stutter. I'd trust Adrian with my life. He couldn't be spying for the Russians! He represents everything I admire in the British." A haze of cigarette smoke obscured the expression on Angleton's face as he confessed, "Adrian is the person I would have liked to be."

Torriti produced a rumpled handkerchief and mopped the humidity off his palms. "Would you trust him with your Cattleya if it ever blooms?" Smirking at his own joke, he raised the matter of the agent drops into Poland and the Ukraine that had all ended in disaster. Philby, as MI6's liaison in Washington, had known about these drops.

"You parachute a bunch of courageous but amateur recruits into the lion's den and then you're surprised to discover they've been eaten alive."

Torriti wandered off and picked up a small jar with a tiny bud breaking through the earth in it.

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't handle the merchandise," Angleton called over. "They are extremely fragile."

The Sorcerer set the jar in its rack and ambled back. Pulling out his own notebook, wetting a thumb and leafing back the pages, he began to walk Angleton through his series of barium meals. He had sent one off to every single person on the Washington end who might have betrayed the Vishnevsky exfiltration. All of the barium messages had looked as if they were distributed widely but the distribution had been limited in each case to a single person or a single office. All of the operations he had exposed in the meals remained in place—all, that is, except the Albanian operation. The barium meal spelling out the Albanian caper had gone to the inter-agency Special Policy Committee, of which Philby was a member.

"There are sixteen members of the Special Policy Committee," Angleton noted, "not counting aides and secretaries who are cleared to read everything that passes through the committees hands."

"Know that," Torriti said. "That's why I narrowed the field down with a last barium meal. I had it sent to Philby himself. I let him know that I knew the identity of the Soviet mole in MI6. Two days later the Russians set me up for a kidnapping."

"Considering how you were occupied at the time—not surprising they'd try to get their hands on the head of Berlin Base." Suddenly a gleam appeared in Angleton's dark Mexican eyes. He snapped shut his notebook and stood up. "There was one more barium meal you haven't mentioned, Harvey. Unfortunately for you it punctures a gaping hole in your case against Adrian. What's your single best intelligence source in the Soviet zone of Berlin? SNIPER, by far. He is not only a theoretical physicist who has access to Soviet atomic secrets but a Deputy Prime Minister of the German Democratic Republic, someone extremely high up in the nomenklatura—someone who one day could conceivably become Prime Minister. Who services SNIPER? A courier code-named RAINBOW. You fed me this information in one of your so-called barium meals. I don't mind telling you I shared it with Adrian. If Adrian is your Soviet mole, how come SNIPER and RAINBOW weren't blown?"

The Sorcerer retrieved his holster and, dipping his left arm through the loop, buckled it across his barrel chest. "You never did say whether you passed on the Vishnevsky serial to your pal."

Angleton, tracing a series of petals in the film of humidity coating a pane of greenhouse glass, appeared to be in the middle of a conversation he was having with himself. "Adrian can't be a Soviet mole—all these years, all these operations. It is inconceivable."

15

GETTYSBURG, SATURDAY, MAY 26, 1951

EUGENE STOOD ON THE CREST OF CEMETERY HILL, GAZING ACROSS the killing ground that sloped down to Seminary Ridge. "They came from there," he said, pointing with the flat of his hand to the woods at the bottom of the fields. "Pickett's lunatic charge—the high water mark of the Confederacy. At midafternoon thirteen thousand Rebels started across the no-mans land, muskets leveled at their waists, bayonets fixed, battle flags flying, drums beating, dogs barking, half the men pissing in their trousers. If they had been Russian soldiers, they would have shouted: 'To the success of our hopeless task!' The objective was the Union line, stretched out along this ridge over to the Big Round Top. The Union gunners held their fire until they could hear the Rebels calling encouragement to each other. Then seventeen hundred muskets fired at once. A moan went up from the soldiers in the fields. Union grapeshot raked the Confederate ranks; the Yankee cannons became so hot their gunners burned their fingers firing and loading, firing and loading. When the cannons and the muskets fell silent, the battlefield was strewn with limbs and awash with blood. Only half of those who started out made it back to the woods. General Lee is supposed to have ridden up to Pickett and ordered him to rally his division against the counterattack that was sure to chase him back across the Potomac. Pickett is supposed to have told Lee that he no longer had a division to rally."

Philby raised a palm to shield his eyes from the bright sun and squinted across the Gettysburg countryside. "Where did a B-b-bolshevik like you learn about the American Civil War?"

Given the situation, Eugene didn't want to pass on personal information It, if divulged, could one day help the FBI identify him. After all, how many Russian exchange students had studied American history at Yale? " At Lomonosov State University in Moscow," he replied evenly.

Philby snickered. "There's a ropey story if I ever heard one. Forget I asked." A guide leading a group of visitors up the hill could be heard reciting Lincoln's Gettysburg address, '"...are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.'"

"Bloody pertinent question, you want my view." Philby, a paper grocery bag tucked under one arm, took Eugene's elbow and steered him away from the group. They strolled along the ridge, past children spooning ice cream out of Dixie Cups, past a family picnicking in the shade of a tree, until they were out of earshot. Eugene asked, "You're sure you weren't followed?"

"That's why I was late," Philby said. "I went round in bloody circles better p-p-part of an hour playing lost. Stopped to ask a gas station attendant directions to Antietam in Maryland, just in case. What you have to tell me must be bloody important to drag me away from my creature comforts on a Saturday, Eugene."

"The news isn't good," Eugene admitted.

Surveying the battlefield, Philby let this sink in. "Didn't think it would be," he muttered.

Tuning in the Moscow frequency on the Motorola the night before, Eugene had picked up one of his personal codes ("That's correct. 'But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I. Ah, that's the great puzzle!' is definitely from Alice in Wonderland") on the cultural quiz program. Using the lucky ten-dollar bill, he had transformed the winning lottery number into a Washington-area telephone number and called it at midnight from a public phone booth. He found himself talking to the woman with the thick Polish accent.

"Gene, is that you? A small packet has been attached to the back of the garbage bin in the parking lot," she said, all business. "In it is an envelope. Memorize the contents, burn the instructions and carry them out immediately." The woman cleared her throat. "Your mentor, the Old Man, wishes you to tell our mutual friend that he regrets things turned out this way. Say to him the Old Man wishes him a safe journey and looks forward eagerly to seeing him again. I would be pleased to talk more with you but I have been instructed not to." Then the line went dead.

Eugene dialed Bernice's number. "I had a fantastic day," she said breathlessly. "I got forty-four new signatures on my Rosenberg petition."

"I won't be coming over tonight," he told her.

"Oh?"

"Something important came up."

He could hear the disappointment in her voice. "Naturally I understand. Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow for sure."

Eugene went out behind the liquor store and felt around between the back of the garbage bin and the wall until he discovered the packet taped to the bin. Returning to the attic apartment, he tore open the envelope and extracted a sheet of paper crammed with four-number code groups. Working from a one-time pad hidden inside the cover of a matchbook, he deciphered the message, which had come from Starik himself. Eugene committed the contents to memory, repeating it several times to be sure he had it down pat, then burned the letter and the one-time pad in a saucepan and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Grabbing two bottles of Lagavulin Malt Whisky from a shelf in the liquor store, jumping into the station wagon parked in the alley, he headed along Canal Road to Arizona Avenue, then turned onto Nebraska and pulled up in front of the two-story brick house with the large bay window. Another automobile was parked behind Philby's car in the driveway. Eugene left the motor running and went up the walkway and rang the bell. After a moment the vestibule light came on and the front door opened. A disheveled Philby, wine stains on his shirt front, peered out at him, his eyes puny from alcohol and lack of sleep. For an instant he couldn't seem to place Eugene. When it dawned on him who his visitor was, he seemed startled. "I d-d-didn't order anything—" he mumbled, half-looking back over his shoulder.

"Yes, you did," Eugene insisted.

"Who is it, Adrian?" someone called from inside the house.

"Liquor delivery, Jimbo. D-d-didn't want the river to run dry on us, did I?"

Through the open door Eugene caught a glimpse of a gaunt, stoop-shouldered figure pulling a book from a shelf and leafing through it. "There's a time, a place, some instructions written in plain text on the inside cover of one of the cartons," Eugene whispered. "Don't forget to burn it." He handed Philby an invoice. Philby disappeared into the house and returned counting out bills from a woman's snap purse. "Keep the change, old boy," he said in, a voice loud enough to be overheard.

"In a hundred years you'd never guess who was visiting me when you d-d-dropped by so unexpectedly last night." Philby was saying now. They had reached the commemorative stone marking the furthest Confederate soldiers had reached during Pickett's charge on July 3, 1863. "It was the illustrious Jim Angleton himself, Mr. Counterintelligence in the flesh, come to conimisserate with me—seems like one of the Company underlings, a rum chap from Berlin with an Italian-sounding name, has d-d-decided I'm the rotter who've been giving away CIA secrets to the ghastly KGB."

"Angleton told you that?"

"Jimbo and I go back to the Creation," Philby explained. "He knows I couldn't be a Soviet mole." He had a good chuckle at this, though it was easy to see his heart wasn't in it.

"I'm afraid it's not a laughing matter," Eugene remarked. "Did you bring all your paraphernalia with you."

"Stuff's here in the bag," Philby said morosely.

"You didn't leave anything behind? Sorry, but I was told to ask you."

Philby shook his head. Eugene took the paper bag filled with the objects that would doom Philby if the Americans discovered them—one-time pads, miniature cameras, film canisters, microdot readers, a volume of poems by William Blake with instructions for emergency dead drops rolled up in a hollow in the binding.

"I'll get rid of this—I'll go home on back roads and bury it somewhere."

"Why all the alarums? Just b-b-because one cheeky bugger comes out of the woodwork and wags a finger at me is no reason to p-p-push the bloody p-p-p-p"—Philby, clearly unnerved, had trouble spitting out the words. "Panic button." Annoyed with himself, he took a deep breath. "Dodgy business, living on the cutting edge," he muttered. "Hard on the nerves. Time to let the bloody cat out of the bloody bag, hey? What's up? Didn't Burgess warn Maclean in time? Didn't Maclean get off ahead of the coppers?"

"Maclean left England last night. He's on his way to Moscow via East Germany."

"Wizard. Wheres the bloody p-p-problem?"

"Burgess lost his nerve and went with him."

"Burgess buggered off!" Philby looked away quickly. Breathing in little gasps, he scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand. "The bloody little bastard! That is hard cheese."

"The British will discover Maclean is missing when they turn up Monday morning to question him about the HOMER business. Won't take them long to figure out Burgess has skipped with him. At which point the alarm bells will go off in London and Washington."

"And all those beady eyes will focus on yours truly," Philby said gloomily "Burgess got you into this business."

Eugene agreed. "Until he headed hack to England to warn Maclean, he was boarding with you in Washington. On top of that there are half a dozen serials that point in your direction. You knew from Angleton that the Americans had deciphered bits of text that identified Maclean as the Soviet agent HOMER. You knew the British were going to take him into custody and begin questioning him Monday morning. Then there are the emigre operations that ended in disaster. There is the business of the Vishnevsky defection." Eugene thought he had made his case. "The rezident figures you have thirty-six hours to get out of the country. You brought your backup passport with you, I hope."

"So Starik wants me to run for it, then?"

"He doesn't think you have a choice." Eugene pulled the small package from his jacket. "There's hair dye, a mustache, eyeglasses, forty-eight hundred dollars in ten and twenty-dollar bills. I have an old raincoat for you in the station wagon. We'll remove your license plates and leave your car here—it'll take the local police a couple of days to trace it to you, by which time you'll be far away. I'll drop you at the Greyhound terminal in Harrisburg. The route is written out in the package—Harrisburg to Buffalo to Niagara Falls, where you cross to the Canadian side. A car will be waiting to take you to a safe house in Halifax. Starik's people will put you on a freighter bound for Poland."

Eugene could see trouble coming; Philby's eyes were clouding over. He put a hand on the Englishman's shoulder. "You've been on the firing line for twenty years. It's time for you to come home."

"Home!" Philby took a step back. "I am a C-c-communist and a M-m-marxist but Russia is not my home. England is."

Eugene started to say something but Philby cut him off. "Sorry, old boy, but I don't see myself living in Moscow, do I? What I relished all these years, aside from serving the great Cause, was the great game. In Moscow there will be no game, only airless offices and stale routines and dull bureaucrats who know whose side I'm on."

Eugene's instructions had not dealt with the possibility that Philby would refuse Starik's order to run for it. He decided to reason with him. "Their interrogators are skillful—they will offer you immunity if you cooperate, they will try and turn you into a triple agent—"

Philby bristled. "I have never been a double agent—I have served one master from the beginning—so how can I become a triple agent?"

I didn't mean to suggest they would succeed..."

Philby, his eyes narrowed, his jaw thrust forward, was weighing his chances and beginning to like what he saw. A thin smile illuminated his face; it made him look almost healthy. His stutter vanished. "All the government have to go on is circumstantial evidence. A bitch of a Communist wife twenty years back, governor, where's the tort? Half a dozen moldy serials, some coincidences that I can explain away as coincidences. And I have an ace up my sleeve, don't I?"

"An ace up your sleeve?"

"Berlin Base has a big operation going—a highly placed defector delivering them goodies twice a week. I passed this on to Moscow Centre but for reasons that are a mystery to me they didn't close it down. I can hear the dialogue now: do you really think this operation would still be running, governor, if I were on the KGB payroll? Not bloody likely! Christ, man, when you boil off the bouillon there is no hard evidence. All I need to do is keep my nerve and bluff it out."

"They broke Klaus Fuchs—they managed to get him to confess."

"You are relatively new at this business, Eugene," Philby said. He was standing straighter, gathering confidence from the sound of his own voice. "What you do not appreciate is that the inquisitors are in a desperately weak position. Without a confession, old boy, their evidence is conjectural—too bloody vague to be used in court. Besides which, if they were to take my case to court, they'd have to blow agents and operations." Philby, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet and circling Eugene, was almost prancing with excitement now. "As long as I refuse to confess, the jammy bastards won't be able to lay a glove on me, will they? Oh, my career will be out onto the hard but I will be free as a lark. The great game can go on."

Eugene played his last card. "You and I are foot soldiers in a war," he told Philby. "Our vision is limited—we only see the part of the battlefield that is right in front of our eyes. Starik sees the big picture—the whole war, the complex maneuvers and counter-maneuvers of each side. Starik has given you an order. As a soldier you have no choice in the matter. You must obey it." He held out the package. "Take it and run," he said.

16

WASHINGTON, DC, MONDAY, MAY 28, 1951

THE DIRECTOR'S REGULAR NOON POWWOW HAD BEEN CANCELLED and an ad hoc war council had been hurriedly convened in the small, windowless conference room across the hall from his office. The DCI, Bedell Smith, sitting under a framed copy of one of his favorite Churchill dictums ("Men occasionally stumble over the truth but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened"), presided from the head of the oval table. Present were the Barons who could be rounded up on short notice: the DD/0, Allen Dulles; his chief of operations, Frank Wisner; Wisner's number two, Dick Helms; General Truscott, who happened to be in Washington on Pentagon business; Jim Angleton; and (in Angleton's words, muttered as the participants queued for coffee in the corridor while the Technical Service's housekeepers swept the conference room for bugs) "the star of the show, the one and only... Harvey Torriti!"

General Smith, who had spent the weekend reviewing the Sorcerer's memorandum and Angleton's written rebuttal, wasn't "tickled pink," as he delicately put it, to discover he had been on the receiving end of one of Torriti's barium meals. "Nothings sacred round here," he griped, "if you think the leak could come from the DCI's office."

Torriti, shaved, shined, decked out in a tie and sports jacket and a freshly laundered shirt, was uncommonly low-keyed, not to mention sober.

"Couldn't make my case that the leaks came from Philby," he pointed out. "I hadn't foreclosed the alternatives."

Dulles, puffing away on his pipe, remarked pleasantly, "According to Jim, you haven't made your case." He slipped his toes out of the bedroom slippers he always wore in the office because of gout and propped his stockinged feet up on an empty chair. "We need to tread carefully on this one," he continued, reaching over to massage his ankles. "Our relations with the cousins can only survive this kind of accusation if we're dead right."

Helms, a cool, aloof bureaucrat who had more in common with the patient intelligence gatherers than the clandestine service's cowboys, leaned toward Angleton's point of view. "Your line of reasoning is intriguing," he told Torriti, "but Jim is right—when you strip it down to the nitty-gritty what you're left with could easily be a series of coincidences."

"In our line of work," Torriti argued, "coincidences don't exist."

The Wiz, his shirtsleeves rolled up above his elbows, his chair tilted back against the wall, his eyes half closed, allowed as how the Sorcerer might be on to something there. A coincidence was like a matador's red cape; if you spotted one, your instinct told you to do more than stand there and paw at the ground in frustration. Which is why, Wisner added, he'd taken a gander at various logs after he'd read the Sorcerer's memorandum. Wiz flashed one of his guileless gap-toothed smiles in Angleton's direction. "On Monday, 1 January," he said, reading from a note he'd jotted to himself on the back of an envelope, "Torriti's cable arrived on Jim's desk. On Tuesday, 2 January, security logs in the lobby show Philby visiting both General Smith and Jim here. Starting in late afternoon on Tuesday, 2 January, radio intercept logs show a dramatic increase in the volume of cipher wireless traffic between the Soviet embassy and Moscow." The Wiz peered down the table at General Smith. "Seems to me like someone might have gone and pushed the panic button over there."

Torriti positioned a forefinger along the side of a nostril. It almost appeared as if he were asking permission to speak. "When all the pieces lock into place," he said, "we'd need to be off our rockers to go on trusting Philby. All I'm saying is we ought to ship him back to England COD, then get ahold of the Brits and lay out what we have and let them grill the shit out of him. They broke Fuchs. They'll break Philby."

"We'll look like horses asses if we go out there with accusations we can't prove," Helms said lazily.

"I don't believe I'm hearing what I'm hearing," Torriti groaned, struggling to keep the cap on his pressure cooker of a temper. "Here we have a guy who began his adult life as a Cambridge socialist, who got hitched to a Communist activist in Vienna..." He looked around the table to see if anything alcoholic had somehow ended up amid all the bottles of seltzer. "Holy shit, the fucker's been betraying one operation after another—"

"There are operations he knew about that weren't betrayed," Angleton snapped.

The Sorcerer exploded. "He knew I knew the identity of the Soviet mole who had compromised the Vishnevsky defection because I sent him a barium meal to that effect. Next thing you know some jokers lure me to a church and try to take me out of circulation. What does that add up to?"

Angleton dragged on his cigarette. "Philby knew that your hottest source in East Germany—"

General Smith ran his thumb down the numbered paragraphs in Angletons rebuttal. "Here it is—number three—you're talking about SNIPER."

"Philby was privy to the SNIPER material from day one," Angleton said. "Backtracking from what was passed on to us, the KGB could have easily figured out the identity of SNIPER. When Harvey discovered that SNIPER was a theoretical physicist and a deputy prime minister in the East German Government, this information was passed on as a matter of routine to the MI6 liaison man in Washington, Philby." He turned toward the Sorcerer. "SNIPER is still delivering, isn't he, Harvey?"

"Yeah, he is, Jim."

Angleton almost smiled, as if to say: I rest my case. Torriti said, very quietly, "He's delivering because he's a Soviet disinformation operation."

The Barons around the table exchanged glances. Truscott leaned back in his chair and eyed the Sorcerer through the haze of pipe and cigarette smoke. "I suppose you're prepared to elaborate on that."

"I suppose I am," Torriti agreed. He tugged two crumpled message blanks from the breast pocket of his sports jacket, ironed them open on the table with the flat of his hand and began reading from the first one. "This is a 'Flash—Eyes Only' that reached me here Saturday morning. 'From: The Sorcerer's Apprentice. To: The Sorcerer. Subject: ÆSNIPER. One: Something fishy's going on here, Harvey."'

General Smith leaned forward. "It starts off with 'Something fishy's going on here, Harvey?"'

"That's what it says, General."

"Is that a cryptogram?"

"No, sir. It's plain English."

The DCI nodded dubiously. "I see. And precisely what is the something fishy that was going on?"

Torriti smiled for the first time that morning. "It's like this," he began. "A while back, acting on my instructions, my Apprentice, name of John McAullife, planted a teardrop microphone in the floorboards of SNIPER'S apartment. McAullife is the officer who's been running SNIPER'S courier code-named RAINBOW..."

At their Friday night meeting in the rehearsal hall. Jack had dipped two fingers into Lili's brassiere and pressed the backs of them against her flesh as he kissed her. When his fingers came out, the square of silk filled with minuscule writing was between them. Later, at Berlin-Dahlem, Jack slipped the silk between two pieces of glass, adjusted the desk lamp and, leaning over a magnifying glass, slowly worked his way through the latest "get" from SNIPER. Not surprisingly, he found details of bacteriological warfare testing on the Baltic island of Rügen, uranium production in the Joachimstal area of the Harz Mountains, the most recent Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia. That was followed by a long quotation from a letter from Walter Ulbricht to the Soviet ambassador complaining about comments supposedly made about his, Ulbricht's, commitment to Communism by his Party rival, Wilhelm Zaisser. After that came a long list of Soviet Army units that, according to an internal Soviet study, were quietly being rotated through a training program designed to prepare combat troops for bacteriological warfare. The Friday "get" from SNIPER ended with the names of middle-level West German government and private enterprise functionaries who were hiding compromising Nazi-party pasts and were thus vulnerable to blackmail.

Bone tired after a long day, Jack switched off the desk lamp and rubbed his eyes. Then, suddenly, he found himself staring into the darkness, thinking hard. Something fishy was going on! He snapped on the desk lamp and, dialing the combination of a small safe, retrieved the most recent transcript of the conversations recorded by the teardrop microphone in SNIPER'S floorboards. Leaning over the desk, he compared the microphone's "get" with the latest material from SNIPER. Slowly, his mouth gaped open. The details of bacteriological warfare testing on Rügen, of uranium production in the Harz Mountains, of the recent Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia had all been subtly altered. The teardrop and the silk were delivering two different versions of the same information. Even more crucial, the silk made no mention at all of the MI6 watch list in the hands of the Polish intelligence service, UB, or the presumption that there might be an important Soviet spy in British intelligence who had provided it.

Did this mean what he thought it meant?

Jack grabbed a message blank and began scrawling a "Flash—Eyes Only" for the Sorcerer in Washington. "Something fishy's going on here, Harvey," he began.

Dressed in the cobalt blue coveralls of an East German state electrical worker, Jack leaned against the kiosk on the south side of Alexanderplatz, eating a sandwich made with ersatz Swiss cheese and skimming the editorial page of Saturday's Communist Party newspaper, Neues Deutschland. Surveilling the far side of Alexanderplatz over the top of his newspaper, he repeated from memory the Sorcerer's answer to his overnight "Something fishy" bulletin. "Hit RAINBOW over the head with it," Torriti had ordered. "Today. I want her answer in my hands when I go into the lion's den Monday at nine."

Jack saw Lili emerge from the private dance school minutes after the noon siren had sounded. She stood for a moment as the lunch hour crowd flowed around her, angling her face toward the sun, relishing its warmth. Then she slung her net catchall over a shoulder and set off down Mühiendammstrasse. She queued to buy beets from an open farm truck, then ducked into a pharmacy before continuing on her way. Jack waved to the Fallen Angel, who seemed to be dozing behind the wheel of the small Studebaker truck that transported bone meal fertilizer into the Soviet zone. He spotted Lili and started the motor. Cutting diagonally across Alexanderplatz, Jack came abreast of her as she waited for the light to change.

"Guten Morgen, Helga," Jack said tensely, slipping his arm through hers. "Wie geht es Dir?"

Lili turned her head. A look of pure animal dread filled what Jack had always thought of as her bruised eyes. She glanced around frantically, as if she would take flight, then looked back at him. "You know my real name?" she whispered.

I know more than that," he said under his breath. He raised his voice and asked, "Wie geht es Herr Loffler?"

Lili pulled free from his grip. "How do you know these things?"

Jack snapped his head in the direction of a workers' cafe across the street. It was evident from his manner that he was very agitated. "I invite you for coffee and cake mit Schlagsahne" reeling giddy, afraid her knees would give way if she couldn't sit down, She let Jack lead her through traffic to the cafe, a spacious high-ceilinged neighborhood canteen with one Bauhaus stained-glass window that had miraculously survived the war. Neon lights suspended from long electric cords illuminated tables covered in Formica. Middle-aged waiters in blue trousers and white shirts and black vests, balancing trays brimming with coffee and cakes on palms raised high over their heads, plied the room. Jack steered Lili up the steps to a table at the back of the almost deserted mezzanine and slid onto the bench catty-corner to hers, his back to a tarnished mirror. He signalled the waiter for two coffees and two cakes and then reached across the table to touch her knuckles.

She jerked her hand away as if it had been scorched. "Why do you coming here in daylight?"

"What I have to say couldn't wait. All hell is going to break loose. I didn't want you to be in the Soviet zone when it does."

"How long have you known our real names, Herr Professor and me?"

"That's not important," Jack said.

"What is important?"

"It is about your Professor Loffler, Lili—I stumbled across the truth. He has betrayed you. He works for the Soviet KGB, he is what we call a disformation agent."

Lili's chin sank onto her chest and she began to breathe through her mouth. The waiter, thinking they were having a marital spat, set the coffee and cakes between them. "Some clouds have silver linings, some do not," he intoned as he slipped the check under a saucer.

Lili looked up, her eyes blinking rapidly as if she were trying to capture an image. "Jack, I am not able to understand what you say?"

"Yes, you do, Lili," he said fiercely. "I can see it on your face, I can see it in your eyes. You understand very well. The silk I pulled from your blouse Friday night—"

"It was filled with information. I read some of it before I gave it to you."

"It was filled with leftovers from a lousy supper. It was filled with things we already knew or weren't true. The good stuff had been edited out."

Now she really did look puzzled. "How could you know what edited out?"

"We have a microphone in Loffler's apartment. It records everything that's said in the dining room. Six days ago it picked up his hurried declaration of love to you. You haven't forgotten what he told you, have you?

Lili, unable to speak, shook her head miserably.

"You had a visitor that night, a man speaking English with an accent. You do remember the evening, don't you, Lili? The three of you had supper together. Then you went out to clean up and let them talk. The microphone recorded a conversation in English between Herr Professor and his Polish friend. You came back with brandy and then left again. What they talked about when you were out of the room was incredibly interesting to me. The trouble was that it had been left off the piece of silk you delivered. The heart of the conversation in the room that night—the secrets, Lili—were assassins. It is not something Herr Professor would have omitted if he was really working for us. Which means he is working for the Communists. Either he or the person who handles him laundered the text before the professor wrote out his report on the silk."

Lili dipped her middle finger into her coffee and carefully ran it over her lips as if she were applying lipstick. Jack said, "Lili, this is bad news for the people I work for—but good news for us. For you and me."

"How is it possible to see this as good news for us?" she managed to ask.

"The debt you owe Herr Professor is cancelled. He has betrayed you." Jack leaned toward her and touched her knuckles again. This time she didn't pull away. "Come across to the American sector, Lili. Come across to me. Right now. Come across and don't look back. I have a small truck waiting on a side street—we will squeeze into its secret compartment and cross the frontier at a little-used check-point."

"I must think—"

"You will start life over. I'll take you to London to see the Royal Ballet. You can try out your English in America. You can use it to tell the justice of the peace that you agree to take me for your wedded husband."

Lili's mask of a face was disfigured by a bitter smile. "Dear Jack-in-thebox, it has slipped from your mind that I am the sand under your bare feet. I make you lightheaded, yes? If only the thing was as simple as you say. You understand nothing. Nothing."

Lili's fingertips passed across her eyelids. Then she sighed and looked Jack in the eye. "It is not the Professor who is a Soviet agent," she told him. "It is me, the Soviet agent. It is me who, in a certain sense, betrayed him." Jack felt spasms shoot through his rib cage as sharp as any he had felt while rowing. It occurred to him that he might be having a heart attack; curiously, it seemed like a solution to his problems. He took a sip of coffee and forced himself to swallow. Then he heard himself say, "Okay, tell me what happened" even though he wasn't sure he wanted to hear it.

"What happened? I ask myself, again and again, what happened." She stared off into space for a moment. "Ernst is a German patriot. After much contemplation he came to the conclusion that the Communists were crippling Germany. He decided to work for reunification of the two Germanies by passing information to the West that would discredit the Communists. He thought through very carefully—he was too well known, both at the University and as a deputy prime minister, to move about freely. I, on the other hand, crossed to the American sector twice each week to give my dance class. So we decided together—the decision was also mine, Jack—that he would collect the information and write it out on silk and I would act as mail deliverer..."

Jack leaned toward her. "Go on," he whispered.

Lili shuddered. "The KGB found out about it. To this day I do not know how. Perhaps they, too, have microphones buried in the apartments of deputy prime ministers. Perhaps they overheard our conversations in bed late in the night. When I left for my first meeting with you—oh, it seems to me a lifetime ago, Jack—I was stopped a block from our apartment. I was forced into the back of a limousine and blindfolded and taken to a building and up an elevator and pushed into a room that smelled of insect repellent. Five men..." She caught her breath. "Five men stood around me—one spoke in Russian, four spoke in German. The Russian was clearly in charge. He was short with fat ankles and had the eyes of an insect, and it crossed my brain that the repellent was there to keep him away but hadn't worked. He spoke German like a German. He ordered me to take off all my clothing. When I hesitated he said they would do it for me if I refused. In that room, before the eyes of men I did not know, I became naked. They discovered the square of silk—they seemed to know it would be in my brassiere. They said that Ernst would be tried for high treason and shot. They said I would certainly go to prison for many years. They said I would never dance again because they would see to it that my knees... my knees—"

"Oh Lili!"

"I was standing before them completely naked, you see. If I could have crawled under a table and died I would have. Then the Russian told me to put my clothes back on. And he said... he said there was a way out for Ernst, for me. I would deliver Ernst's piece of silk to them and they would substitute another piece, rewritten, edited, things taken out, other things added, and I would deliver the second square to the American spy who would come to meet me Tuesday and Friday after my class. They promised that my service to the cause of Communism would be taken into consideration. Ernst, would not be harmed as long as I cooperated—"

Jack's heart sank—he remembered Lili's saying, "Without me he cannot remain alive." At the time it had seemed a phrase with a simple meaning—the emotion or a lover who could not support the departure of the person he loved. Now Jack understood that she had meant it literally; she could not defect West because Ernst Ludwig Loffler would be arrested and tried and shot.

"After each meeting," she was saying, her voice thick with anger, "I had to report—I had to tell them who I met, and where, and what was said. They know your identity, Jack."

"Did you tell them about—"

"Not a word. They know nothing about us..."

Jack racked his brain for things he could say to convince her to come with him to the West. "The Professor—Herr Loffler—is condemned, Lili. You must see that. This game couldn't go on forever. And when it came to an end they would punish him, if only as an example to others who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps. You can still be saved. Come with me now—we will live happily ever after."

"There is no such thing as happily ever after. It is a child's tale. If I would leave, my going would kill him before they came to kill him."

So Lili's "Without me he cannot remain alive" had two meanings after all.

Jack knew he was running out of arguments. "Take him where there are no microphones and tell him what you've told me—tell him the KGB has been using him. Tell him I can get the both of you out."

"You do not understand Ernst. He will never leave his University, his work, his friends, the Germany he was born in and his parents are buried in. Not even to save his life." Her eyes clouded over. "He always said if it came to that, he had a small caliber handgun. He would joke about how the bullet was so small, the only way you could kill yourself was to fill your mouth with water and insert the pistol and explode your head..."

"He loves you—he'll want you to save yourself."

Lili nodded dumbly. "I will ask his advice..."

Which explains why SNIPER wasn't closed down when Philby passed word of it on to his handlers," Torriti was telling the ad hoc war council. "The KGB already knew about SNIPER—the whole thing was a KGB disinformation operation."

There was a restless silence in the conference room when the Sorcerer came to the end of his story. The point of Truscott's pencil could be heard doodling on a yellow pad. Dulles aimed a flame from a Zippo lighter into the bowl of his pipe and sucked it back into life. Wisner drummed his fingers on the metal band of his wristwatch.

Angleton reached up and massaged his forehead, which was throbbing with a full-blown migraine. "There are two, five, seven ways of looking an any given set of facts," he said. "I will need time to tease the real meaning out of this, to—"

There was a sharp knock on the door. General Smith called out gruffly, "Come."

A secretary poked her head in. "I have a 'Flash—Eyes Only' for you, General. It's from the station chief, London."

Helms took the message board and passed it along the table to the Director. Smith fitted on a pair of reading glasses, opened the metal cover and scanned the message. Looking up, he waved the secretary out of the room. "Well, gentlemen, the shit has hit the fan," he announced. "On 3 Friday the British Foreign Office authorized MI 5 to begin interrogating Maclean regarding the HOMER serials first thing Monday. The interrogators turned up at dawn this morning and they discovered he'd jumped ship. I'm afraid that's not all. Guy Burgess seems to have disappeared with him."

Angleton, pale as a corpse, sagged back into his seat, stunned. General Truscott whistled through his front teeth. "Burgess—a Soviet agent!" he said. "Son of a bitch! He obviously went back to England to warn Maclean we'd broken the HOMER serials. At the last second he lost his nerve and went with him."

Wisner pushed his chair off the wall. "How'd Burgess find out we'd broken into the HOMER serials?"

"Burgess was living with Philby in Washington," Torriti said pointedly. General Smith shook his head in disgust. "Burgess rented an Austin and drove to Maclean's home in the suburb of Tatsfield," he said, running his finger down the message from London station. "At 11:45 Friday night Burgess and Maclean boarded the cross-Channel boat Falaise bound for Saint-Malo. A sailor asked them what they planed to do with the Austin on the pier. 'Back on Monday,' Burgess called. On the French side, MI5 found a taxicab driver who remembered driving two men that he identified from photographs as Burgess and Maclean from Saint-Malo to Rennes, where they caught a train for Paris. The trail ends there."

"The trail ends in Moscow," Wisner said.

General Truscott frowned. "If Philby is a Soviet agent he may have run also."

Torriti turned on Angleton. "I warned you we should have taken goddamn precautions."

The Barons around the table studiously avoided Angleton's eye.

"Philby didn't run for it," Angleton said huskily, "because he is not a Soviet agent."

Truscott reached for the phone on a table behind him and pushed it across to Angleton. General Smith nodded. "Call him, Jim," he ordered.

Angleton produced a small black address book from the breast pocket of his jacket. He thumbed through to the P's and dialed a number. He held the phone slightly away from his ear; everyone in the room could hear it ringing on the other end. After twelve or fourteen rings he gave up. "He's not at his home," he said. The two generals, Smith and Truscott, exchanged looks. Angleton dialed the MI6 offices in Washington. A woman answered on the first ring. She repeated the phone number, her voice rising to a question mark at the end. Angleton said, "Let me speak to Mr. Philby, please."

"Would you care to give a name?"

"Hugh Ashmead."

"One moment, Mr. Ashmead."

Around the table the Barons hardly dared to breath. A jovial voice burst onto the line. "That you, Jimbo? Assume you've heard the not-so-glad tidings. Phone hasn't stopped ringing over here. Christ, who would ve thought it? Guy Burgess, of all people! He and I go way back."

"That may pose a problem," Angleton said carefully.

"Figured it would, old boy. Not to worry, I have a thick pelt against the slings and arrows—I won't take it personally."

"Let's meet for a drink," Angleton suggested.

Philby could be heard swallowing a laugh. "Sure you want to be seen with me? I may be contagious."

"Hay-Adams bar? One-thirty suit you?"

"You're calling the shots, Jimbo."

Preoccupied, Angleton set the phone back on its hook. Torriti remarked, "Give the fucker credit—he has moxie."

"If Philby were a Soviet mole," Angleton said, thinking out loud, the KGB would have brought him home along with Maclean and Burgess." To the others in the room he sounded as if he were trying to convince himself.

General Smith scraped back his chair and stood up. "Here's the bottom line, Jim, Philby is contaminated. I want him barred from our buildings as of right now. I want him out of America within twenty-four hours. Let the cousins put him through the ringer and figure out whether he's been spying for the Ruskies." He looked down at Angleton. "Understood?"

Angleton nodded once. "Understood, General."

"As for you. Torriti: you have to be the most unconventional officer on the Company payroll. Knowing what I know, I'm not sure I would have hired you but I'm certainly not going to be the one to fire you. Understood"

Torriti stifled a smile. "Understood, General."

In the executive lavatory down the hall from the DCIs bailiwick, the Sorcerer flexed his knees and undid the zipper of his fly and, groaning with relief, peed into the urinal. "So what does it tell us about the human condition, that taking a leak turns out to be one of life's great pleasures?" he asked the person at the next urinal.

Torriti's short, round-shouldered MI5 friend, Elihu Epstein, chortled under his breath. "Never thought of it quite like that," he admitted. "Now that you mention it, I can see that it is one of the more Elysian moments in one's day." Epstein did up the buttons of his fly and went over to the line of sinks to wash his hands. "How did things go this morning?" he asked, eyeing the Sorcerer in the mirror.

Torriti flexed his knees again and then joined Epstein at the sinks. "Are you wired, Elihu?"

"Afraid so."

"Are you taping or broadcasting?"

"I'm broadcasting. My pals on the other end are taping."

"What are you using for a microphone these days?"

Epstein let his eyes drift to the discreet Victoria Cross rosette on his lapel.

Grinning like a maniac, Torriti leaned toward Epstein and barked into the rosette: "Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known as Kim to his sidekicks in the rancid precincts of British intelligence, has been declared persona non grata. The fucker has twenty-four hours to get his ass out of our country, after which he'll be all yours. Persuading him to help you with your inquiries is not going to be a cakewalk—you may have to twist his old school tie around his neck to get him to talk."

Torriti spun back to the mirror and splashed water on his face. He had been up most of the night rehearsing the case he would make against Philby. Now the tension and the fatigue were hitting him.

Epstein held his hands under a hot air dryer and raised his voice to be heard over it. "By the by, how did your James Jesus Angleton take it?"

"Hard. I don't see him looking at the world the same way again."

"Hmmmm. Yes. Well. Not sure whether one ought to bless you or curse you, Harvey. Relations between our sister services will go from bad to non-existent, won't they? Still, I suppose its better to have loved and lost. Whatever."

"Whatever," Torriti agreed. He desperately needed a drink.

The lunch hour crowd was queuing up at the Hay-Adams, across Lafayette Park from the White House, when Angleton sank onto the stool next to Philby at the low end of the bar. The bartender had set out three double martinis in front of the Englishman. Philby had polished off the first two and, squinting along his nose, was trying to impale one of the olives in a saucer on a toothpick. "Did you spot the three-piece suits at the door, Jimbo?" he asked under his breath. "J. Edgar's eunuchs. They haven't let me out of their sight. There's two cars full of 'em parked out front. Bloody FBI! You'd think I'd knocked over your Fort Knox."

"Some of my associates think you have," Angleton said. He raised a finger to get the bartender's eye, pointed at Philby's martinis and held up two fingers. "They think you sent Burgess back to warn Maclean. They think that's only the tip of the iceberg."

Philby came up with a bad imitation of a Texas accent. "That a fact, pardner?"

"Did you, Adrian? Send Burgess back to warn Maclean?"

Philby slowly turned his red-rimmed eyes on Angleton. "That cuts, Jim. Coming from you..." He shook his head. "'There is a tide in the affairs of men ...My world is coming apart at the seams, isn't it?"

"Bedell Smith sent a stinging cable to your 'C' saying he wanted you out of the country. Your Five is going to rake you over the coals, Adrian."

"Don't I know it." He gripped the third martini and threw down most of it in one gulp. "I would have run for it if I was one of theirs," he told the glass.

I remember one night back on Ryder Street when the buzz bombs were exploding around us," Angleton said. "We were talking theory, Adrian, and suddenly you said that theory was fine as far as it went. You quoted the rounder of British Secret Service back in the sixteenth century—"

"Francis Walsingham, old boy."

I never could remember his name but I never forgot what you said he said."

Philby managed a smirk. "'Espionage is an effort to find windows into men's souls."'

"That's it, Adrian. Windows into men's souls."

The bartender set two double martinis down on the bar. Angleton started to stir the first one with a pretzel. "Haven't found the window in your soul, Adrian. Who are you?"

"I thought you knew."

"Thought I did, too. Not so sure now."

"I swear to you, Jimbo, I never betrayed my side—"

"Which is your side, Adrian?"

The question knocked the wind out of Philby. After a moment he said. with mock lightness, "Well, have to be toddling, don't I? Sorry I can't do lunch. Bags to pack, house to close, plane to catch, that sort of thing." He more or less fell off his stool. Clutching the bar with one hand, he wedged a folded fiver under the saucer filled with olives, then held out his hand. Angleton shook it. Philby nodded, as if something he had just thought of had reinforced something he already knew. "Hang in there, Jimbo."

"I expect to."

Angleton watched Philby stumble through the swinging door. Hoover's three-piece suits fell in behind him. Turning back to his drink, he took a long swallow and pulled a face; too much vermouth but what the hell. Finishing off the martini, he started to reflect on the almost infinite number of interpretations that could be put on any set of facts, the ambiguities waiting to be discovered in patterns of behavior. Say, for argument's sake, that Adrian had been spying for the Russians. Someone that important would have been handled by the senior controller; by the one known as Starik. Angleton had started a dossier on Starik the first time he came across a reference to him in the serial provided by the Russian defector Krivitsky. The file was pretty thin but there was enough to convince him that the mysterious Starik was a cunning and meticulous planner, someone who prided himself on staying one jump ahead of the enemy. Which meant that the real question was not what Philby had given away—let the MI5 interrogatory wrestle with that one—but who was taking his place. It was inconceivable that Starik would let the pipeline run dry, inconceivable that Soviet penetration operations would come to a grinding halt on 28 May 1951.

Torriti's accusations against Philby had initially unnerved Angleton; now he felt a surge of energy; now more than ever he had his work cut for him. Attacking the second martini, he felt himself slip across a faultline, a stygian mindscape where subtleties proliferated, where variations on theme roared in the ear like an infernal chorus. Grimacing, Angleton made a silent vow: He would never trust another mortal the way he had trusted Philby. No one. Not ever. In the end, anyone could be a Soviet mole. Or everyone.

17

BERLIN, SATURDAY, JUNE 2, 1951

THE SORCERER SCRATCHED HIS KNUCKLES ACROSS JACK'S OPEN DOOR. "Can I, eh, come in?" he asked, the balls of his feet on the threshold, his oversized body curling forward deferentially.

The question astonished Jack. "Be my guest," he said from behind the small desk that had been liberated from a Wehrmacht post office at the end of the war. He pointed to the only other place to sit in his cubicle of an office, a metal barber's stool on castors. Jack pulled a bottle of whiskey from a carton at his feet, set out two glasses and half-filled them, careful to be sure they both held the same amount.

Distributing his weight carefully on the stool, Torriti wheeled closer to the desk and wrapped his fingers around one glass. "You wouldn't happen to have ice?" he asked.

"Fridge in the hall is on the fritz."

"No ice, no tinkle. No tinkle, schlecht!"

"That what you said the night we were waiting for Vishnevsky to show up," Jack remembered. "No tinkle, schlecht!"

The Sorcerer scraped dandruff out of an eyebrow with a fingernail. "Lot of waters passed under the bridge in five months."

"An awful lot, yeah."

You played heads-up ball on the SNIPER business," the Sorcerer said. "To you."

They downed their whiskeys.

First time I've been up to the top floor," the Sorcerer said. He took in Jack's cubicle. "Nice place."

"Small."

"Small but nice. Least you have a window. What does it look out on when the shade's up?"

"Brick wall of the building across the alley."

Torriti snickered. "Well, you didn't come to Germany for the view. "

"Where are they with Philby?"

"MI5's Torquemadas are stretching him on the rack. So far he's pleading coincidence. "

"Will they break him?"

"My palm Five, Elihu Epstein, is sitting in on it. He says Philby s going to be a tough nut to crack."

For a moment neither of them could think of anything to say. Then Jack remarked, "She missed two meetings, Harvey."

Torriti nodded uncomfortably.

"The teardrop in SNIPER'S floorboard's gone dry. The silence is deafening."

The Sorcerer looked around the small room as if he were trying to find a way out. "Jack, I have some unpleasant news for you."

"About RAINBOW?"

"About RAINBOW. About SNIPER "

"Un-huh."

"Remember that tap we have on the phone of Ulbricht's wife in her Central Committee office?"

"Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do."

Torriti pushed the glass across the desk for a refill. His Apprentice obliged. The Sorcerer downed the second whiskey, then patted his pockets in search of a folded sheet of paper. He found it hidden in a shirt pocket under his shoulder holster. "This is a transcript of a conversation—took place two days ago—between Ulbricht and his wife, Lotte."

Torriti started to set the sheet down on the desk but Jack said, "What's it say, Harvey?"

The Sorcerer nodded. "Ulbricht tells her the jokers from Karlshorst tracked Ernst Ludwig Loffler to his brother's house in Dresden. They went around to arrest him for high treason, they broke down the door when nobody opened it, they found Loffler's sister-in-law cowering in a closet, they found Loffler hanging from a curtain rod. He'd climbed a stepladder and tied a bunch of neckties around his neck and kicked the ladder away. He'd been dead for two days."

"Un-huh."

"Lotte asks Ulbricht about Helga Asnes. "

"Un-huh."

"He tells her she'd locked herself in the John. The boys from Karlshorst ordered her to come out. They heard a shot." Torriti cleared his throat. "There are details in the transcript you don't want to know... You listening, sport."

Jack ran his finger around the rim of his glass. "She went into it never once considering how the hell she was going to get out again."

"So I guess you kind of fell for her."

"We couldn't spend time. Neither of us had any to spare."

The Sorcerer pushed himself to his feet. "What can I say?"

"Win some, lose some."

"That's the spirit, Jack. Wasn't your fault. You offered her a ticket out. Her problem she didn't take it."

"Her problem," Jack agreed. "Solved it with a mouth full of water and a small-caliber pistol."

The Sorcerer eyed his Apprentice. "How'd you know about the mouth full of water? How'd you know the pistol was small-caliber?"

"Shot in the dark."

Torriti started for the door. Jack said, "Tell me something, Harvey."

The Sorcerer turned back. "Sure, kid. What do you want to know?"

"Were SNIPER and RAINBOW one of your barium meals? Because if they were, Harvey, if they were, I'm not sure I can go on—"

Torriti spread his hands wide. "SNIPER was Berlin Base's crown jewel, sport. I was ready to give a lot of crap away. I was ready to give Lotte's phone tap away. But not SNIPER." He shook his head for emphasis. "No way I'd put him on the line." He raised his right hand. "Hey, I swear it to you, kid. On my mothers grave."

"That makes me feel better, Harvey."

"Onward and upward, sport."

"Yeah. Onward. Whichever."

18

CHERYOMUSKI, MOSCOW DISTRICT, MONDAY, JUNE 4, 1951

STARIK HAD CLAMBERED UP THE SPIRAL IRON STAIRCASE TO THE FLAT roof of the three-story mansion to get a respite from the telephones that never stopped ringing. Was it true, Beria wanted to know, that the two Englishmen who had been spying for the Soviet Union had already arrived in Moscow? At what point, Pravda's editor asked, would the two be available for interviews by Western journalists in order to prove to the world that they had defected of their own free will? The Politburo needed to know, Nikita Khrushchev insisted, whether the rumors circulating in the Kremlin about there being a third English defector were based on fact or wishful thinking.

Grinding a Bulgarian cigarette out under his foot, Starik made his way across the roof to the southeast corner and hiked himself onto the balustrade. From beyond the forest of white birches came the pungent aroma of the dung that had been scattered from horse-drawn carts in the fields that the Cheryomuski collective would sow with feed corn if the weather held. Pasha Zhilov, a.k.a. Starik, had been born and raised in the Caucuses. His father, an acolyte who fasted on the Sabbath and read to his six children from the Book of Revelations before bedtime every night, died in a typhus epidemic when Starik was sixteen, and he had been sent to live with his father's brother in the Ukraine. Before the collectivization campaign of the early thirties, he used to accompany his uncle, a minor Bolshevik official charged with ensuring that private farms delivered the correct quotas to the state, on his trips through the countryside. The thing that Starik remembered most about these expeditions was the pure odors that reached his nostrils from the piles of manure steaming after a sudden summer cloudburst. Because Starik's uncle was extremely unpopular with the Ukrainian peasants—there were occasions when the tires of his car had been slit or sand had been thrown into its petrol tank—he was accompanied by a second automobile filled with armed militiamen who sometimes let the young Starik fire their Nagant rifles at beer bottles set out on a fence.

The boy had turned out to be a terrible shot; try as he would he couldn't prevent himself from wincing before he pulled the trigger. Clearly, his uncle would say with a laugh, Pasha's talents lay in other directions.

Gazing out over the birch trees, Starik smiled at the memory; how prophetic his uncle had been!

In the pale break between the dark storm clouds and the horizon, Starik could make out a large passenger airplane, its propellers droning in a throaty growl, descending toward the military runway that few in Moscow knew existed. If everything had gone according to plan, the Englishmen Burgess and Maclean would be aboard. They would be welcomed by a handful of generals in full regalia in order to make the defectors feel important, then whisked to a secret KGB training school for a long and detailed debriefing, the phase that Starik referred to as "the squeezing of the sponge." After which they would be turned over to the Party people and trotted out in front of the world's journalists to extract whatever propaganda benefits were to be had from the defections.

Starik's talents had lain in other directions, though there were not three people in all of the Soviet Union—in all the world!—who understood in a deep way what he was orchestrating.

What he was orchestrating was the demolition of the American Central Intelligence Agency from the inside.

The first stage of the meticulous campaign had involved letting selected cipher keys fall into the hands of the CIA's experts, permitting them to break out chunks of text concerning the Soviet agent code-named HOMER; the text led the Americans to the British diplomat Maclean. From Starik's point of view Maclean was expendable. His exposure had only been a matter of months; Starik had just accelerated the process.

The timing was critical. Starik knew that Philby would learn from Angleton that the Americas were closing in on Maclean. With the British gearing up for the interrogation process, Starik had planted the idea in Philby's head of sending Burgess back to warn Maclean. Then had come the stroke of genius: Burgess hadn't lost his nerve, as the Western newspapers reported; Starik had ordered him to defect with Maclean. Burgess had protested to the London rezident when he was informed of the order; he was afraid his defection would lead to the exposure of his old friend Philby, since he had been the one who introduced Philby into the British Secret Service to begin with; more recently, the two had even been sharing a house in Washington. The rezident, following Starik's instructions to the letter, had convinced Burgess that Philby's days as a spy were numbered: that, since the aborted Vishnevsky defection in Berlin, the noose had been tightening around his neck; that it was only a matter of days before he, too, would have to run for it; that he would be brought home before the Americans could arrest him; that the three Englishmen would be triumphantly reunited in Moscow for all the world to see.

By bringing Burgess in, Starik wasn't giving up much; Burgess, a pariah who exasperated many of his British and American colleagues, was drunk most of the time, frightened all of the time, and delivering little intelligence of value.

Which narrowed the game down to Kim Philby. He was close to Angleton and had access to other top people in the CIA, and was still delivering a fair amount of secrets. But Starik knew from communication intercepts that the Vishnevsky affair had set off alarm bells. The shrewd American who ran the CIA's Berlin Base, Torriti, had picked up the scent; Philby's panicky message to Moscow Centre warning that Torriti was onto him could have been the result of a barium meal planted by Torriti to smoke Philby out. In any case, it would only be a matter of time before someone would make a case against Philby based on the Krivitsky serials and the dozens of recent CIA emigre infiltrations that had ended in failure.

The enigma in intelligence work was the wear and tear on the nerves and the intellect of the successful agent—there was no way to measure it or to alleviate it. Philby put on a good show but after twenty years in the field he was anaesthetized by alcohol consumption and frayed nerves. It was high time to bring him home. And the bringing in of Philby would serve a greater purpose.

Starik was playing a more subtle game than anyone suspected. Counterintelligence was at the heart of any intelligence service. Angleton was at the heart of American Counterintelligence. Starik had been studying Angleton since Philby had first reported his presence at Ryder Street during the war. Starik had continued to observe him from afar when Angleton was in Italy after the war, and later when he returned to Washington to run the Counterintelligence arm of the CIA. He had pored over Philby's reports or their rambling late-night conversations. Angleton talked endlessly about teasing seven layers of meaning out of any given situation. But Angleton had an Achilles heel—he could not imagine someone being more subtle than him, more elegant than him. Which meant that the person who could descend to an eighth layer of meaning had an enormous advantage over Angleton.

Like all Counterintelligence operatives, Angleton had a streak of paranoia; paranoia went with the terrain of Counterintelligence. Every defector as a potential plant; every intelligence officer was a potential traitor. Everyone, that is, except his mentor and close friend, Kim Philby.

By exposing Philby, Starik would push Angleton over the edge into real paranoia. Paranoia would infect his skull. He would chase shadows, suspect everyone. From time to time Starik would send over a "defector" to feed his paranoia; to drop dark hints of Soviet moles in the CIA and in government. If Starik orchestrated it carefully, Angleton would serve Soviet interests better than a real Soviet agent inside the CIA—he would tear the CIA apart looking for elusive Soviet moles, he would mangle the CIA's anti-Soviet elite in the process.

Only one thing hadn't gone according to plan: Philby had decided on his own not to run for it. He obviously preferred the creature comforts of capitalism; he lived to pull the wool over people's eyes, which fed his feelings of superiority. Playing the great game, Philby would protest his innocence from now to doomsday. And the MI 5 interrogators might not be able to prove otherwise to the satisfaction of a judge and jury in a court of law.

But Angleton knew!

And Angleton was Starik's target. Exposing Philby would break Angleton. And a broken Angleton would cripple the CIA. At which point there would be nothing standing in the way of the operation dubbed KHOLSTOMER, Starik's epic long-term machination to break the back of the Western industrial democracies, to bring them to their knees and clear the way for the spread of Marxism-Leninism to the far corners of the planet earth.

There was one other reason for pushing Philby to the sidelines—Starik had positioned his last, his best, mole, code-named SASHA, in Washington. He was someone with access to the Washington elite, including the CIA and the White House. His nerves intact, SASHA would pick up where Philby had left off.

A warm whisper of air drifted in from the fertilized fields, bringing with it the rich aroma of dung and freshly turned earth. Starik savored the redolence for a moment. Then he started back towards the phones ringing off their hooks in his office downstairs. It was going to be a long Cold War.

Three of the girls sprawled on the oversized bed, their long white limbs entwined, their dark nipples pushing through filmy blouses, their bare toes playfully tickling Starik's thighs and penis under his long rough peasant robe. The fourth girl lay stretched on the sofa, one leg hooked over the back. Her dress had ridden up her skinny body, revealing a pair of worn cotton underpants.

"Shhhhh, girlies," Starik groaned. "How are you going to concentrate on what I'm reading if you fidget all the time."

"Its working," one of the girls tittered. "Its getting hard."

The girl on the couch, who had been with Starik the longest, taunted the others with a pink tongue. "How many times must I tell you," she called from across the room. "It only gets hard when you talk directly to it."

The youngest of the girls, a curly-haired blonde who had celebrated her tenth birthday the previous week, crept under the hem of his robe. "Oh my dears, it's not hard at all," she called back to her stepcousins. "It looks ever so much like the trunk of an elephant."

"Speak to it, then," called the girl from the couch.

"But what in heaven's name shall I say?"

Starik grabbed an ankle and pulled her out from under the robe onto the bed. "I am not going to tell you again," he declared, wagging a finger at each of the girls in turn.

"Shhhhh," the girl on the couch instructed the others.

"Shhhhh," the curly-haired blonde agreed.

"We must all shhhhh," a porcelain-skinned girl with granny glasses declared, "or Uncle will become angry with us."

"Now, then," Starik said. He opened the book to the page where he'dleft off the previous day and began to read aloud.

"Of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey Through The Looking-Glass, this was the one that she always remembered most clearly. Years afterwards she could bring the whole scene back again, as if it had been only yesterday—the mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the Knight—"

"Oh, I did love the Knight," sighed the girl with blonde hair.

"You must not interrupt while Uncle is reading," instructed the girl from the sofa.

"—the setting sun gleaming through his hair, and shining on his armor in a blaze of light that quite dazzled her—the horse quietly moving about, with the reins hanging loose on his neck, cropping the grass at her feet—and the black shadows of the forest behind..."

"I am frightened of black shadows," the girl wearing granny glasses announced with a shiver.

"And I am frightened of forests," confessed the blonde.

"As for me, I am frightened of war," the girl on the sofa admitted, and she shut her eyes and covered them with her small palms to keep bad visions at bay.

"Dadya Stalin thinks there will be a war," the girl who had been silent up to now told the others. "I heard him say as much in the newsreel before the film."

"Uncle, will there be a war, do you suppose?" asked the curly-haired blonde.

"There won't have to be." Starik replied. "Some months ago I came across a thesis by a clever economist. The idea seemed outrageous when I first read it but then I began to see the possibilities— "

"What is a thesis?" "And what is an economist?"

"You ask too many questions, girlies."

"How can we be expected to learn, then, if we don't ask questions?"

"You can learn by sitting still as a church mouse and paying attention to what I say." Starik was thinking out loud now. "The thesis I discovered could be the answer..."

"A thesis is a weapon," guessed the girl in the granny glasses. "Something like a tank, only larger. Something like a submarine, only smaller. Aren't I right?"

Before he could reply, the girl on the sofa asked, "And what will become of our enemies, Uncle?"

Starik ran his fingers through the blonde curls of his niece. "Why, it's as simple as rice pudding, girlies—it may take quite a time but if we are patient enough we will defeat them without shooting at them."

"How can that be., Uncle?"

"Yes, how can you be so certain of such a thing?"

Starik almost managed a smile as he recited from memory one of his alltime favorite lines: "I am older than you and must know better."

Snapshot: an old magazine page proof originally intended for publication in mid-November 1956 but spiked at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency, which claimed that it had identified several employees in the full-page photograph and its publication could compromise their missions and ultimately endanger their lives. The photo, taken with a powerful telephoto lens and accordingly grainy, shows a group of people dressed in heavy winter overcoats—Deputy Director Operations Frank Wisner, Jack McAuliffe, and CIA counselor Mildred Owen-Brack among them—standing on a rise watching a line of refugees trudge along a dirt rut of a road. Some of the refugees carry heavy suitcases, others clutch children by their collars or hands. Jack seems to have recognized someone through the morning ground-mist and raised a hand in salute. Diagonally across the page a big man carrying a small girl on his shoulders appears to be waving back.

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