MOSCOW, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1956

IN AN OVERHEATED OFFICE ON THE TOP FLOOR OF THE LUBYANKA headquarters in Moscow, a group of senior officers and Directorate chiefs of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosri, their eyes riveted on an Army radio on the table, listened through a closed-circuit military channel to the rough peasant caterwaul of the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, as he wound up his speech to the secret session of the Twentieth Party Congress. Staring out a window at the ice-shimmering statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky in the middle of the square below, Starik sucked absently on one of his hollow-tipped Bulgarian cigarettes, trying to calculate the likely effect of Khrushchev's secret speech on the Cold War in general; on the operation code named KHOLSTOMER in particular. His gut instinct told him that Khrushchev's decision to catalogue the crimes of the late and (at least in KGB circles) lamented Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world by his nom de guerre, Stalin, would shake the Communist world to its foundations.

About time, that was Starik's view; the more you were committed to an idea, to an institution, to a theory of life, the harder it was to live with its imperfections.

Which is what he told Khrushchev when the First Secretary had casually raised the idea of a reckoning. The two, who knew each other from the Great Patriotic War, had been strolling along a bluff not far from where Europe's longest river, the Volga, plunges into the Caspian Sea. Four security guards armed with shotguns were trailing discreetly behind.

Khrushchev had recently outmaneuvered his Politburo colleagues in the long struggle for power that followed Stalin's death in March 1953 and had taken control of the Party. "So what opinion do you hold on the question. Pasha Semyonovich?" Khrushchev had asked.

"For too many years all of Stalin's kittens lived in dread, waiting to see whose head would be lopped off next. I myself never went to sleep without a satchel filled with toilet articles and spare socks under my bed. I would lay awake for hours listening for the sound of the Black Marias screeching to a stop in front of my building, come to cart me off to a camp in Vorkuta where the prisoners who are still alive in the morning suck on icicles of frozen milk."

Khrushchev stabbed at the air with a stubby forefinger. "There is something to be said for setting the record straight. But can I survive such revelations?"

Starik had considered the question. Denouncing Stalin as error prone—hinting that he was terror prone—would rock the Party that had delivered absolute power into his hands and then had failed to stand up to him when he abused it; when he executed scores of his closest associates after a series of show trials; when he sent hundreds of thousands, even millions, of so-called counter-revolutionists to rot in the Siberian gulag.

"I cannot say whether you will survive," Starik had finally replied. "But neither you nor the Leninist system can survive"—he had searched for a phrase that would resonate with the peasant-politico who had risen through the ranks to become the Party's First Secretary—"without turning over the ground before you sow new seeds."

"Everyone can err," Khrushchev could be heard saying over the Army radio now, "but Stalin considered that he never erred, that he was always right. He never acknowledged to anyone that he made a mistake, large or small, despite the fact that he made not a few mistakes in the matter of theory and in his practical activity."

"What can he be thinking of!" one of the Directorate chiefs exclaimed. "Dangerous business, the washing of dirty linen in public," muttered another. "Once you start where do you stop?"

"Stalin was consolidating a revolution," snapped a tall man cleaning the lenses of his steel-rimmed eyeglasses with a silk handkerchief. "Mao got it right when he said revolution was not a dinner party."

"To make an omelet," someone else agreed, "one is obliged to crack eggs."

"Stalin," a bloated KGB general lieutenant growled, "taught us that revolutionists who refuse to use terror as a political weapon are vegetarians. As for me, I am addicted to red meat."

"If Stalin's hands were stained with blood," one of the younger chiefs said, "so are Khrushchev's. What was he doing in the Ukraine all those years? The same thing Stalin was doing in Moscow—eliminating enemies of the people."

Over the radio Khrushchev rambled on, his voice rising like that of a woman in lament. "Stalin was the principal exponent of the cult of the individual, the glorification of his own person. Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all."

From the radio came a sharp burst of what sounded like static but was actually an ovation from the delegates to the Party Congress. After a moment the closed circuit went dead. The sudden silence unnerved the men gathered around the radio and they turned away, carefully avoiding each other's eye. Several wandered over to a sideboard and poured themselves stiff whiskeys. A short, nearly bald man in his sixties, an old Bolshevik who resided over the Thirteenth Department of the First Chief Directorate, nicknamed the Wetwork Department because it specialized in kidnappings and killings, strolled across the room to join Starik at the window.

"Good thing the speech was secret," he remarked. "I do not see how the Communist Party leaders who rule the Socialist states of Eastern Europe in Stalin's name—and using Stalin's methodology—could survive the publication of Khrushchev's revelations."

Starik, the Centre's presbyter by dint of his exploits and experience, dragged the cigarette from his lips and stared at the bitter end of it as if there were a message concealed in the burning embers. "It will not remain secret for long," he told his colleague. "When the story becomes known it will break over the Soviet camp like a tidal wave. Communism will either be washed clean—or washed away."

Half an hour after the formal closing of the Twentieth Party Congress, Ezra Ben Ezra, the Mossad's man in Berlin known as the Rabbi, picked up a tremor from a Communist source in East Berlin: a political event registering nine on the Richter scale had occurred in Moscow; delegates to the Congress, sworn to secrecy, were scurrying back to their various bailiwicks to brief the second echelon people on what had taken place.

As it was a Saturday the Rabbi had his Shabbas goy, Hamlet, dial the Sorcerer's private number in Berlin-Dahlem and hold the phone to his ear. "That you, Harvey?" the Rabbi asked.

Torriti's whiskey-slurred voice came crackling down the line. "Jesus, Rabbi, I'm surprised to get ahold of you on the Sabbath. Do you realize the risk you're running? Talking on the phone on Saturday could get you in hot water with the Creator."

"I am definitely not talking on the telephone," the Rabbi insisted defensively. "I'm talking into thin air. By an absolute coincidence my Shabbas goy happens to be holding the phone near my mouth."

"What's cooking?" the Sorcerer asked.

The Rabbi explained about the tremor from his Communist in East Berlin. The Sorcerer grunted appreciatively. "I owe you one, Ezra," he said.

"You do, don't you? As soon as the sun sets and Shabbat ends, I shall mark it in the little notebook I keep under my pillow." The Rabbi chuckled into the phone. "In indelible ink, Harvey."

Working the phone, Torriti made some discreet inquiries of his own, then dispatched a CRITICAL to the Wiz, who had succeeded Allen Dulles as the Deputy Director for Operations when Dulles moved up to become Director, Central Intelligence. The Moscow rumor mill was abuzz, the Sorcerer informed Wisner. Nikita Khrushchev had made a secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress during which he had criticized the cult of the individual, which was said to be a euphemism for Stalin's twenty-seven-year reign of terror. The revelations were bound to send a shudder through the Communist world and have a profound impact on the Cold War.

In Washington, the Wiz was impressed enough to hand-carry Torriti's CRITIC directly to Dulles, who was winding up an off-the-record briefing to the New York Times's James "Scotty" Reston. The DCI, puffing on a pipe, waved Wisner to a couch while he finished his pitch. "To sum up, Scotty. Anybody looking at the big picture would have to give the Company points for its triumphs. We got rid of that Mossadegh fellow over in Iran—when he nationalized British Petroleum we installed the pro-American Shah in his place, thereby securing oil supplies for the foreseeable future. Two years ago we gave moral support to the people who ousted that Arbenz fellow in Guatemala after he took Communists into his government. The Wiz here had a hand in that."

Reston turned a guileless grin on Wisner. "Care to define 'moral support,' Frank?"

The Wiz smiled back. "We held the hands of the rebels who were afraid of the dark."

"Nothing material?"

"We may have provided war-surplus combat boots when the folks who invaded from Honduras got their feet wet. I'd have to check the records on that to be sure."

Reston, still grinning, said, "Fact that Arbenz, a democratically elected leader, expropriated four hundred thousand acres of a banana plantation owner by an American company didn't have anything to do with the coup, right?"

"Climb down off your high horse, Scotty," Wisner told Reston, his Mississippi drawl subverting the smile stitched to his face. "The Company ain't defending United Fruit interests, and you damn well know it. We defending United States interests. You've heard speak of the Monroe Doctrine. We need to draw the line when it comes to letting Communists into this hemisphere."

"It's cut-and-dried," Dulles interjected. "Both Iran and Guatemala are squarely in our camp now."

Reston started screwing the cap back onto his fountain pen. "You guys must have heard the story about Chou En-lai—someone asked him about the impact of the French Revolution on France. He's supposed to have formed his hands into a pyramid, his fingertips touching, and said, 'Too soon to tell.' Let's see what's happening in Iran and Guatemala twenty-five years down the line before we list them on the credit side of the CIA's ledger."

"Thought Scotty was supposed to be one of the Company's friends," the Wiz complained when Reston had departed.

"He's a no-nonsense journalist," Dulles said, slipping his stockinged feet back into bedroom slippers. "You make a strong case, you can usually count on him being in your corner. He's peeved because the Times bought our 'supplied moral support' cover story two years back. A lot of ink's been spilled on Guatemala since then—people are aware that we stage-managed the invasion and frightened Arbenz into running for it." Relighting his pipe, Dulles gestured with his chin toward the piece of paper in Wisner's fist. "Must be a hell of a dog for you to be walking it personally?"

Wisner told the DCI that the Sorcerer had picked up rumors of a secret Khrushchev speech denouncing the errors—and perhaps the crimes—of Joe Stalin. Dulles, bored to tears by administrative chores and budget charts, always open to an imaginative operation, immediately grasped the propaganda potential: If the Company could get its hands on the text of the Khrushchev speech they could play it back into the satellite states, into Russia itself. The result would be incalculable: rank-and-file Communists the world over would become disillusioned with the Soviet Union; the French and Italian Communist Parties, once so powerful there was a question of them sharing political power, could be permanently crippled; the Stalinist leaders in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Hungary, could become vulnerable to revisionist forces.

Dulles instructed Wisner to send a top-secret cable to all Company Nations abroad alerting them to the existence of the speech and ordering them to leave no stone unturned to get a copy of it.

In the end it wasn't the Company that got its hands on Khrushchev's secret speech; it was the Israeli Mossad. A Polish Jew spotted a Polish translation of Khrushchev's speech on a desk in the Stalin Gothic Communist Party headquarters in Warsaw and managed to smuggle it into the Israeli embassy long enough for Mossad people there to photograph it and send it on to Israel.

In Washington, James Angleton had set up a long table as an extension to his desk and filled it with boxes overflowing with file folders on CIA officers and agents; so many of the documents in the folders were flagged with red priority stickers—each sticker signaled an operation gone awry— a curious remark, a suspicious meeting—that one of the rare visitors to Mother's sanctum sanctorum had described them as poppies in a field of snow. Some two weeks after the Twentieth Party Congress, Angleton (who, in addition to his counterintelligence chores, handled liaison with the Israelis) had returned from one of his regular three-martini lunches and was poring over the Central Registry file on a Company officer who claimed to have sweet-talked a Soviet diplomat in Turkey into spying in place for the Americans. Under the best of circumstances Angleton would have been leery of anything or anybody that fell into the Company's lap. Which prompted him to take a closer look at the person who had done the recruiting. Angleton noticed that the officer in question had belonged briefly to a socialist study group at Cornell, and had fudged the episode when it was brought up during an early interview. Philby, Angleton remembered, had joined a socialist society at Cambridge but had later severed his ties with the socialists and covered his tracks by associating with rightist groups and people. The CIA officer who had recruited the Russian diplomat in Turkey needed to be brought back to Washington and grilled; the possibility that he was a Soviet mole and had "dropped out" of the socialist study group on orders from his KGB controlling officer had to be explored. If the shadow of a doubt persisted, the officer would be encouraged to resign from the CIA. In any case, the Soviet diplomat in Turkey would be kept at arm's length lest he turn out to be a KGB disinformation agent.

Angleton was tacking one of the red priority stickers to the CIA officer's Central Registry file when there was a knock on the door. His secretary opened it a crack and held up a sealed pouch that had just been brought over by a young Israeli diplomat. Waving her in, Angleton broke the seal with a wire cutter and extracted a large manila envelope. Scrawled across the face or the envelope was a note from the head of the Israeli Mossad: "Jim—consider this a down payment on the briefing you promised re: the Egyptian order or battle along the Suez Canal." Opening the envelope, Angleton discovered a bound typescript with the words "Secret Speech of the Soviet First Party Secretary N. Khrushchev to the Twentieth Party Congress" on the title page.

Days later, Dulles (over the strenuous objections of Angleton, who wanted to "doctor" the speech to further embarrass the Russians and then wanted dribs and drabs to spin out the impact) released the text of the secret speech to the New York Times. Then he and the Wiz sat back to watch the Soviets squirm.

A friend of Azalia Isanova's who worked as a headline writer for the Party newspaper, Pravda, let her in on the secret as they queued for tea and cakes at a canteen on a back street behind the Kremlin: the American newspaper, the New York Times, had published the text of a secret speech that Nikita Sereeyevich Khrushchev delivered to a closed session of the Twentieth Party Congress. Khrushchev had created a sensation at the Congress, so the American newspaper claimed, by reproving "real crimes" committed by Joseph Stalin, and accusing the Great Helmsman of abusing power and promoting a cult of the individual. At first Azalia didn't believe the news; she suggested that the American Central Intelligence Agency might have planted the story to embarrass Khrushchev and sow dissension within the Communist hierarchy. No, no, the story was accurate, her friend insisted. His brother s wife had a sister whose husband had attended a close meeting of his Party cell in Minsk; Khrushchev's secret speech had been dissected line by line for the Party faithful. Things in Russia were going to thaw, her friend predicted gleefully, now that Khrushchev himself had broken the ice. "It might even become possible," he added, his voice reduced to a whisper, "for you to publish your—"

Azalia brought a finger to her lips, cutting him off before he could finish the sentence.

In fact, Azalia—trained as a historian and working for the last four years as a researcher at the Historical Archives Institute in Moscow, thanks to a letter of introduction from her girlfriend s father, the KGB chief Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria—had been compiling index card files on Stalin's victims. She had been enormously moved, years before, by two lines from Akhmatova's poem, "Requiem," which she had come across in an underground samizdat edition passed from hand to hand:

I should like to call you all by name,

But they have lost the lists...

Azalia had celebrated the death of Stalin in March of 1953 by beginning t0 compile the lost lists; cataloguing Stalin's victims became the secret passion of her life. The first two index cards in her collection bore the names of her mother and father, both arrested by the secret police in the late forties and (as she discovered from dossiers she unearthed in the Historical Archive Institute) summarily executed as "enemies of the people" in one of the basements of the massive KGB headquarters on Lubyanskaya Square. Their bodies, along with the dozens of others executed that day, had been incinerated in a city crematorium (there would have been a small mountain of corpses piled in the courtyard, and dogs had been seen gnawing on human arms or legs in a nearby field), and their ashes thrown into a common trench on the outskirts of Moscow. The great majority of her index cards were based on files she came across in cartons gathering dust in the Institute. Other information came from personal contacts with writers and artists and colleagues; almost everyone had lost a parent or a relative or a friend in the Stalinist purges, or knew someone who had. By the time of Khrushchev's secret speech, Azalia had quietly accumulated 12,500 index cards, listing the names, dates of birth and arrest and execution or disappearance, of the up-to-then nameless victims of Stalin's tyrannical rule.

Unlike Akhmatova, Azalia would be able to call them by their names. Spurred on by her Pravda friends suggestion, Azalia arranged a meeting with the cousin of a cousin who worked as an editor at the weekly Ogonyok, a magazine noted for its relatively liberal point of view. Azalia hinted that she had stumbled across long forgotten dossiers at the Historical Archives Institute. In view of Khrushchev's denunciation of the crimes of Stalin, she was prepared to write an article naming names and providing details of the summary trials and executions or deaths in prison camps of some of the victims of Stalinism.

Like other Moscow intellectuals, the editor had heard rumors of Khrushchev's attack on Stalin. But he was wary of actually publishing details of Stalin's crimes; editors who went out on limbs often fell to their deaths. Without identifying her, he would sound out members of the magazine's editorial board, he said. Even if they agreed to her proposition, it was unlikely that a final decision would be taken without first clearing the matter with high ranking Party officials.

That night Azalia Isanova was woken by the thud of feet pounding up the stairwell. She knew instantly what it meant: Even in buildings equipped with working elevators, the KGB always used the stairs in the belief that their noisy arrival would serve as a warning to everyone within earshot. A fist pounded on her door. Azalia was ordered to throw on some clothing and was hauled off to a stuffy room in Lubyanka, where until noon the following day she was questioned about her work at the Institute. Was it correct, the interrogators wanted to know, that she had acquired data on enemies of the people who had died in prison camps during the thirties and forties? Was it correct that she was exploring the possibility of publishing an article on the subject? Glancing at a dossier, another interrogator casually inquired whether she was the same Isanova, Az alia, a female of the Hebrew race, who had been summoned to a KGB station in 1950 and quizzed about her relationship with a certain Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin? Thoroughly frightened but lucid, Azalia kept her answers as vague as possible. Yes, she had once known Tsipin; had been told that continuing to see him was not in the state's best interests; by that time the relationship, if that is what it was, had long since ended. Her interrogators didn't appear to know about her index cards (which she kept hidden in a metal trunk in an attic in the countryside). After twelve and a half hours of interrogation, she was let off with a crisp warning: Mind your own business, she was sternly instructed, and let the Party mind the Party's business.

One of her interrogators, a coldly polite round-faced man who squinted at her through rimless spectacles, escorted Aza down two flights of wide stairs to a back entrance of Lubyanka. "Trust us," he told her at the door. "Any rectifications to the official history of the Soviet Union would be made by the Party's historians acting in the interests of the masses. Stalin may have made minor mistakes," he added. "What leader doesn't? But it should not be forgotten that Stalin had come to power when Russian fields were plowed by oxen; by the time of his death, Russia had become a world power armed with atomic weapons and missiles."

Aza got the message; Khrushchev's speech notwithstanding, real reform in Russia would only come when history was restored to the professional, as opposed to the Party, historians. And as long as the KGB had a say in the matter, that was not about to happen anytime soon. Aza vowed to keep adding to her index cards. But until things changed, and drastically, they would have to remain hidden in the metal trunk.

Lying awake in bed late that night, watching the shadows from the street four floors below flit across the outside of her lace window-curtains, Aza let her thoughts drift to the mysterious young man who had come into her life six years before, and gone out of it just as suddenly, leaving no forwarding address; he had disappeared so completely it was almost as if he never existed. Aza had only the haziest memory of what he looked like but she was still able to recreate the timbre and pitch of his voice. Each time I see you I seem to leave a bit of me with you, he had told her over the phone. To which she had responded, Oh, I hope this is not true. For if you see me too often there will be nothing left of you. On the spur of the moment, stirred by a riptide of emotion, she had invited him to come home with her to explore whether his lust and her desire were harmonious in bed.

They had turned out to be lusciously harmonious, which made his disappearance from the face of the earth all the harder for her to bear. She had tried to find him; had casually sounded out some of the people who had been at the Perdelkino dacha the day they met; had even worked up the nerve to ask Comrade Beria if he could discover where the young man had gone to. A few days later she had found a hand-penned note from Beria under her door. Continuing a relationship with Tsipin was not in the state's best interests, it had said. Forget him. Several weeks later, when the KGB called her in to ask about her relationship with Tsipin, she had managed to put him out of mind; all that remained was the occasional echo of his voice in her brain.

I am pleased with your voice, Yevgeny, she had told him. I am pleased that you are pleased, he had responded.

2

NEW YORK, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1956

A COLD WAR-WEARY E. WINSTROM EBBITT II, BACK IN THE STATES on his first home leave in nineteen months, had a three-week fling with an attractive State Department attorney that ended abruptly when she weighed her options and decided on the bird in hand, which turned out to be a promotion and a posting to the Philippines. Weekdays, Ebby briefed Company analysts on the increasingly tense political situation in the satellite states in the wake of Khrushchev's secret speech. (In June, Polish workers had rioted against the Communist regime in the streets of Poznan.) Weekends, he commuted to Manhattan to spend time with his son, Manny, a thin boy with solemn eyes who had recently turned nine. Ebby's ex-wife, Eleonora, remarried to a successful divorce lawyer and living in a sumptuous Fifth Avenue apartment, made no bones about the fact that she preferred the absentee father to the one turning up on her doorstep Saturdays and Sundays to bond with Immanuel. As for Manny, he greeted his father with timid curiosity but gradually warmed to Ebby, who (acting on the advice of divorced friends, of which there were many in the Company) kept the meetings low-key. One weekend they went to see Sandy Koufax pitch the Brooklyn Dodgers to victory over the Giants at Ebbets Field. Another time they took the subway to Coney Island (an adventure in itself, since Manny was driven to his private school in a limousine) and rode the giant Ferris wheel and the roller-coaster.

Later, on the way back to Manhattan, Manny was gnawing on a frozen Milky Way when, out of the blue, he said, "What's a Center Intelligence Agency?"

"What makes you ask?"

Mommy says that's what you work for. She says that's why you spend s0 much time outside America."

Ebby glanced around. The two women within earshot seemed to belooking out the car windows. "I work for American government—"

"Not this Center Intelligence thingamajig?"

Ebby swallowed hard. "Look, maybe we ought to discuss this another time."

"So what kind of stuff do you do for the government?"

"I'm a lawyer—"

"I know thaaaat."

"I do legal work for the State Department."

"Do you sue people?"

"Not exactly."

"Then what?"

"I help protect America from its enemies."

"Why does America have enemies?"

"Not every country sees eye to eye on things."

"What things?"

"Things like the existence of different political parties, things like honest trials and free elections, things like the freedom of newspapers to publish what they want, things like the right of people to criticize the government without going to jail. Things like that."

Manny thought about this for a moment. "Know what I'm going to be when I grow up?"

"What?"

Manny slipped his hand into his father's. "I'm going to protect America from its enemies same as you—if it still has any."

Ebby had to swallow a smile. "I don't think we're going to run out of enemies any time soon, Manny."

"He told me he wanted to protect America from its enemies but he afraid there'd be none left by the time he grew up," Ebby explained. The Wiz tossed off his Bloody Mary and signaled a passing waiter : two more. "Not much chance of that," he said, chuckling under his breath."

"That's what I told him," Ebby said. "He seemed relieved." Ebby and the DD/0, Frank Wisner, were having a working lunch at a corner table in a private dining room of the Cloud Club atop the Chrysler Building. When two more drinks were delivered to the table, the Wiz, looking more drawn and worried than Ebby remembered him, wrapped his paw around one of them. "To you and yours," he said, clinking glasses with Ebby. "Are you surviving home leave, Eb?"

"I suppose so, Bill. Actually, it's as if I landed on a different planet. I had dinner with three lawyers from my university the other day. They've grown rich and soft—big apartments in the city, with weekend homes in Connecticut, country clubs in Westchester. One guy I worked with's been named a junior partner. He pulls down more in one month than I make in a year."

"Having second thoughts about the choice you made?"

"No, I'm not, Frank. There's a war on out there. People here just don't seem concerned about it. The energy they invest in working out stock options and mergers... hell, I keep thinking about those Albanian kids who were executed in Tirane."

"Lot of people will tell you it's the folks in academia who're wrestling with the really big questions—like whether Joyce ever used a semicolon after 1919."

The comment drew an appreciative snicker from Ebby.

"Sounds to me like you're 'bout ready to get back into harness," Wisner said. "Which brings me to the subject of this lunch. I'm offering you a new assignment, Eb."

"Offering implies I can refuse."

"You'll have to volunteer. It'll be dangerous. If you nibble at the bait I'll tell you more."

Ebby leaned forward. "I'm nibbling, Frank."

"Thought you might. The mission's right up your alley. I want you to get your ass to Budapest, Eb."

Ebby whistled under his breath. "Budapest! Don't we have assets there already—under diplomatic cover, in the embassy?"

The Wiz looked off to the side. "All of our embassy people are tailed, their offices and apartments are bugged. Ten days back the station chief thought he'd shaken his tail, so he slipped a letter into a public mail box addressed to one of the dissidents who'd been supplying us with information. They must have emptied the box and opened all the letters, and that led them to the dissident. The poor bastard was arrested that night and wound up on a meat hook in a prison refrigerator." Wisner turned back to Ebby. "I'm speaking literally. We badly need to send in a new face, Eb. Because of security considerations, because sending someone in from the outside will emphasize the seriousness of the message being delivered."

"Why me?"

"Fair question. First off, you operated behind German lines in the war; In our business there's no substitute for experience. Secondly, you're a bona fide lawyer, which means we can work up a watertight cover story that gives you a good reason to be in Budapest. Here's the deal: there's a State Department delegation going into Hungary mid-October to negotiate the issue of compensation for Hungarian assets that were frozen in America when Hungary came in on the side of the Germans in World War II. Your old law firm has been representing some of the claims of Hungarian Americans who lost assets when Hungary went Communist after the war. We're talking about factories, businesses, large tracts of land, art collections, apartments, the like. Your old boss, Bill Donovan, has set aside an office and a secretary—the desk is piled high with the claims of Hungarian-Americans. The idea is for you to hole up there for a couple of weeks to establish a cover story while you familiarize yourself with the claims, after which you'll go in with the State Department folks and argue that any settlement needs to include compensation for the Hungarian-Americans. Anybody wants to check you out, Donovan's people will backstop you—you've been working there since Eve nibbled on the apple, so your secretary will tell anyone who asks."

"You haven't spelled out the real mission," Ebby noted.

Wisner glanced at his watch; Ebby noticed a slight twitch in one of his eyes. "The DCI specifically said he wanted to brief you himself."

"Dulles?"

"They don't call him the Great White Case Officer for nothing. From here on out, Eb, we want you to stay away from Cockroach Alley. Dulles is expecting us to join him for a drink at the Alibi Club in Washington today after tomorrow at six."

Ebby began chewing on a piece of ice from his glass. "You were pretty damn sure I'd accept."

The Wiz grinned. "I guess I was. I guess I counted on your commitment to protecting America from its enemies."

His brush mustache dancing on his upper lip, his eyes glinting behind silver spectacles, DCI Allen Welsh Dulles was regaling the men gathered around him at the bar of the Alibi Club, an all-male hangout in a narrow brick building a few blocks from the White House that was so exclusive only a handful of people in Washington had ever heard of it. "It happened in Switzerland right after the first war," he was saying. "I got word that some one was waiting to see me in my office but I decided the hell with him and played tennis instead. Which is how I missed out meeting Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, whom you gents know by the name of Lenin." Spotting the Wiz and Ebby at the door, Dulles waded through the crowd and steered them into a tiny office off the cloakroom that he often commandeered for private meetings. Wisner introduced Ebby and then took a back seat; he knew from experience that Dulles relished the operations side of the Company's work.

"So you're Ebbitt," Dulles said, motioning his guest toward a chair, sat in another so close to him that their knees were scraping. Puffing on a pipe, he walked Ebby through his curriculum vitae; he wanted to know what universities he'd attended, what undergraduate clubs he'd belonged to, how he'd ended up in the OSS, precisely what he'd done during his mission behind German lines in France to win the Croix de Guerre. He quizzed Ebby about his two Company tours in Germany; about the agent's infiltration ops into the Carpathians and Albania that had turned sour, about the possibility that Gehlen's Org in Pullach had been infiltrated by the KGB. Then, suddenly, he changed the subject. "The Wiz tells me you're volunteering for this mission to Budapest," he said. "Do you have an idea why we're sending you in?"

"That's above my pay grade."

"Take a stab at it anyway."

"I've been doing my homework," Ebby admitted. "Khrushchev's secret speech pulled the rug out from under the Stalinists in the satellite states. Poland is seething with insurrection. Hungary looks a lot like a powder keg waiting to explode—a totalitarian state run by an unpopular Stalinist with the help of forty thousand secret police and a million and a half informers. I assume you want me to get in touch with the Hungarian firebrands and light the fuse."

Dulles, who was jovial enough in social situations, could be icily shrewd in private. His eyes narrowing, he glanced at Wisner, then looked intently at Ebby. "You're one hundred eighty degrees out of whack, Ebbitt. We want you to go in and tell these people to simmer down."

'Radio Free Europe has been encouraging them to rise up—" Ebby started to say.

Dulles cut him off. "Radio Free Europe is not an organ of the United States government. The bottom line is: We don't want Hungary exploding until we're good and ready. Don't get me wrong: roll-back is still my official line—"

The Wiz put in a word. "You mean it's still the official policy, Allen, don't you?"

Dulles didn't take kindly to correction. "Line, policy, it amounts to the same thing," he said impatiently. He turned back to Ebby. "We figure we'll need a year and a half to lay in the plumbing. General Gehlen's Org has a Hungarian Section up and running but it will take a while to organize arms caches inside Hungary, train and infiltrate teams of Hungarian emigres with communications skills and equipment so that an uprising can be coordinated"

"You're assuming that the firebrands can control their troops," Ebby said. "From the background papers I've been reading, it doesn't seem as if spontaneous uprising can be ruled out."

"I don't buy that," Dulles shot back. "A demonstration on a street corner can be spontaneous. A popular uprising is another kettle of fish."

"Our immediate worry," Wisner chimed in, "is that the firebrands reckon that the United States will be obliged to come in and save their hides once they bring the cauldron to a boil. Or at the very least we'll threaten come in to keep the Russians at arm's length."

"This would be a dangerous miscalculation on their part," Dulles warned. "Neither President Elsenhower nor his Secretary of State, my brother Foster, are ready to start World War III over Hungary. Your job is to convince the firebrands of this fact of life. As long as they understand that, we're off the hook if they decide to go ahead and stir things up. On the other hand, if they can keep the lid on for, say, eighteen months—"

"A year would probably do it," Wisner suggested.

"A year, eighteen months, when the Hungarians—with our covert help—have an infrastructure in place for an uprising, the situation may be more propitious."

"There's another problem you need to be aware of," the Wiz said. "The situation in the Near East is heating up. Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal, last July, his rejection last week of that eighteen-nation proposal to internationalize the Canal, are pushing the British and French into a corner. Israeli teams have been shuttling between Tel Aviv and Paris. They're cooking up something, you can bet on it; the Israelis would do almost anything to get the French to supply them with a nuclear reactor. Cipher traffic between the Israeli Army central command in Tel Aviv and the French General Staff is way up. Feeling here is that the Israelis might spearhead a British-French attack on Nasser with a blitzkrieg across the Sinai to capture the Canal."

"In which case a revolution in Hungary would get lost in the shuffle," Dulles said. He climbed to his feet and extended a hand. "Good luck to you, Ebbitt."

Outside the Alibi Club, a newspaper vender hawking the Washington Post was wading into oncoming traffic backed up at a red light. "Read about it," he cried in a sing-song voice. "Dow Jones peaks at five hundred twenty-one."

"The rich grow richer," Wisner said with a sardonic grin.

"And the soft grow softer," Ebby added.

3

BUDAPEST, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1956

THE PARIS-ISTANBUL ORIENT EXPRESS HURTLED ACROSS THE FLATLANDS bordering the chalky Danube toward Budapest. Drinking hot black coffee from a thermos lid, Ebby gazed through the window of the first-class compartment at the herds of squat, wide-horned cattle guarded by czikos, the Hungarian cowboys riding wiry horses. Stone houses and barns flitted past, along with neat vegetable gardens and fenced yards teeming with chickens and geese. Soon the first low brick-and-mortar factories came into view. As the train slipped through the suburbs of Buda, the narrow highway alongside the tracks became clogged with dilapidated open trucks spewing diesel exhaust from their tailpipes. Minutes later the Orient-Express eased into the West Station behind Castle Hill.

Carrying a bulging attache case and a leather two-suiter, Ebby discouraged the uniformed porter with a shake of his head and made his way through the glass-domed station and down the steps to the street. A fresh-faced embassy counselor waiting next to a car-pool Ford came forward to meet him. "Sir, I'll wager you're Mr. Ebbitt," he said.

"How could you tell?"

"No offense intended but your luggage looks too posh for anyone but a New York lawyer," the young man said with a broad grin. He took Ebby's two-suiter and dropped it into the trunk compartment. "Name's Doolittle," he announced, offering a hand as he introduced himself. "Jim Doolittle, no relation whatsoever to the aviator of the same name. Welcome to Budapest, Mr. Ebbitt."

"Elliott."

"Elliott it is." He slid behind the wheel of the Ford and Ebby settled into the passenger seat. The young counselor deftly maneuvered the car into traffic and headed in a southeasterly direction toward the Danube. "You've been booked into the Gellert Hotel, along with the delegation from the State Department. They flew in yesterday. Ambassador charged me to tell you if you need assistance in any shape or form, you only need to say 'hey.' The first negotiating session is scheduled for ten A.M. tomorrow. The State Department people will be ferried over to the Foreign Ministry in one of our minibuses. You're welcome to hitch a ride. Do you know Hungary at all?"

"Only what I read in my guide book," Ebby said. "How long have you been posted here?"

"Twenty-three months."

"Do you get to mix much with the natives?"

"Meet Hungarians! Elliott, I can see you don't know much about life behind the Iron Curtain. Hungary is a Communist country. The only natives you meet are the ones who work for the Allamvedelmi Hatosag, what we call the AVH, which is their secret police. The others are too frightened. Which reminds me, the embassy security officer wanted me to caution you to be wary..."

"Be wary of what?"

"Of Hungarian women who seem ready and willing, if you see what I mean. Of Hungarian men who are eager to take you to some off-the-beaten-track night spot. Whatever you do, for God's sake don't change money on the black market. And don't accept packages to deliver to someone's cousin in America—they could be filled with secret documents. Next thing you know you'll be arrested as a spy and I'll be talking to you through the bars of a prison."

"Thanks for the tips," Ebby said. "All that spy rigamarole is not up my alley."

Doolittle glanced at his passenger with a certain amount of amusement. "I don't suppose it is. I don't suppose you noticed the small blue Skoda behind us, did you?"

As a matter of fact he had but he didn't want Jim Doolittle to know it. Ebby made a show of looking over his shoulder. The blue Skoda, with two passengers visible in the front seat, was two car lengths behind the Ford's rear bumper. Doolittle laughed. "All of us at the embassy are followed all the time," he said. "You get kind of used to it. I'll be mighty surprised if you're not assigned a chaperon."

Driving parallel to the Danube, the embassy counselor sped past the girders of the Szabadsag Bridge, then threaded through the yellow cars swarming at the corner and dropped off the New York attorney in front of the Art Nouveau entrance to the Gellert at the foot of the Buda hills. Watching Ebby make his way through the great revolving door into the hotel, Doolittle shook his head. "Another innocent abroad," he muttered. And he threw the Ford into gear and headed back toward the embassy.

The small blue Skoda with a long whip antenna attached to the rear fender pulled into the driveway of the Gellert's outdoor swimming pool and parked behind the hedges, giving it a view of the hotel's main entrance down the block. The Hungarian in the passenger seat removed a small microphone from the glove compartment and plugged it into the transceiver under the dashboard. He flicked on the switch, let the vacuum tubes warm up for a half a minute, then spoke into the microphone.

"Szervusz, szervusz. Mobile twenty-seven reporting. The amerikai Ebbitt has entered the Gellert Hotel. Activate microphones in room two zero three. We will stand by and pick him up if he emerges from the Gellert. Over to you."

"Viszldt, " a voice said.

"Viszldt, " the man in the car repeated. He switched off the transceiver.

For Ebby, the week passed in a haze of wearisome negotiations that went over the same ground again and again and seemed to go nowhere fast. During the long morning and afternoon sessions around a shabby oval table at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Hungarian negotiators appeared to be following a script. Sipping mineral water, puffing on cigarettes mooched from their American counterparts, they read in droning tones from long lists of Hungarian assets that they said were frozen in America fifteen years earlier, and supplied outrageous estimates of the value of those assets. The State Department people, used to dealing with Communist apparatchiki who had no mandate to settle for anything less than their initial demands, treated the whole exercise as an indoor sport. One of the State Department economic experts dryly pointed out that several dozen companies on the Hungarian list had actually gone bust during or immediately after the 1929 stock market crash, but the Hungarians, without batting an eyelash, continued to include the companies on their list of frozen assets. On the second afternoon, he finally got to argue his case that any agreement to compensate Hungary for Hungarian assets lost in America must include provisions to compensate Hungarian-Americans—here Ebby hefted a thick pile of dossiers—who lost assets when the Communists assumed power in Hungary. The chief of the Hungarian delegation, a stocky timeserver who picked at his teeth while Ebby's words were being translated, suppressed a yawn. To suggest that the People's Republic of Hungary had confiscated assets, he said stiffly, was to distort history. Under Hungarian law, those who fled Hungary after the Communist regime assumed power in 1947 forfeit any claim to compensation for nationalized assets if they failed to file appropriate forms.

"Could such claims still be filed?" Ebby asked.

"The legal deadline established by law expired on December 31, 1950," the Hungarian responded.

"Who had passed that law?" Ebby asked.

"The legitimately elected government of the People's Republic Hungary," the bureaucrat replied.

"In other words," Ebby said, "having confiscated assets, your government then passed a law ex post facto denying compensation to those had fled the country."

"We never denied compensation to those who left the country," Hungarian insisted. "We denied compensation to those who failed to claims before the legal deadline."

"You need to simmer down," the head of the State Department delegation, an old hand at dealing with the Communists, told Ebby at an embassy reception that evening. "We're just going through motions here. The United States is not about to hand over gold ingots to a Soviet satellite so they can build more tanks and planes."

Saturday morning Ebby ordered a car with an English-speaking chauffeur and set out (with the small blue Skoda trailing behind him) to see some thing of Budapest. He roamed the Buda hills, inspecting the Buda Cast where Hungarian Kings and Habsburg royalty had once held court; visited the Coronation Church that had been converted to a mosque during the Ottoman period; he peered over the ramparts of the Fishermen's Bastiti at the massive Parliament building, a neogothic relic from the Austria-Hungarian epoch that loomed across the Danube in the Pest skyline. At one thirty in the afternoon he dismissed the driver and ducked into an old coffee house on the Pest side of the river for an open sandwich and a beer. He shared a table with a bird-like old woman who wore a frayed fox twisted around her gaunt neck and a ski cap on her skull. Sipping a glass of Tokaj, a white wine from the slopes of the Carpathians, she whispered something t0 Ebby in Hungarian. Seeing his confusion, she inquired politely in German if he was a foreigner. When he said yes, he was an American, she became flustered. "Oh, dear, you will have to excuse me," she whispered. Leaving her wine unfinished, she dropped some coins on the table and fled from the coffee house. Through the plate-glass window Ebby could see one of the men in the blue Skoda gesturing toward the old lady as she hurried cross Stalin Avenue. On the other side of the street, two men in dark anklelength overcoats and fedoras approached her. The old woman rummaged in her handbag for documents, which were snatched out of her hand. One of the men stuffed the woman's papers in a pocket and, with a snap of his head, indicated that she was to come with them. The two men, with the tiny woman almost lost between them, disappeared down a side street.

Ebby had a pang of concern for the old woman whose only crime was that she had found herself sharing a table with an American. Or was there more to it than that? Obviously a team of AVH men had been assigned to keep tabs on him. But were they following him because they routinely kept track of every American on Hungarian soil, or had they been alerted to his presence—and his identity—by one of the dissidents he had come to meet? Slipping a bank note under a saucer, Ebby pulled on his overcoat and set off up Stalin Avenue, stopping now and then to window-shop—and use the window to see what was happening behind him in the street. The blue Skoda was following him at a crawl but there was only one figure in it now; Ebby spotted the second man walking ahead of him. A younger man in hiking boots stopped to study a newspaper every time Ebby stopped. A middle-aged woman window-shopping across the street proceeded up the avenue at a pace that matched Ebby's.

With a tight knot forming in the pit of his stomach—a sensation he first felt the night he parachuted behind German lines during the war—Ebby continued along Stalin Avenue. He hesitated at an intersection called Octagon to consult the fold-out map in his guide book. At the top of the avenue he skirted Hero's Park, where an enormous statue of Stalin stood on a pink marble pedestal. Off to the left he could see the Fine Art Museum. He stopped to check his guide-book again, then went up the steps; as he reached the top he saw, in the glass door, the reflection of the Skoda easing t0 the curb in the street below.

Inside, Ebby queued at the booth to buy a ticket. A sign in English taped to the window confirmed what he had been told back in Washington: there was an English-language tour of the museum daily at 2:30 P.M. Ebby joined the dozen or so English tourists milling at the foot of the staircase.

Promptly at 2:30 a door opened and a slim young woman emerged from an office. Somewhere in her early thirties, she was dressed entirely in black--, skin-hugging ribbed turtleneck sweater, a flannel skirt flaring around delicate ankles, thick winter stockings and solid shoes with flat heels—and had a mop of unruly dirty-blonde hair that looked as if it had been hacked off at the nape of her neck by a shearing scissors. As far as Ebby could make out she wore no makeup. Pinned to the sweater over her left breast was a nametag that read: "E. Nemeth."

"Hullo—I am to be your guide," she announced in the crisp, flawless English of an upper-class Sloane Square bird. A nervous trace of a smile appeared on her face as she let her eyes flit over the crowd; they lingered for an instant, not longer, on Ebby before moving on. She said something in fluent Hungarian to the man guarding the turnstile, and he swung it back to let the tourists through. "If you will be kind enough to follow me," said E. Nemeth. With that, she turned on a heel and set off into the long hall filled with enormous canvases depicting in gory detail some of the epic battles Hungarians had fought against the Ottoman Turks.

Ebby trailed along at the fringe of the group, catching bits and pieces of the battles and the painters. Climbing the steps to the second floor, he overheard one of the tourists, a matronly woman who walked with the aid of a cane, ask the guide, "My dear, wherever did you learn to speak English so beautifully?'

"I am half-English," E. Nemeth told her. "I was born in Tuscany, raised and educated in Britain." She glanced quickly over her shoulder and her eyes grazed Ebby's. Again the tense half-smile flickered on her face, a look that seemed to announce the existence of anxiety and her determination not give in to it.

"And may I ask how an English woman like you wound up living in Budapest?"

"I married in," E. Nemeth replied.

"Bully for you, my dear. Bully for you."

When they reached the last room in the guided tour, fifty minutes later, E. Nemeth turned toward her charges. "Here you see six paintings by the renowned Spanish artist El Greco," she announced. "There is actually a seventh painting but it is currently in a basement workshop for cleaning. The museum is very proud of these paintings—this is the largest collection of Grecos in the world outside of Spain. El Greco was born Domenikos Theotokopoulos on the Greek island of Crete in 1541. He studied under Venetian master Titian before establishing himself in Toledo. Over the years his use of vibrant colors and deep shadows, his distorted figures, contributed to his reputation as a master painter of religious ecstasy. Many of the figures we see here were actually Spanish noblemen—"

Ebby stepped around the side of the group. "Is there any truth to the notion that El Greco's eye trouble led him to see—and to paint—his figures with elongated faces?"

Her head angled slightly, several fingers (with the nails bitten to the quick, Ebby noticed) kneading her lower lip, E. Nemeth slowly focused on Ebby. "I have, of course, heard that theory," she replied evenly, "but as far as I know it is based on guesswork, not medical evidence."

As the group started down the long staircase toward the main entrance of the museum, Ebby found himself trailing behind, alongside the guide. He detected the scent of attar of roses in the air.

"You seem to know a good deal about El Greco," she remarked.

"I am a great admirer of his work."

"Would it interest you to see the El Greco that is being restored in the basement workshop?"

"Very much."

They were halfway down the long flight of steps and passing a narrow door on the landing. The guide glanced back. Seeing no one behind them, she stepped quickly to the door, opened it, pulled Ebby through, and jammed it closed behind him. "You were followed when you arrived at the museum," she informed him. "I saw them through the window. There seemed to be an entire team spread out behind you—a car, at least three people on foot."

"I saw them, too," Ebby said. "It is probably standard operating procedure for them to keep tabs on visiting Americans."

E. Nemeth started down a wooden staircase no wider than her body and lit by weak bulbs on every landing. Under her feet the raw wood of the floorboards in the little used stairs creaked. At the bottom she pushed open another door and stuck her head through. Seeing the coast was clear, she motioned for Ebby to follow her. They made their way across the cement floor of a vast storage room filled with busts and paintings to a door locked and bolted on the inside.

"What does the E stand for on your nametag?" Ebby whispered.

"Elizabet."

"My name is Elliott."

She fixed her dark eyes on him. "I was sure you were the one even before y0u spoke the prearranged sentence," she told him. She grabbed a duffle coat off a hook and flung it over her shoulders as if it were a cape. Producing a large skeleton key from a pocket, she threw the bolt on the door. As they emerged from the basement into a sunken patio at the rear of the museum she locked the door behind them, then led the way up a flight of steel steps to a door in the high iron fence, which she unlocked with a second skeleton key and locked again when they had passed through it. Crossing the street, she led the way down a narrow alleyway to a beat-up two-door Fiat parked in a shed. Elizabet unlocked the door, slid behind the wheel, then reached across to unlock the passenger door. Gunning the motor, she set off down the alley and melted into the traffic on the thoroughfare at the end of it.

Elizabet piloted the tiny car through the crowded streets of Pest in utter concentration. After a while Ebby broke the silence. "Where are taking me?"

"Arpad and his friends are waiting for you in an apartment in Buda behind the South Station."

"What will happen back at the museum when I don't turn up at front door?"

"They will wait a while and then come looking for you. When they realize you are no longer in the museum, they will return to the Gellert Hotel and wait for you to show up there. We have seen this sort of thing many times—to protect themselves from the wrath of their superiors, they are unlikely to report your disappearance. After your meeting with Arpad I will drop you at one of the bridges and you can make your way back to the Gellert on foot as if nothing out of the ordinary has taken place."

"I heard you tell that woman in the museum that you were married to Arpad."

She glanced quickly at him. "I did not say I was married to Arpad. I am married to another Hungarian. I am Arpad's mistress."

Ebby winced. "I didn't mean to pry—"

"Of course you did. You are a spy from the Central Intelligence Agency. Prying is your business."

Gusts of icy wind knifing in from the Danube buckled the mullions and rattled the panes in the corner apartment on the top floor of the house lost in the labyrinthine streets of the Buda hills. When Ebby appeared at the door, a heavyset man in his late thirties, with a mane of prematurely grey hair and the flat forehead and knuckled nose of a Roman Centurion, strode across the room to greet him. He was wearing the heavy lace-up shoes, rough corduroy trousers and worn woolen pullover of a laborer. "I welcome you with all my heart to Budapest," he declared, burying the visitor's outsized hand in both of his, scrutinizing him with dark, restless eyes.

"This is Arpad Zeik," Elizabet murmured.

"It is an honor to meet such a distinguished poet," Ebby said.

Arpad snorted bitterly. "As I compose my poems in my native Tinearian, a language spoken by a mere ten million of the two and a half billion people on the planet Earth, my distinction resembles that of a bird chirping at the top of his lungs in a soundproof cage."

Arpad turned away to hold a hurried conference in Hungarian with Flizabet and the two young men sitting at the glass-covered dining table. Ebby took in the room: there was an enormous 1930s radio (big enough to house a small dog) on a table, wooden beams overhead, heavy rug-like drapes drawn across the windows, a fireplace stuffed with paper waiting to be burned, two buckets filled with coal, a small mountain of pamphlets stacked against a wall. Elizabet glanced back at Ebby. "Excuse me for a moment—I am telling them about the AVH men who were following you. Arpad wants to be sure they did not follow us here."

Arpad switched off the overhead light and went to a window, where he parted the heavy drapes the width of two fingers and surveyed the street below. "It does not appear that you were followed," he announced. "In any case I have people watching the street from another apartment—they will alert us by telephone if there is danger." Arpad motioned for Ebby to take the empty chair at the table. He nodded toward the two other men sitting around it and pointedly introduced them by their first names only. "Meet, please, Matyas; meet, also, Ulrik," he said. "They are comrades in the Hungarian Resistance Movement."

Ebby reached to shake the hand of each man—Matyas wore the distinctive short jacket of a university student; Ulrik, the suit and vest and detachable-collar shirt and steel-rimmed eyeglasses of a white-collar worker—and then sat down in the empty chair. Elizabet settled onto a couch.

Arpad filled a demitasse with a pale liquid and pushed it across the table to his guest. "Are you familiar with our Magyar Torkoly? Ah, I did not think so. It is a brandy fabricated from the skins of grapes after they have been crushed to make wine. Egeszsegedre he said, hoisting his own demitasse.

"Egeszsegedre," the two men at the table echoed, saluting Ebby with raised glasses.

"Cheers," Ebby said.

They downed their cups. The brandy scalded Ebby's throat. He opened his mouth wide and exhaled and pulled a face. The others smiled.

"If you please," Arpad said with great formality, "what word do you bring to us from the United States of America?"

"I bring you the good wishes of people highly placed in the American government. I bring you their respect for your courage and their sympathy for your cause—"

Arpad's palm came down on the glass of the table so hard that Ebby was astonished it didn't shatter under the blow. Matyas said something in Hungarian and Arpad answered him irritably. When Matyas persisted, Arpad nodded reluctantly. He looked back at Ebby. "My friends and I are not diplomats at a tea party," he said gruffly, stirring the air with his thick fingers. "We do not need your good wishes or your sympathy or your respect. We need your pledge of material assistance if the situation explodes."

"The American government is wary of pushing the Soviets too far—"

"Over something as inconsequential as Hungary," Arpad snapped, finishing the sentence for him. "That is what you dare not say."

"Hungary is not inconsequential to us. Which is why we want you to postpone any uprising until the groundwork has been laid; until Khrushchev, who has a tendency toward dovishness in these matters, has consolidated his hold on the Politburo hawks."

"How long?"

"Somewhere between a year and eighteen months."

Ulrik repeated this in Hungarian to make sure he had understood it correctly. "Igen," Elizabet told him. "Between a year and eighteen months."

"Remenytelen!" sneered the young man. Elizabet translated for Ebby. "Ulrik says the word hopeless."

"It is not hopeless," Ebby said. "It is a matter of prudence and patience. The American government is not interested in being drawn into a war with the Soviets—"

"I will say you what Trotsky said to the Russians before the 1917 revolution," Arpad declared, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on Ebby's. "'You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you."' Matyas muttered something and Arpad nodded in agreement. "Matyas says we can neither start nor stop an uprising against the Communists, and I hold the same view. Whatever will happen will happen with or without us, and with or without you. We live in a country sick with what we call esengofrasz—" Arpad looked at Elizabet for a translation. "Doorbell fever," she said.

"Yes, yes. Doorbell fever. Everyone waits for AVH agents to ring his bell at midnight and take him away for questioning or torture. I myself have been arrested five times in my life, twice by the fascists who brought Hungary into the world war on the side of the Germans, three times by the Communists who seized power with the help of the Red Army after the war. I have spent eleven years and four months of my life in prisons—that is fifteen years less than Sade and six years more than Dostoyevsky. I have lived for months at a time in airless subterranean cells crawling with rats in the fortress prison of Vac north of Budapest. Over one particularly bitter winter I tamed several of the rats; they used to come out to visit me in the evening and I would warm my fingers against their bodies. I was tortured in the same prison—in the same cell—by the Hungarian fascists before the war and the Communists after. The difference between the two ideologies is instructive. The fascists tortured you to make you confess to crimes you really committed. The Communists torture you to make you confess to imagined crimes; they want you to sign a confession they have already written—admitting to contacts with fascist elements of foreign countries, admitting to plots to assassinate the Communist leaders, admitting to putting ground glass in the supply of farina to cause economic sabotage." Sinking back into his chair, Arpad sucked air through his nostrils to calm himself. "Once, to avoid more torture, I confessed to passing state secrets to the chief of American intelligence in Vienna named Edgar Allen Poe. For this crime I was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but I was quietly pardoned when someone in the superstructure recognized the name of Poe."

Waving a hand in scorn, Ulrik spoke at length to Arpad in Hungarian. Arpad nodded several times in agreement. "He would have me say to you that your Radio Free Europe has spoken endlessly in its broadcasts to us about rolling back Communism," he told Ebby.

"Radio Free Europe is not an organ of the United States government," Ebby insisted. "Its an independent enterprise staffed by emigres from the Communist countries. Its broadcasts don't necessarily represent official American policy—"

If you please, who pays for Radio Free Europe?" Arpad demanded.

The question reduced Ebby to silence. Drumming a knuckle on the table top, Ulrik spoke again in Hungarian. Arpad nodded in vehement agreement. "He says the moment of truth approaches. He says you must be ready to assist an uprising, if one occurs, materially and morally. He says that if y0u can keep the Russians from intervening, only that, nothing more, Communism in Hungary will be swept onto the dust-heap of history."

Here the young student spoke for a moment to the others with a certain shyness. Smiling, Arpad reached across the table and gave him a mock punch in the shoulder. Elizabet said from the couch, "Matyas quotes the Bertold Brecht poem on the brief uprising of the East Germans against the Communist regime in 1953. "

Closing his eyes, collecting his thoughts, tilting back his large Arpad recited four lines in English:

Would it not be simpler

If the government

Dissolved the people

And elected another?

Out of the corner of his eye Ebby caught a glimpse of Elizabet curl into a contorted position on the couch, her legs tucked under her, one arm flung back over the back of the couch. He could feel her eyes on him. "Noone in the American camp doubts your determination to rid yourselves the Stalinist dictatorship," he told Arpad. "But you must, in our view, place realities above romanticism. The realities are stark and speak for themselves. Two Soviet tank units, the second and the seventeenth Mechanized Divisions, are stationed forty miles from Budapest; they could be in the capitol in an hour's time. We have abundant evidence that the Soviets are not blind to the explosiveness of the situation here. They clearly have contingency plans to rush reserves into the country in the event of unrest. I can tell you that we have information that they are in the process of assembling large mobile reserves on the Ukrainian side of the Hungarian frontier. I can also tell you that they are constructing floating pontoon bridges across the Tisza River so that these reserves can reach Hungary at a moments notice."

Arpad and Elizabet exchanged dark looks; Ebbys information apparently came as a surprise to them. Elizabet quickly translated what Ebby had said for the others. "The Soviet General Konev," Ebby went on, "who led Russia ground forces in the capture of Berlin and is considered to be one of their best tacticians, is the operational commander of the Soviet reserves. The Soviet General Zhukov, the current Minister of Defense, is pushing Khrushchev and the Politburo to be ready to intervene in Hungary for strategic reasons: the Russians are secretly constructing intermediate range ballistic missiles which eventually must be based in Hungary if they are to menace NATO's south flank in Italy and Greece."

With Elizabet translating phrase by phrase, Ulrik, who worked as a political analyst in a government ministry, conceded they hadn't known about the pontoon bridges, but he challenged Ebby's assessment that Khrushcw would send Soviet armor across the Tisza if there were to be an uprising. The Kremlin," Ulrik argued, "has its hands full with its own domestic worries.

Arpad produced a cloth pouch from the pocket of his corduroys. "Which is why," he agreed as he absently started to roll a cigarette, "the Russians accepted Austrian neutrality in 1955; which is why Khrushchev publicly recognized Yugoslavia as a country on the road to Socialism; this despite it being outside the Soviet bloc. In Poland, the threat of popular unrest has led to the Communist reformer Gomulka being released from prison. There is a good chance he will be named first Secretary of the Polish Communist Party any day now." He deftly licked the cigarette paper closed with his tongue, twisted the tip with his fingertips, tapped the cigarette on the table to pack down the tobacco and, thrusting it between his lips, began searching his pockets for a match. "Even the hawks on Khrushchev's Politburo seem resigned to living with the situation in Poland," he added. He found a match and, igniting it with a thick thumbnail, held the flame to the twisted end of the cigarette. Smoke billowed from his nostrils. "Why should Hungarian reformers cringe at the menace of Soviet tanks when the Polish reformers have succeeded?" he asked rhetorically.

"Because the situation in Hungary is different from the situation in Poland," Ebby argued. "The Polish reformers are clearly Communists who don't plan to sweep away Communism or take Poland out of the Soviet bloc."

"We'd be fools to settle for half a loaf," Matyas exploded.

"You have put your finger on the heart of the problem," Ebby grimly suggested.

When Elizabet translated Ebby's remark, Matyas angrily scraped back his chair and came around the table to flop onto the couch next to her. The two, whispering in Hungarian, got into a lively argument. It was obvious that Elizabet was trying to convince him of something but was having little success.

At the table, Arpad stared past Ebby at a calendar on the wall for a long moment. When he finally turned back to his visitor, his eyes appeared to be burning with fever. "You come to us with your Western logic and your Western realities," he began, "but neither takes into account the desperateness of our situation, nor the quirk of Hungarian character that will drive us to battle against overwhelming odds. We have been at war more or less constantly since my namesake, the Hungarian chieftain Arpad, led the Magyar horsemen out of the Urals twelve hundred years ago to eventually conquer, and later defend, the great Hungarian steppe. For Hungarians, the fact that a situation is hopeless only makes it more interesting."

Ebby decided not to mince words. "I was sent here to make certain that you calculate the risks correctly. If you decide to encourage an armed uprising, you should do so knowing that the West will not be drawn in to save you from Konev's tanks massing on the frontier."

The three men around the table exchanged faint smiles and Ebby understood that he had failed in his mission. "I and my friends thank you for coming, at great personal risk, to Budapest," Arpad said. "I will give you a message to take back to America. The Athenian historian Thucydides, speaking twenty-four hundred years ago about the terrible conflict between Athena and Sparta, wrote that three things push men to war—honor, fear and self-interest. If we go to war, for Hungarians it will be a matter of honor and fear. We cling to the view that the American leaders, motivated by self-interest, will then calculate the advantages to helping us."

The conversation around the glass-covered table rambled on into early evening. From behind the thick curtains came the muted jingle of ambulance bells or the mournful shriek of a distant police siren. As a sooty twilight blanketed the city, Elizabet disappeared into the kitchen and turned up twenty minutes later carrying a tray filled with steaming bowls of marrow soup and thick slices of dark bread. Arpad quoted two lines from the legendary Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi, who had been killed fighting the Russians in 1849:

Fine food, fine wine, both sweet and dry, A Magyar nobleman am I.

Lifting his bowl in both palms, he gulped down the soup, then lugged a heavy German watch from the coin pocket of his trousers. He'd been asked to read poems to a group at the Technological University, he told Ebby. The students there were considered to be among the most defiant in Budapest. If it would interest him, Ebby was welcome to come along. Elizabet could translate some of what was said.

Ebby eagerly accepted; if he wanted to get a feeling for the mood of the students, a poetry reading was as good a place as any to start.

Arpad dialed a phone number and mumbled something to the comrades surveying the street from another apartment. Then, with Arpad leading the way, Ebby, Elizabet, and the others filed down a narrow corridor to a bedroom in the back of the apartment. Matyas and Ulrik pushed aside a large armoire, revealing a narrow rug-covered break in the brick wall of the building that opened into a storage room in a vacant apartment in the adjoining building. The two young men remained behind to shoulder the armoire hack into place and block the secret passage as Arpad, Elizabet, and Ebby entered the adjoining apartment and let themselves out of its back door, then descended five flights to a cellar door that gave onto a completely different street than the one Ebby and Elizabet had arrived on hours earlier. Making slow progress on foot through the meandering dimly lit side streets of Buda, avoiding the main thoroughfares, the three crossed Karinthy Frigyes Road and moments later entered the sprawling Technical School through a basement coal delivery ramp. A young student with a mop of curly hair was waiting for them inside. He led them through the furnace room to an employees' canteen crammed with students sitting on rows of benches or standing along the walls. There must have been a hundred and fifty of them crowded into the narrow room. They greeted the poet with an ovation, tapping their feet on the cement in unison and chanting his name: "Ar-pad, Ar-pad, Ar-pad."

At the head of the room, Arpad blew into the microphone to make sure it was alive, then flung his head back. '"Without father without mother,'" he declaimed. "'Without God or homeland either without crib or coffin-cover without kisses or a lover.'"

The students recognized the poem and roared their approval. Elizabet pressed her lips to Ebby's ear. "Those are lines from a poem byAttila Jozsef," she told him. "He wrote around the turn of the century... his subject was crazy Hungarian individualism..."

"Your friend Arpad broke the mold," Ebby said into her ear. Elizabet turned on him. "He is not my friend, he is my lover. The two are worlds apart." The admission broke a logjam and disjointed phrases spilled through the breach. "You are right about Arpad... he is one crazy Hungarian... a chaos of emotions... a glutton for words and the spaces between them... addicted to the pandemonium and pain he stirs in the women who love him." (Her use of the plural women was not lost on Ebby.) She looked away, her fingers kneading her lower lip, then came back at him, ner dark eyes fierce with resentment. "He is the poet-surgeon who distracts you from old wounds by opening new ones."

The students quieted down and Arpad, reciting in a droning matter-of-fact manner, launched into a long poem. "This is the one that made him famous," Elizabet whispered to Ebby. "It's called 'Ertelmisegi'—whicti is Hungarian for 'Intellectual.' Arpad wound up spending three years in a prison because of this poem. By the time he was released, it has been passed from hand to hand until half the country seemed to know it by heart. Arpad describes how he tried to slip across the frontier into Austria when the Communists came to power in 1947; he was betrayed by his peasant-guide and given an eight-minute summary trial and jailed at the notorious prison Vac where the dead are not buried but thrown to the vultures. When he was finally set free, at the age of twenty-nine, he discovered that his internal passport had been stamped with a red E for 'Ertelmisegi,' which meant he could no longer teach at a university." She concentrated on the poem for a moment. "In this part he describes how he worked as a mason, a carpenter, a plumber, a dish washer, a truck driver, even a dance instructor when he could no longer find literary magazines willing to publish his essays or poems."

The students crowded into the canteen appeared spellbound, leaning forward on the benches, hanging on the poet's words. When he stumbled over a phrase voices would call out the missing words and Arpad, laughing, would plunge on. "Here," Elizabet whispered, "he explains that in the prison of Vac the half of him that is Jewish—Arpad's mother was a Bulgarian Jew— transformed itself into an angel. He explains that Jews have a tradition that angels have no articulation in their knees—they can't bend them to someone. He explains that this inability to kneel can be a fatal handicap in a"Communist country."

The poem ended with what Arpad styled a postlude. Raising his arms over his head, he cried: "Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

The students, each with one fist raised in pledge, leapt to their feet and began stamping the ground as they repeated the refrain. "Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

Elizabet, caught up in the general excitement, shouted the translation into Ebby's ear. "Let the Magyars alone!" Then she joined the Hungarians in the battle cry. "Ne bdntsd a Magyart! Ne bdntsd a Magyart!"

As the bells in the Paulist monastery on Gellert Hill struck eleven, one of the AVH man in the blue Skoda spotted a male figure on the walkway of the Szabadsag Bridge. For a moment a passing trolley car hid him. When the figure reappeared the AVH man, peering through binoculars, was able to make a positive identification. The vacuum tubes in the transceiver were warm so he flicked on the microphone. "Szervusz, szervusz, mobile twenty-seven. I announce quarry in sight on the Szabadsag walkway. Execute operational plan ZARVA. I repeat: execute operational plan ZARVA."

Clawing his way out of an aching lethargy, Ebby toyed with the comfortable fiction that the whole thing had been a bad dream—the scream of brakes, the men who materialized from the shadows of the girders to fling him into the back of a car, the darkened warehouse looming ahead on the Pest bank of the Danube, the endless corridor along which he was half-dragged, the spotlights that burned into his eyes even when they were shut, the questions hurled at him from the darkness, the precise blows to his stomach that spilled the air out of his lungs. But the ringing in his ears, the leathery dryness in his mouth, the throb in his rib cage, the knot of fear in the pit of his stomach brought him back to a harder reality. Flat on his back on a wooden plank, he tried to will his eyes open. After what seemed like an eternity he managed to raise the one eyelid that was not swollen shut. The sun appeared high overhead but, curiously, didn't seem to warm him. The sight of the sun transported him back to his stepfather's seventeen-foot Herreshoff, sailing close hauled off Penobscot Bay in Maine. He had been testing the boat to see how far it could heel without capsizing when a sudden squall had caused the wind to veer and the boom, coming over without warning, had caught Ebby in the back of the head. When he came to, he was lying on the deck in the cockpit with the orb of the sun swinging like a pendulum high over the mast. Stretched out now on the plank, it dawned on Ebby that the light over his head wasn't the sun but a naked bulb suspended from the ceiling at the end of an electric cord. With an effort he managed to drag himself into a sitting position on the plank, his back against the cement wall. Gradually things drifted into a kind of two-dimensional focus. He was in a large cell with a small barred slit of a window high in the wall, which meant it was a basement cell. In one corner there was a wooden bucket that reeked from urine and vomit. The door to the cell was made of wood crisscrossed with rusted metal belts. Through a slot high in the door, an unblinking eye observed him. It irritated him that he couldn't tell whether it was a left eye or a right eye.

He concentrated on composing pertinent questions. He didn't bother with the answers; assuming they existed, they could come later. How long had he been in custody?

Had he said anything during the interrogation to compromise his story?

Would the Americans at the Gellert notice he was missing? Would they inform the embassy? At what point would the embassy cable Washington? Would Arpad discover he had been arrested? Could he do anything about it if he did?

And, of course, the crucial question: Why had the Hungarians arrested him? Had the AVH infiltrated the Hungarian Resistance Movement? Did they know the CIA had sent someone into Budapest to contact Arpad? Did they know that he was that someone?

Formulating the questions exhausted Ebby and he drifted off, his chin nodding onto his chest, into a shallow and fitful sleep.

The squealing of hinges startled him awake. Two men and a massive woman who could have passed for a Japanese sumo wrestler appeared on the threshold of the cell, the men dressed in crisp blue uniforms, the woman wearing a sweat suit and a long white butcher's smock with what looked like dried blood stains on it. Grinning, the woman shambled over to the wooden plank and, grasping Ebby's jaw, jerked his head up to the light and deftly pressed back the eyelid of his unswollen eye with the ball of her thumb. Then she took his pulse. She kept her coal-black eyes on the second hand of a wristwatch she pulled from the pocket of her smock, then grunted something in Hungarian to the two policemen. They pulled Ebby to his feet and half-dragged, half-walked him down a long corridor to a room filled with spotlights aimed at the stool bolted to the floor in the middle of it. Ebby was deposited on the stool. A voice he remembered from the previous interrogation came out of the darkness. "Be so kind as to state your full name."

Ebby massaged his jaw bone.

"You already know my name."

"State your full name, if you please." Ebby sighed.

"Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt."

"What is your rank?"

"I don't have a rank. I am an attorney with—"

"Please, please, Mr. Ebbitt. Last night you mistook us for imbeciles. It was my hope that with reflection you would realize the futility of your predicament and collaborate with us, if only to save yourself from the sanctions that await you if you defy us. You have not practiced law since 199*"! You are an employee of the American Central Intelligence Agency, a member of the Soviet Russia Division in Mr. Frank Wisner's Directorate of Operations. Since the early 1950s you have worked in the CIA's station at Frankfurt in Western Germany running emigre agents, with great persistence but a notable lack of success, into Poland and Soviet Russia and Albania. Your immediate superior when you arrived at Frankfurt was Anthony Spink. When he was transferred back to Washington in 1954, you yourself became head of the agent-running operation."

Ebby's mind raced so rapidly he had trouble keeping up with the fragments of thoughts flitting through his brain. Clearly he had been betrayed, and by someone who knew him personally or had access to his Central Registry file. Which seemed to rule out the possibility that he had been betrayed by an informer in the Hungarian Resistance Movement. Shading his open eye with a palm, he squinted into the beams of light. He thought he could make out the feet of half a dozen or so men standing around the room. They all wore trousers with deep cuffs and shoes that were black and shining like mirrors. "I must tell you," Ebby said, his voice rasping from the back of a sore throat, "that you are confusing me with someone else. I was with the OSS during the war, that's true. After the war I finished my law studies and went to work for Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard and Irvine at number two Wall—"

Ebby could make out one set of black shoes ambling toward him from the rim of darkness in a kind of deliberate duck-walk. An instant later, a heavy man dressed in a baggy civilian suit blotted out several of the spotlights and a short, sharp blow landed in Ebby's peritoneal cavity, knocking the wind out of his lungs, dispatching an electric current of pain down to the tips of his toes. Rough hands hauled him off the floor and set him back on the stool, where he sat, doubled over, his arms hugging his stomach.

Again the soothing voice came out of the darkness. "Kindly state your full name."

Ebby's breath came in ragged gasps. "Elliott... Winstrom... Ebbitt."

"Perhaps now you will tell us your rank."

It seemed like such an inconsequential question. Why was he making such a fuss? He would tell them his name and rank and pay grade and they would let him curl up on the wooden plank in the damp cell that smelled of urine and vomit. He would open his good eye and peer up at the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling and remember the sun swinging back and forth like a pendulum high over the mast; he would feel the calming lift and tide of the Atlantic ground swell under the deck, he would taste the salt of sea breeze on his lips. "My rank—"

Suddenly he caught a glimpse of his ex-wife's flinty eyes boring into him. He could hear Eleonora's throaty voice laced with exasperation: "Whatever you do," she said, "you'll never catch up to your father unless someone stands you in front of a firing squad."

"My father has nothing to do with this," Ebby cried out. Even as he uttered these words, he understood that his father had everything to do with it.

"Why do you speak of your father?" the soothing voice inquired from the murkiness beyond the spotlights. "We are not psychoanalysts—we only want to know your rank. Nothing more."

Ebby forced words one by one through his parched lips. "You... can... go... to... hell."

The baggy civilian suit started toward him again but the soothing voice barked a word in Hungarian and the heavy man melted back into the shadows. The spotlights went out and the entire room was plunged into inky blackness. Two hands wrenched Ebby off the stool by his armpits, propelled him across the room to a wall and propped him upright. A heavy curtain in front of his face parted, revealing a thick pane of glass and a spotlit room beyond it. There was a stool bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, and a ghostly porcelain figure on the stool. Ebby blinked his open eye hard. With the languidness of underwater motion the figure swam into focus.

The guide from the museum, the wife of a Hungarian named Nemeth, the lover of the poet Arpad Zeik, sat hunched on the stool. She was naked except for a pair of dirty faded-pink bloomers that sagged over one hip because of a torn elastic waistband. One arm was raised across her breasts. The fingers of her other hand played with a chipped front tooth. The dark figures of men standing around the room were obviously questioning her, although no sound reached Ebby through the thick glass. Elizabet fended off the questions with a nervous shake of her head. One of the figures came up behind her and, grabbing her elbows, pinned her arms behind her back. Then the massive woman wearing the long white butcher's smock lumbered up to her. She was brandishing a pair of pliers. Ebby tried to turn away but strong hands pinned his head to the glass.

Elizabet s swollen lips howled for a release from the pain as the woman mutilated the nipple of a breast.

Ebby started to retch but all that came up from the back of his throat was phlegm.

"My name," Ebby announced after two men had dragged him back to the stool, "is Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt. I am an officer of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. My pay grade is GS-15.'

Barely concealing his sense of triumph, the interrogator asked from the darkness, "What was your mission in Budapest? What message did you bring to the counterrevolutionist Arpad Zeik?"

The spotlights caused tears to trickle from the corner of Ebby's open eye. Blotting them with the back of a hand, he detected another voice murmuring in his brain. It belonged to Mr. Andrews, the one-armed instructor back at the Company's training school. "Its not the pain but the fear that breaks you." He heard Mr. Andrews repeat the warning over and over, like a needle stuck in a grove. "Not the pain but the fear! Not the pain but the fear!"

The words reverberating through his brain grew fainter and Ebby, frantic to hang on to them, reached deep into himself. To his everlasting mystification, he discovered he wasn't afraid of the pain, the dying, the nothingness beyond death; he was afraid of being afraid.

The discovery exhilarated him—and liberated him.

Had his father experienced this exhilarating revelation the day he was lashed to the goal post of a soccer field? Was that the explanation for the smile on his lips when the Germans bayoneted him to death because they were short of ammunition?

Ebby felt as if a great malignant knot had been extracted from his gut.

"The message, if you please?" the voice prompted him from the darkness. "I want to remind you that you do not have diplomatic immunity."

Again Ebby forced words through his lips. "Fuck... you... pal."

4

WASHINGTON, DC, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1956

THE MOOD IN THE CORRIDORS OF COCKROACH ALLEY WAS SUBDUED. Junior officers milled around the coffee-and-doughnut wagons, talking in undertones. There was a crisis brewing. Details were scarce. One of the Company's people somewhere in the field appeared to be in jeopardy. Leo Kritzky, whose recent promotion to the post of deputy to the head of the Soviet Russia Division in the Directorate for Operations had coincided with the birth of twin daughters, knew more than most. The DCI, Allen Dulles, who had been woken at three in the morning by the duty officer reading an "Eyes-Only" CRITIC from the CIA station chief in Budapest, brought key people in on Sunday for an early morning war council. Leo, standing in for his boss who was away on sick leave, attended it. Leaning back into the soft leather of his Eames chair, his eyeglasses turned opaque by the sun streaming through a window, Dulles brought everyone up to speed: E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, on a mission to Budapest under deep cover (and without diplomatic immunity), had failed to turn up at his hotel the previous evening. A check of hospitals and city police precincts had drawn a blank. The Hungarian AVH, which as a matter of routine monitored visiting Americans, was playing dumb: yes, they were aware that a New York attorney named Ebbitt had joined the State Department negotiating team at the Gellert Hotel; no, they didn't have any information on his whereabouts; it went without saying, they would look into the matter and get back to the Americans if they learned anything.

"The bastards are lying through their teeth," Dulles told the men gathered in his spacious corner office. "If for some reason Ebbitt went to ground of his own accord, first thing he'd do would be to send us word— when he left Washington he committed to memory the whereabouts of Hungarian cutout equipped with a radio and ciphers. Christ, we even had emergency procedures to exfiltrate him out of Hungary if his cover was blown."

Half an hour into the meeting the DD/0, Frank Wisner, came on the squawk box from London, his first stopover on a tour of European stations, remind everyone that the Hungarian AVH were the step children of the Soviet KGB. "Bear in mind the relationship," he advised from across the Atlantic in his inimitable drawl. "If the KGB sneezes, it's the AVH that catches cold."

"The Wiz may be on to something," Bill Colby allowed when the squawk box went dead. "We won't get to first base with the AVH. On the other hand the KGB has a vested interest in preserving the unspoken modus vivendi between our intelligence services."

The department heads kicked around ideas for another twenty minutes. The State Department would be encouraged to file a formal complaint with the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, though none of the people who had pulled up chairs around Dulles's desk held out hope that this would produce results. A channel would be opened, via the Hungarian cutout, to determine if Ebby had actually met with this Arpad Zeik fellow and other members of the Resistance Movement. A sometime-asset in the AVH would be contacted through his handler in Austria but this would take time; if the Hungarians had snagged Ebbitt, the asset might have gotten wind of it. Leo, still junior enough in the presence of the DCI and the various department heads to raise a finger when he wanted to say something, felt Dulles's hard gaze lock onto him when he came up with the idea of putting the Sorcerer on the case; he could meet in Berlin with his KGB counterpart and point out the disadvantages to both sides if they allowed their client services to take scalps, Leo suggested. One of the analysts wondered aloud whether an approach to the Russians on behalf of Ebbitt would undermine whatever chance he had of sticking to the cover story about being a New York attorney.

Leo shook his head thoughtfully. "If they've seized Ebbitt," he said, "it's because they've penetrated his cover story. The problem now is to extricate him alive and in one piece."

Behind a cloud of pipe smoke, Dulles nodded slowly. "I don't recall your name," he told Leo.

'Kritzky. I'm standing in for—" He named the head of the Soviet Russia Division.

"I like the idea ofTorriti explaining the facts of life to the Russian," Dulles announced, eyeing Leo over the top of his glasses. "Coming from Sorcerer, the menace of reciprocity would carry weight with the Russian. Torriti doesn't play games." Dulles hiked a cuff and glanced at his wrist watch. "It's early afternoon in Berlin. He might be able to get something off the ground today. Write that up, Kritzky. I'll sign off on it."

Torriti's corpulent body had slowed down over the years but not his brain. The deciphered version of Dulles's "Action Immediate" reached his sight when he was slumped over it, snoring off a hangover from a bottle of monastery-aged Irish whiskey he'd finally gotten around to cracking open. It had been a gift from the Rabbi to celebrate the Jewish New Year. ("May 5717 bring you fame, fortune and a defector from the Politburo," he had written on the tongue-in-cheek note that accompanied the bottle. "Barring that, may you at least live to see 5718.") Shaking himself out of a stupor, fitting on a pair of spectacles that he had begun to use to read printed matter, the Sorcerer digested Dulles's orders, then bawled through the half open door to Miss Sipp, "Get ahold of McAuliffe—tell him to get his butt down here pronto."

"From Washington, it probably looked like a cakewalk," Jack—now second-in-command at Berlin Base—remarked when he'd read through the Action Immediate. "One of our people's fallen into the hands of the AVH in Budapest. We're going to hold the KGB's feet to the flame if anything happens to him. So far, so good. But Jesus H. Christ, how does Dulles expect us to get in touch with the KGB rezident at Karlshorst on such short notice—I mean, it's not as if you could pick up the phone and dial his number and invite him over to West Berlin for tea and sympathy."

"Knew you'd come up with a creative idea," Torriti said. He dragged the telephone across the desk, then laced the fingers of both hands through his thinning hair to make himself presentable for the phone conversation he hoped to engage in. From the pocket of his rumpled trousers he produced a small key attached to the end of a long chain anchored to his belt. Squinting, he inserted the key in the lock of the upper right-hand desk drawer, tugged it open and rummaged among the boxes of ammunition until he found the small notebook German children used to keep track of class schedules, which he used as an address book. "Does Karlshorst begin with C or K?" he asked Jack.

"K, Harvey."

"Here it is. Karlshorst rezidentura." The Sorcerer fitted his trigger finger in the slots on the phone and dialed the number. Jack could hear the phone pealing on the other end. A woman babbling in Russian answered.

Torriti spoke into the phone cautiously, articulating every syllable. 'Get me some-one who speaks A-mer-i-can Eng-lish." He repeated the words "American English" several times. After a long while someone else came on the line. "Listen up, friend," Torriti said as patiently as he could. "I want you to go and tell Oskar Ugor-Zhilov that Harvey Torriti wants to speak to him." Pleats of skin formed on the Sorcerers brow as he spelled his name. "T-O-R-R-I-T-I." There was another long wait. Then: "So, Oskar, how the fuck are you? This is Harvey Torriti. Yeah, the Harvey Torriti. I think we need to talk. No, not on the phone. Face to face. Man to man. I got a message from my summit that I want you to deliver to your summit. The sooner, the better." Torriti held the phone away from his ear and grimaced. Jack could make out the tinny sound of someone with a thick Russian accent struggling to put a coherent sentence together in English. "You have to be making a joke," Torriti barked into the phone. "No way am I going to put a foot into East Berlin. I got another idea. Know the playground in the Spandau Forest in the British Sector? There's an open-air ice-skating rink that sits smack on the border. I'll meet you in the middle of the rink at midnight." The KGB rezident grunted something. Torriti said, "You can bring as many of your thugs as you like long as you come out onto the ice alone. Oh, yeah, and bring two glasses. I'll supply the whiskey," he added with a titter.

The Sorcerer dropped the phone back onto the receiver. Jack asked, "So how do you figure on playing it, Harvey?"

Torriti, cold sober and thinking fast, eyed Jack. "Not for laughs," he said

The full moon flitting between the clouds had transformed the ice on the skating rink into Argentine marble. At the stroke of midnight two phantoms emerged from the woods on either side and started across the ice in short, cautious flat-footed steps. Oskar Ugor-Zhilov, a wiry man in his middle fifties, wearing baggy trousers tucked into rubber galoshes and a fur shapka with the earflaps raised and jutting, carried two wine glasses in one hand and a bulky Russian walkie-talkie in the other. The Sorcerer, bareheaded, held his ankle-length green overcoat closed with both hands (two buttons were missing) and clutched a bottle of PX booze under an armpit. As the two men warily circled each other in the center of the rink, a giant US Air Force transport plane roared over the tree tops on its way to Tegel Airport in the Free Sector of Berlin.

"We're right under the air corridor," Torriti shouted to his Russia counterpart.

Ugor-Zhilov raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth and muttered something into it. There was an ear-splitting squeal by way of an answer. The Sorcerer waved the bottle. Nodding, the Russian held out the two glasses and Torriti filled them with whiskey. He grabbed one of the glasses by its stem and, saluting the KGB rezident, drank it off as if it were no more potent than apple juice. Not to be outdone by an American, Ugor-Zhilov threw back his head and gulped down the contents of his glass.

"You got a family?" Torriti inquired, skating from one side of the Russian to the other and back again on the balls of his shoes. He was mesmerized by the small tuft of curly hair growing under Ugor-Zhilov's lower lip.

Torriti's question amused the Russia. "You meet me at midnight in the middle of nowhere to find out if I have family?"

"I like to get to know the people I'm up against."

"I am married man," the Russian said. "I have two sons, both living in Moscow. One is senior engineer in the aeronautics industry, the other is journalist for Pravda. Or you, Gospodin Harvey Torriti—you have family?"

"Had a wife once," the Sorcerer said wistfully. "Don't have one any more. She didn't appreciate the line of work I was in. She didn't appreciate my drinking neither. Say, Oskar—you don't mind me calling you Oskar, right?—you wouldn't want to defect, would you?" When the Sorcerer spotted the scowl on the Russian's face, he laughed out loud. "Hold your water, sport, I was only pulling your leg. You know, kidding, teasing. Hey, you Russians need to loosen up. You need to be able to let your hair down. Take a joke." Suddenly Torriti turned serious. "The reason I ask about your family, Oskar, baby," he said, his head angled to one side as if he were sizing the Russian up for a coffin, "is..."

Torriti offered Ugor-Zhilov a refill but was waved off with an emphatic shake of the head. He refilled his own glass and carefully set the bottle down on the ice. "Suppose you were to kick the bucket, Oskar—that's American for cash in your chips, bite the dust, push up the daisies, buy the farm, die— would your family get a pension?"

"If you are threatening me, I inform you that two sharpshooters have your head in telescopic sights even as we talk."

Torriti's lips twisted into a lewd smirk. "If I don't make it off the ice, sport, you can bet you won't make it off the ice neither. Listen up, Oskar, I ain't threatening you. I was talking hypothetically. I'm concerned about what would happen to your family if we were to start killing each other off. We being the KGB and the CIA. I mean, we're not vulgar Mafia clans, right? We are civilized organizations on two sides of a divide who don't see eye to on things like what makes a free election free and due process due, stuff like that. But we are careful not to—"

The throaty growl of a small propeller plane passing low over Spandau drowned out the Sorcerer.

"Yeah, like I was saying, we are careful, you and me, your KGB and my CIA, not to start hurting each other's people."

Ugor-Zhilov looked puzzled. "As far as I know we are not hurting any CIA people."

"You don't know very far," the Sorcerer retorted icily. "Fact is, you have one of our people in custody—"

"I know of no—

"It's in Budapest, sport. The person in question disappeared from the radar screen twenty-four hours ago."

The Russian actually seemed relieved. "Ah, Hungary. That complicates the problem. The Hungarian AVH are completely autonomous—"

"Autonomous, my ass! Don't hand me that crap, Oskar. The KGB runs the AVH same as it runs every other intelligence service in East Europe. You take a crap, they flush the toilet." Over the Russian's shoulder, a flashlight came on near the edge of the woods and described a circle and then flicked off. Torriti skated closer to Ugor-Zhilov. "What would happen right now if I reached under my jacket and lugged out a handgun and stuck it into your gut?"

The Russian's eyes narrowed; he was clearly a man who didn't scare easily. "You would be doing a big mistake, Torriti," he said softly. "Such a gesture would be a form of suicide."

Nodding, the Sorcerer finished the whiskey in his wine glass and noisily licked his lips and set the glass down on the ice. Then, moving very deliberately, he slid his right hand inside his overcoat and came out with the pearl-handled revolver. The Russian froze. The long barrel glistened in the moonlight as Torriti raised the revolver over his head so that anybody watching from either side of the rink could see it. Ugor-Zhilov held his breath, waiting for the crack of the rifle to echo across the rink. Smiling sourly the Sorcerer thumbed back the hammer and jammed the business end of the barrel into the Russian's stomach. "Looks like the turkeys backing you up have gone to sleep on the job," he remarked. Then he pulled the trigger.

The hammer fell onto the firing pin with a hollow click. "Goddamn," Torriti said. "I must've forgotten to load the fucker." Cursing Torriti in a stream of guttural Russian, Ugor-Zhilov started backing toward his side of the rink.

"If anything happens to our guy in Budapest," Torriti called after him "I'll load the pistol and come after you. There won't be anyplace in Germany for you to hide. You reading me, Oskar? Like my friend the Rabbi says, our man loses a tooth, you lose a tooth. Our man goes blind, you go blind. Our man stops breathing, your wife starts collecting your KGB pension."

Torriti retrieved the wine glass and the bottle from the ice and poured himself a refill. Ambling in flat-footed steps back toward the woods, humming under his breath, he treated himself to a well-earned shot of booze.

"So how many of the fuckers were there?" the Sorcerer asked Jack. They were squeezed into the back seat of a station wagon filled with agents from Berlin Base. Sweet Jesus was driving. A second station wagon trailed behind them.

"Six. Two with sniper rifles, two with submachine guns, one with binoculars, one with a walkie-talkie."

"Did they put up much of a fight?"

Jack smirked. "They were all very reasonable types, you could see it in their eyes when they spotted our artillery," Jack said. He produced a small pair of Zeiss binoculars from the pocket of his duffle coat and offered them to the Sorcerer. "Thought you might like a trophy."

Torriti, suddenly weary, let his lids close over his eyes of their own accord. "You keep them, Jack. You earned them."

"I'll keep them, Harvey. But we both know who earned them."

5

BUDAPEST, TUESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1956

HANGING FROM A MEAT HOOK EMBEDDED IN THE WALL OF THE refrigerator room, his limbs numb from the cold, Ebby sank into a sleep so shallow he found himself drifting into or out of it with the twitch of an eye. When the lockset on the outside of the door was cranked open, he was wide awake and straining to make out the footfalls of his jailers before they entered the room. He was glad they were finally coming for him; between beatings, he would at least be thawed out by the spotlights in the interrogation chamber. One of the guards grabbed him around the waist and lifted his body while the other, standing on a crate, detached his jacket and shirt from the hook. With his bare feet planted on the icy floor tiles, Ebby raised his elbows so they could grasp him under the armpits and drag him off for another round of questioning. Curiously, the two guards who held him erect did so with unaccustomed gentleness, and Ebby understood that something had changed. The guards steered him, at a pace he set, out of the frigid room and down the corridor to an elevator, which sped him to an upper floor. There he was taken along a carpeted corridor to a heated room with a wooden bed with sheets and a pillow and blankets. Even more astonishingly, the room was equipped with a shaded table lamp that could presumably be switched off at night. There was a flush toilet and a small bathtub at one end, and a window with a slatted shutter on the outside through which Ebby could make out the sounds of traffic.

The honking of a horn in the street below seemed like music to his ears. A short matronly woman with coarse gray hair and a stethoscope dangling from her neck rapped her knuckles against the open door and walked in. Smiling impersonally at Ebby, she began examining him. She listened to his heart and wedged a thermometer under his tongue and (obviously accustomed to dealing with prisoners being questioned by the AVH) checked to see if any of his bruised ribs were broken. Then she set about massaging his limbs to restore circulation to them. Before she departed, she disinfected the welts on his chest and spread a salve on his swollen lid and set out on the table a glass of water and two pills, telling him in sign language that he was to take them before going to sleep. Another woman appeared with clean clothing and a tray of food—there was a bowl of clear broth, a slice of bread, a plate of goulash, even a piece of candy wrapped in cellophane. Ebby drank off the broth, which soothed his raw throat, and managed to get down a little of the goulash. Before stretching out on the bed, he hobbled over to the window and stared at the street through the slats. Judging from the fading light he reckoned it was the end of the afternoon. There weren't many automobiles, but the street was packed with young people calling back and forth to each other as they hurried along in one direction. An open truck filled with students shouting what sounded like slogans and holding aloft large Hungarian flags sped past in the same direction.

Steadying himself on the back of a chair piled high with the clean clothing, switching off the light as he passed the table, Ebby made his way back to the bed. Stripping to the skin, dropping his filthy clothes onto the floor, he slid under the sheets and slowly stretched out his aching limbs as he concentrated, once again, on composing pertinent questions.

Why had the AVH started treating him with kid gloves?

He could assume the State Department people at the Gellert had alerted the embassy when he didn't return to the hotel; that the Company chief of station at the embassy had set off alarm bells in Washington. Would the Company have dared to broach the subject of its missing agent with the KGB? He knew there was an unspoken compact between the two intelligence services; there were exceptions, of course, but normally neither side went around shooting the other's people. Had the AVH—an organization with a reputation for brutality—been operating behind the back of the KGB to root out local troublemakers? Had the KGB read the riot act to the AVH? Was he being fattened up for the kill or would he eventually be traded for one of the KGB's officers who had fallen into American hands? )

And what about the mob of youngsters flowing through the street under his window? Were they hurrying to a soccer match or a Communist rally?

If it was a communist rally, how could he explain the bewildering detail that had hit his eye: the Communist coat-of-arms—the hammer and the sheath of wheat at the center of the white-green-and-red Hungarian flag—had been from the banners held aloft by the students riding in the truck.

In the early hours of the next morning there was a soft knock on Jack's door. A moment later the table lamp flickered on. Ebby struggled into a sitting position and pulled the blanket up to his unshaven chin. A dwarf-like man—Ebby guessed he couldn't be more than five feet tall— who wore a goatee and mustache and dark rimmed eyeglasses on his round face, scraped over a chair. When he sat down his feet barely reached the floor. He snapped open a tin case and offered Ebby a cigarette. When he declined, the visitor selected one for himself, tapped the tobacco down, and thrust it between extraordinarily thick lips. He lit the cigarette and sucked in a lungful of smoke and turned his head away and exhaled. "For purposes of this conversation," he said, turning back, speaking English with what Ebby took to be a Russian accent, "you may call me Vasily. Let me begin by expressing my regret at the—what shall I call it?—the zeal with which some of my Hungarian colleagues questioned you. Still, one has to see their side. Insurrection is brewing in Budapest and across the country. It is understandable that my very nervous Hungarian colleagues would want to quickly learn what instructions you brought to the revolutionist A. Zeik, if only to better anticipate the direction he would be likely to lead the masses. You handled yourself with distinction, Mr. Ebbitt. Although we are adversaries, you and I, I offer you—for what it is worth—my esteem." The Russian cleared his throat in embarrassment. "The English national who was taken into custody the same night as you was not able to withstand the persuasive interrogation techniques of the AVH. So we now know the contents of the message you delivered to A. Zeik."

"I saw the persuasive techniques of the AVH through a window," Ebby noted caustically.

Mr. Ebbitt, your clients—your Germans, as opposed to ours—have used similar or even harsher interrogation techniques to persuade captured agents to divulge their small secrets. You are an experienced intelligence officer. Surely we can agree not to quibble over methods of interrogation."

"Is the woman still alive?"

The Russian sucked pensively on his cigarette. "She is alive and continues to be interrogated," he said finally. "My Hungarian colleagues are hoping with her help, to be able to put their hands on A. Zeik before—"

From somewhere in the city came the crackle of rifle fire; it sounded like firecrackers popping on the Chinese New Year. The Russian laughed benignly. "Before the situation deteriorates into outright conflict, though it appears we are too late. I can tell you that there is unrest in the city. A. Zeik is reported to have read out revolutionary poems to a crowd of students assembled the statue of the Hungarian poet Petofi earlier in the day. Perhaps you heard the rabble of students heading in the direction of the Erzsebet Bridge; the Petofi statue—"

There was a burst of automatic weapon fire from a nearby intersection. Under Ebby's window a car with a loudspeaker on its roof broadcast the national anthem as it sped through the streets. And it suddenly dawned on Ebby why the hammer and sheath of wheat had been cut out from the center of the national flag: the students were in open revolt against Communist rule in Hungary!

"That's not what I'd call unrest, Vasily. There's a revolution under way out there."

A young Hungarian wearing a wrinkled AVH uniform appeared at door and breathlessly reported something in a kind of pidgin Russia. Grinding out the cigarette under his heel, Vasily went over to the wind and, standing on his toes, looked down between the slats of the shutter. He clearly didn't like what he saw.

"Dress quickly, if you please," he ordered. "A mob of students is preparing to assault the building. We will leave by a back entrance."

Ebby threw on clean clothing and, moving stiffly, followed the Russia down four flights of steel steps to a sub-basement garage. The Hungarian who had alerted Vasily moments before, a bony young man with a nervous tic to his eyelids, was hunched behind the wheel of a shiny black Zil limousine, its motor purring. A second Hungarian, a beefy AVH officer with the bars of a captain on his shoulder boards and a machine pistol slung under one arm, slid into the passenger seat. Vasily motioned Ebby into the back of the car and scrambled in beside him. Throwing the car into gear, the driver inched the Zil up a ramp toward the metal door slowly sliding back overhead. When the opening was clear, the driver came down hard on the gas pedal and the Zil leapt out of the garage onto a darkened and deserted side street. At the first intersection he spun the wheel to the right, skidding the Zil on two wheels around the corner. The headlights fell on a mob young people marching toward them with raised banners and placards. Vasily barked an order. The driver jammed on the brakes, then threw the Zil into reverse and started backing up. In the headlights, a young man armed with a rifle could be seen sprinting forward. He dropped to one knee and fired. The right front tire burst and the Zil, pitching wildly from the bullet, slammed back into a lamppost. The AVH officer in the passenger seat flung open his door and, crouching behind it, fired off a clip at the rioters racing toward them. Several figures crumpled to the ground. There was a howl of outrage from the students as they engulfed the Zil. The AVH officer tried desperately to cram another clip into the machine pistol but was downed by two quick rifle shots. The doors of the car were wrenched open and dozens of hands pulled the occupants into the street. The driver, Vasily nd Ebby were dragged across the gutter to a brick wall and thrown against it. Behind him, Ebby could hear rifle bolts driving bullets home. Raising his hands in front of his eyes to shield them from the bullets, he cried into the night, "I am an American. I was their prisoner."

A voice yelled something in Hungarian. In the faint light coming from the street lamps that hadn't been shot out, Ebby could make out the mob parting to let someone through.

And then Arpad Zeik appeared out of the darkness. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a black beret and black leggings, and carried a rifle in his hand. He recognized Ebby and shouted an order. A young man holding a wine bottle with a cloth wick sticking from its throat darted forward and pulled Ebby away from the two Russians. Behind him, the young AVH driver sank onto his knees and started pleading in disjointed phrases for his life. The dwarf-like Vasily, smiling ironically, calmly pulled the cigarette case from the pocket of his jacket and snapped a cigarette between his lips. He struck a match and held the flame to the end of the cigarette but didn't live long enough to light it.

A line of students, formed into an impromptu firing squad, cut down the two men with a ragged volley of rifle fire.

Arpad came up to Ebby. "Elizabet—do you know where she is?" he asked breathlessly. The question came across as half plea, half prayer.

Ebby said he had caught a glimpse of her in prison. He explained that there was an entrance to the sub-basement garage under the prison on a nearby side street. Brandishing the rifle over his head, Arpad shouted for the students to follow him and, gripping Ebby under an arm, headed for the AVH prison. As they approached the garage, they could hear the demonstrators massed around the corner in front of the main entrance chanting slogans as they tried to break through a steel fence. The student who had relieved the machine pistol from the dead AVH officer in the car stepped forward and shot out the lock on the garage door. Eager hands tugged at the metal door and pushed it open overhead. From inside the garage a pistol shot rang out. A girl with long dark hair plaited with strands of colorful ribbon turned to stare with lifeless eyes at Ebby and then collapsed at his feet. The students spilled down the ramp into pitch darkness. Ebby tried to keep up with Arpad but lost him in the melee. Shots reverberated through garage. A Molotov cocktail detonated under a car and the gas tank caught fire and exploded. Flames licked at the concrete ceiling. In the shimmering light, Ebby saw some students herding half a dozen men in disheveled AVH uniforms against a wall. The students stepped back and formed a rough line and Arpad shouted an order. The whine of rifle shots echoed through the garage. The AVH men cowering against each other melted into a heap on the floor.

With Arpad leading the way and Ebby at his heels, the students flooded up the steel staircase and spread out through the building, cutting down any AVH men they discovered, opening cells and liberating prisoners. In a basement toilet, the insurrectionists discovered three AVH women, including the one who looked like a sumo wrestler, hiding in stalls; they pulled them out and forced them into urinals and finished them off with pistol shots through the necks. Ebby pulled Arpad through a heavy double door that separated the administrative offices from the cells. Finding himself in a corridor that seemed familiar, he started throwing bolts and hauling open doors. Behind one door he recognized his own cell with the plank bed and the window high in the wall. At another room he spun a chrome wheel to retract the lockset and swung open a thick door and felt the chill from the refrigerated chamber.

Against one wall, Elizabet was dangling from a meat hook spiked through the collar of a torn shirt, her bare legs twitching in a macabre dance step. Her mouth opened and her lips formed words but the rasps that emerged from the back of her throat were not human. Arpad and Ebby lifted her free of the meat hook and carried her from the room and laid her on the floor. Arpad found a filthy blanket in a corner and drew it over her to hide her nakedness.

Two young men—one Ebby recognized as Matyas, the angry student who had been at the meeting in the Buda safe house—appeared at the ene of the hall, prodding ahead of them the woman doctor with coarse grey hair and an older man with the gold bars of a colonel general on the shoulder boards of his AVH uniform. One of his arms hung limply fr0m his shoulder and he was bleeding from the nose. Ebby told Arpad, "She is a doctor."

Jumping to his feet, Arpad gestured for the woman to attend to Elizabet. Only too glad to be spared the fate of the other AVH people in the build, she dropped to her knees and began to feel for a pulse. Arpad pulled a pistol from his waistband and motioned for Matyas to bring the prisoner to them. The AVH officer stared at Ebby and said, in English, "For the love of God, stop him." A gold tooth in his lower jaw glistened with saliva. "I have information that could be of great value to your Central Intelligence Agency."

Ebby recognized the voice—it was the one that had emerged from the darkness of the interrogation chamber to ask him, 'Be so kind as to state your full name."

"His name is Szablako," Arpad informed Ebby, the pupils of his eyes reduced to pinpricks of hate. "He is the commandant of this prison, and well-known to those of us who have been arrested by the AVH."

Ebby stepped closer to the AVH colonel general. "How did you know I was CIA? How did you know I work for Wisner? How did you know I worked in Frankfurt?"

Szablako clutched at the straw that could save his life. "Take me into your custody. Save me from them and I will tell you everything."

Ebby turned to Arpad. "Let me have him—his information can be of great importance to us."

Arpad, wavering, looked from Elizabet on the floor to Szablako, and then at Matyas, who was angrily shaking his head no. "Give him to me," Ebby whispered, but the muscles around the poet's eyes slowly contorted, disfiguring his face, transforming it into a mask of loathing. Suddenly Arpad jerked his head in the direction of the refrigerator room. Matyas understood instantly. Ebby tried to step in front of the colonel general but Arpad, rabid, roughly shoved him to one side. Szablako, seeing what was in store for him, began to tremble violently. "It was the Centre that told us," he cried as Arpad and Matyas dragged him into the cold room. A shriek of terror resounded through the basement corridor, followed by the mournful whimpering a coyote would make if one of its paws had been caught in the steel teeth of a bear trap. The whimpering continued until Arpad and Matyas emerged from the refrigerator room and swung the heavy door shut. They spun the chrome wheel, driving home the spikes on the lockset.

Once outside the room, Arpad cast a quick look at Elizabet, stretched out on the floor. For a fleeting moment he seemed to be torn between staying with her and dashing off to lead the revolution. The revolution won; grabbing his rifle, Arpad strode away with Matyas. The prison doctor busied herself disinfecting Elizabet's wounds and, with Ebby's help, dressed her in a man's flannel shirt and trousers that were tugged up high and tied around her waist with a length of cord. Elizabet's eyes flicked open and stared dumbly into Ebby's face, unable at first to place him. Her tone measured the gap in a chipped front tooth. Then her right hand clutched her left breast through the fabric of the shirt and her stiff lips pronounced his name.

"Elliott?"

"Welcome back to the world, Elizabet," Ebby whispered.

"They hurt me..."

Ebby could only nod.

"The room was so cold—"

"You're safe now."

"I think I told them who you were—"

"It doesn't matter." Ebby noticed a filthy sink with a single faucet at the far end of the hall way. He tore off a square of cloth from the tail of his shirt and wet it and sponged her lips, which were caked with dried blood.

"What has happened?" she asked weakly.

"The insurrection is underway," Ebby said.

"Where is Arpad?"

Ebby managed a bone-weary grin. "He's trying to catch up with the revolution so he can lead it."

As streaks of gray tinted the sky in the east, rumors spread through the city that Russian tanks from the 2nd and the 17th Mechanized Divisions had already reached the outskirts of the capitol. Ebby spotted the first T-34 tank, with the number 527 painted in white on its turret, lumbering into position at an intersection when he and Elizabet were being taken in a bread delivery van to the Corvin Cinema on the corner of Ulloi and Jozsef Avenues. A skinny girl named Margit, with veins of rust bleached into her long blonde hair, was behind the wheel of the van. Ebby sat next to her, Elizabet lay curled up on a mat in the back. On Kalvin Square, five tanks with Russian markings stenciled on the turrets had formed a circle with their guns pointing outward and their commanders surveying the surrounding streets through binoculars from their hatches. Ebby noticed that three of the tanks had small Hungarian flags attached to their whip antennas; the Russians clearly weren't looking for a clash with the students, many of whom were armed with Molotov cocktails.

Ebby scribbled down an address on Prater Street that he had memorized back in Washington—it was the apartment of the Hungarian cutout with a radio and ciphers—and Margit managed to make it there by only side streets and alleyways, avoiding the intersections controlled by Russian tanks. The cutout turned out to be a happy-go-lucky young man named Zoltan with sickle-shaped sideburns that slashed across his pox-scarred cheeks and two steel teeth that flashed when he smiled. Ebby had no difficulty convincing Zoltan to come along with him; the Gypsy didn't have anything against Communism but he was aching to get into a fight with the Russians who occupied his country. He brought along backpack with a transceiver in it, a long curved knife that his father's father had used in skirmishes against the Turks and a violin in a homemade canvas case.

"I understand about the radio and the knife," Ebby told him as they squeezed into the front seat of the van. "But why the violin?"

"Not possible to make war without a violin," Zoltan explained seriously. "Gypsy violinists led Magyars into battle against goddamn Mongols, okay, so it damn good thing if gypsy violinist, yours truly, leads Hungarians into battle against goddamn Russians." He crossed himself and repeated the same thing to Margit in Hungarian, which made her laugh so hard it brought tears to her eyes.

On Rakoczi Street the van was suddenly surrounded by students who had thrown up a roadblock of overturned yellow trolley cars placed in such a way that an automobile had to zigzag through the gaps between them. Overhead, electric cables dangled from their poles. The students wore armbands with the Hungarian colors and brandished large naval pistols, antiquated World War I German rifles and, in one case, a cavalry sword. They must have recognized Margit because they waved the van through. From the sidewalk, an old woman raised her cane in salute. "Eljen!" she cried. "Long life!" On the next corner, more students were carrying out armloads of suits from a big clothing emporium and piling them on the sidewalk. A young woman wearing the gray uniform of a tram conductor, her leather ticket pouch bulging with hand grenades, shouted to a group of passing students that anyone joining them would be given a suit and five Molotov cocktails. Half a dozen students took her up on the offer.

The Corvin Cinema, a round blockhouse-like structure set back from the wide avenue, had been transformed into a fortress and command post for the five hastily organized companies of the so-called Corvin Battalion. A poster in the lobby advertised a film entitled Irene, Please Go Home; someone had crossed out "Irene" and substituted "Russki." In the basement girls manufactured Molotov cocktails by the hundreds, using petrol from a nearby gas station. The movie theater itself, on the ground floor of a four story block of flats, had been turned into a freewheeling assembly line patterned after the popular "Soviets" that had sprung up in Petrograd during the Bolshevik Revolution. Delegates from schools and factories and Hungarian Army units came and went, and raised their hands to vote while they were there. At any given moment a speaker could be heard arguing passionately that the object of the uprising was to put an end to the Soviet occupation of Hungary and rid the country of Communism; merely reforming the existing Communist government and system would not satisfy the people who flocked to Corvin.

Students wearing Red Cross armbands carried Elizabet off on a stretcher to a makeshift infirmary on the third floor. Ebby and his gypsy radioman set up shop in an office on the top floor of an adjoining apartment house that was connected to the Corvin Cinema by a jury-rigged passage through the walls of the buildings. "If goddamn Russian tanks start shooting, this is safest place to be," Zoltan explained with an ear-to-ear grin. "Because those cannons on the goddamn T-34's, they can't aim so high in narrow streets, right." Zoltan shinnied up a stovepipe on the roof to string the shortwave antenna, then set about enciphering Ebby's first bulletin to the Company listening post in Vienna. It reported briefly on his arrest and the arrival of a KGB officer who tried to spirit him away from the AVH station, only to wind up in front of an impromptu firing squad as the insurrectionists raided secret police buildings. Ebby described sighting the first Russian tanks and the telling detail that many of them displayed Hungarian flags. He also pointed out that the Russian armor that had taken up positions in Budapest was not accompanied, as far as he could see, by ground troops, which meant that the Russians were incapable of putting down the revolution without the assistance of the Hungarian army and regular 40,000 strong uniformed police force. And as of dawn on this second day or the insurrection, he said, the Hungarian army and the regular Budapest police had either gone over to what Ebby called the freedom fighters (a phrase that would be picked up by the press) or had declared neutrality.

6

VIENNA, MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1956

AS REBELLION ROCKED HUNGARY, CIA REINFORCEMENTS POURED INTO Vienna from Company stations across Europe. Jack McAuliffe, on detached duty from Berlin, reported to the dingy six-story hotel that the Company had leased on the edge of the Danube Canal in the blue collar suburb of Landstrasse. Directing a task force working out of a warren of rooms on the fourth floor, Jack began to set up an infrastructure for screening the refugees starting to trickle across the Austro-Hungarian frontier; if the situation deteriorated, that trickle was expected to turn into a flood and the Company had to be ready to deal with it. The Austrian Red Cross had opened reception centers in villages near the frontier. Jack's brief was to make sure that middle or high level Communists, as well as ranking military and police officers, were weeded out and interrogated; to make sure, also, that the Company kept an eye peeled for refugees who might be recruited as agents and sent back into Hungary. Late in the afternoon of the 29th, Jack received word that his refugee screening net had pulled in its first big fish: a regular army colonel who had been attached to the Hungarian general staff as liaison with the Soviet 2nd Mechanized Division had come across the frontier with his family during the ^ght and had exhibited a readiness to trade information for the promise of political asylum in America. Jack was signing off on an in-house memo on the 5110-001 when one of his junior officers, fresh out of the S.M. Crew Management course in Alexandria, Virginia, stuck his head in the door. There was going t0 be a briefing on the latest developments in Hungary in twenty minutes.

Jack was settling into one of the folding metal chairs at the back of the banquet hall on the hotels top floor when a young woman pushed through the swinging doors from the kitchen. The officer sitting next to him whistled under his breath. "Now that's someone I wouldn't kick out of rack," he said.

"If she's the new briefing officer," a meteorologist quipped, "we better rent another truckload of seats for the hall."

Jack pushed up his tinted aviators sunglasses with a forefinger and peered under them to get a closer look at her. The young woman seemed vaguely familiar. She was wearing a soft blue skirt that fell to the tops of her ankle boots, a white shirt with a ruffled front and a riding jacket that flared at the waist. Her mouth was painted with raspberry-pink lipstick. She strode across the room to the podium, propped up her briefing folder and scratched a very long and very painted fingernail across the microphone to see if it was turned on. Then she stared out at the ninety or so Company officers crowded into the banquet hall. "My name," she announced, her take-charge voice cutting through the background noise of unfinished conversations, "is Mildred Owen-Brack."

Of course! Owen-Brack! A lifetime ago, back at the posh Cloud Club in the Chrysler building in Manhattan, Jack had been dumb enough to make a pass at her but she hadn't been in the market for a one-night stand. Bye-bye, John J. McAuliffe, and good luck to you, she'd said, batting eyelashes that were so long he'd imagined they were trying to cool his lust.

At the podium Owen-Brack was providing a rundown on the latest news's from Hungary. The Stalinist old guard in Budapest had been booted out and Imre Nagy, the former Hungarian premier who had once been imprisoned as a "deviationist," had emerged as the new head of government. Nagy, who favored a system that Communist intellectuals dubbed Marxism with a human face, had informed the Russians that he couldn't be held responsible for what happened in Hungary unless Soviet troops were pulled out of Budapest. Within hours the Soviet tanks guarding the major intersections had kicked over their engines and started to re-deploy. A long line of ammunition carriers pulling field kitchens, some with smoke still corkscrewing up from their stovepipes, had been spotted heading east through the suburbs. The population, convinced that the revolution had triumphed, had spilled into the streets to celebrate. Nagy, under pressure from militant anti-Communists, appeared willing to test the limits of Russian patience; one of the uncensored newspapers quoted Nagy as saying privately that he would abolish the one-parry system and organize free elections. The political counselor at the American embassy guessed that, in a genuinely free election, the Communists would be lucky to poll ten percent of the vote, which would spell the end of Socialism in Hungary. This same counselor had heard rumors that Nagy was toying with the idea of pulling Hungary out of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Military Pact.

The $64,000 question, Owen-Brack suggested, was: Would the Soviets sit on their hands while Nagy eased Hungary out of the Soviet orbit? Were the Russians pulling the 2nd and 17th Mechanized Divisions out of Budapest in order to buy time—time for Soviet reinforcements, known to be stationed in the Ukraine, to cross the pontoon bridges over the Tisza and reoccupy the entire country

After the briefing Jack lingered to discuss some of the finer points of the refugee screening program with his younger staffers, then wandered over to the back of the banquet hall. Owen-Brack was already there, chatting with two visiting firemen from the House Armed Services Committee. Jack ordered a whiskey sour, then edged closer to Owen-Brack. Turning toward the bar for a pretzel, she caught him sizing her up.

"Crying shame to come all the way up to the top floor of the hotel and not take in the view," he remarked. "From the window over there you can catch a glimpse of the blue Danube flowing toward Hungary."

Owen-Brack looked hard at Jack, trying to place him. Then she snapped her fingers. "New York. The Cloud Club. I don't remember your name but I do remember you had a middle initial that didn't stand for anything." She laughed. "To tell the truth, I wouldn't have recognized you without the mustache... you've changed."

"In what way?"

"You seem older. It's your eyes..." She let the thought trail off.

"Older and wiser, I hope."

"If you mean by wiser, less cocky," she said with a musical laugh, "you had no place to go but up."

Jack smiled. "Last time we met I offered you a cup of Champagne. You saw right through that—you said I wanted to get you into bed, and you were damn right."

Owen-Brack gnawed on the inside of her cheek. "Tell you what," she said. "I'll take you up on that drink you offered me in New York." She held out a hand. "I'm Millie to my friends."

Jack took it. "John McAuliffe. Jack to you."

He bought her a daiquiri and they drifted across the hall to the floor-to-ceiling windows for a view of the Danube. Because of the chandeliers behind them the only thing they could see was their own reflection. "What've you been up to since that day at the Cloud Club?" she inquired, talking to his image in the window.

"This and that."

"Where did you do your this and that?"

"Here and there."

Owen-Brack's brown eyes crinkled into a smile. "Hey, I'm cleared top secret, eyes-only. I can read anything Allen Dulles can read."

Jack said, "I've been stationed in Germany. In Berlin."

"You work with that character Torriti?"

"Yeah. I'm his XO."

"Berlin's supposed to be a tough beat."

"So they say."

"Now I understand why your eyes look older."

Jack turned away from their reflection to gaze at her directly He liked what he saw. "Harvey Torriti suffers from stomach cramps, loss of appetite, a more or less permanent ache in the solar plexus. Me, too. I guess you could write it off as occupational afflictions. But so far I've had Lady Luck on my side—I've managed to survive the skirmishes that killed your husband."

Millie was very moved. "Thanks for remembering that," she said softly.

They clinked glasses and drank to the skirmishes inside and outside the office they'd both survived. Jack asked her if she wanted to sample something beside hotel fare and when she said "Sure, why not," he took her to dinner at a small Viennese restaurant two blocks away with a covered terrace jutting over the Danube Canal. They ordered trout fresh from the kitchen tank and grilled over an open fire, and washed it down with a bottle of chilled Rhine wine. Gradually, Jack loosened up. He talked about his childhood in Pennsylvania and his education at Yale which, in hindsight, seemed like the four best years of his life. He talked about varsity rowing; how the few worries he might have had vanished when he concentrated on the intricate business of pulling a twelve-foot blade.

By the time they cracked the second bottle of wine, Millie was rambling on about her adolescence in Santa Fe, where she'd spent most of her free time on horseback, exploring the endless ranges and canyons. There had been something that passed for an education at a state college and four years of law at a university in Colorado, then a chance meeting with a reckless man in his thirties who introduced her to a world that was a world away from the mysterious Anasazi canyons of New Mexico. There had been a wild trek across Thailand and Laos, an abortion, an angry separation, an emotional reconciliation. Because of his experiences in the Far East and his ability to speak Mandarin Chinese, her husband had been recruited by the Company, which is how she'd gotten her foot in the Pickle Factory door; for security reasons, the CIA liked to employ the wives of officers because it tended to keep secrets in the family. Then one unforgettable day the DD/0, Allen Dulles, and his deputy, Frank Wisner, had turned up at the cubbyhole where she was busy writing contracts and had delivered some awful news: her husband had been pushed and killed running saboteurs into China from Burma. Wisner had taken the new widow under his wing and she'd wound up working at various jobs for the DD/0. And here she was, briefing officers on the situation in Hungary while she waited for her boss, the Wiz, currently on a tour of European stations, to show up in Vienna.

It was after eleven when Jack called for the check and started to count out bills from his wallet. Suddenly he raised his eyes and looked directly into hers. "I guess this is where I get to ask, your room or mine?"

Millie caught her breath. "Are you dead sure you're not pushing your luck?"

"It's not my luck I'm pushing."

She sipped the last of her wine. "I haven't changed my mind about one-night stands."

"I have." Jack came around to sit next to her on the banquette and reached down to finger the hem of her skirt. "I'm not as interested in them as I used to be."

It was easy to see she was tempted. "Look, I just met you. I mean, for all I know you could be a serial killer." She laughed a little too loudly. "So are you, Jack? A serial killer?"

He focused on the smudge of raspberry lipstick on the rim of her wine glass. It reminded him of the color of Lili's lips the night he met her at the ballet and bought her a Berliner Weisse mit Schuss. Jack was still haunted by the memory of the slim dancer who had survived American bombs and rampaging Russian soldiers and the winter of '47 but not the East German Stasi pounding on the locked door of the toilet; in his mind's eye he could see her filling her mouth with water and inserting the small caliber pistol between her thin raspberry-pink lips.

"I have killed," he announced, his eyes never wavering from hers, "but not serially"

His answer irritated her. "If that's your idea of a joke," she retorted, you're registering zero on my laugh meter." Then she noticed the faraway look in his eyes and she realized that he was telling her a truth. "God damn it!" she moaned.

"What's the matter?"

"Every New Year's Eve I vow I'll never get involved with someone who works for the Company."

Jack reached across to touch her knuckles. "We make New Year's resolutions," he said solemnly, "in order to have the satisfaction of breaking them."

7

BUDAPEST, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 1956

FROM THE FIRST HOURS OF THE REVOLT TEN DAYS EARLIER, BANDS OF armed students had been combing the city in the blood hunt for members of the loathed Hungarian secret police. Tracked like animals to their hiding places in basements or subway tunnels, AVH men had been dragged out into the street and executed on the spot; sometimes their bodies were hung head-down from trees, with their pay slips (showing they earned many times more than the average worker) pinned to their trousers. Shortly after midnight on Friday, Arpad personally led a foray against a group of AVH men who had gone to ground in an abandoned police post in one of the Pest suburbs; there were rumors that two particularly brutal district Communist bosses were hiding there, too. Ebby, eager to take the temperature of the city for what had become his daily report to the Company station in Vienna, talked the poet into letting him tag along. Piling into six taxicabs parked in the alleyway behind the Corvin Cinema, borrowing an armored car from the rebel Hungarian soldiers occupying the Kilian Barracks across the intersection, the raiding party headed down Jozsef Avenue and onto Stalin Avenue. Ebby could see evidence of fierce fighting everywhere: shattered store windows, pitted facades, thousands of spent bullets, heaps of cobblestones that had been pried up and used to construct anti-tank strongpoints, the burned out carcasses of automobiles and yellow trolley cars, the black bunting draped from apartment windows in sign of a recent death in the family. At Hero's Park, the caravan skirted the giant statue of Stalin, now sprawling in the gutter. It had been cut down with acetylene torches in the early hours of the revolution; only Stalin's hollow boots, filled with Hungarian flags, remained on the pink pedestal.

At the other side of the giant city park, on a dark street lined with trees and automobile repair garages, the taxis pulled up in a semicircle around an ugly two-story cinderblock building that had served as a neighborhood AVH station, their headlights illuminating the darkened windows. The armored car sighted its cannon on the front door. From a radio in one of the taxis came the tinny sound of an accordion playing "Que Sera, Sera." Standing behind the open door of his vehicle, Arpad raised a battery-powered megaphone and called out an ultimatum in Hungarian. As his voice reverberated through the street, he fixed his eyes on his wristwatch. The hand-rolled cigarette glued to his lips burned down until the embers scorched the skin but he barely noticed the pain.

Moments before Arpad's three-minute deadline expired, the front door swung open and a puffy AVH officer with crew-cut gray hair emerged, his hands thrust so high over his head that his white shirt cuffs protruded from the sleeves of his shapeless uniform jacket. Six other AVH men filed out behind him. Blinded by the headlights, the officer shaded his eyes with one hand.

"Polgdtdrs," he shouted.

Arpad, his eyes ablaze with pent-up fury, spit the butt of the cigarette into the street. "After nine years of Communist rule we have suddenly become citizens," he called over to Ebby.

The AVH officer made an appeal in Hungarian, and then laughed nervously. A tall AVH man behind him held up a framed photograph of his three children and pleaded for mercy. Arpad looked over to the next taxicab and nodded at Ulrik, whose left arm was bound in a blood-soaked bandage. Ulrik, in turn, muttered something to the riflemen near him. Half a dozen of them steadied their weapons on the tops of open taxi doors. Ebby, watching from behind the open door of the last taxicab in the semicircle, turned away as the shots rang out. When he looked back, the seven AVH members lay crumpled on the ground.

Several more men appeared at windows and began firing at the students. The windshield of Ebby's taxicab splintered; flying shards scored the right side of his face. He pressed a handkerchief to his cheek to stop the bleeding as the students returned the fire, shattering windowpanes and pockmarking the cinderblocks around them. A headlight on one of the taxicabs exploded with a loud hiss. The cannon on the armored car blasted away at the front door of the building, filling the frosty night air with the stinging odor of cordite. A sole figure appeared through the haze of dust and rubble at the front door waving an umbrella with a square of white cloth tied to the tip. The shooting broke off. Seven AVH men and two AVH women in disheveled uniforms emerged to cower against the front of the building. For God's sake," Ebby shouted to Arpad, "take them prisoner."

Suddenly an AVH major materialized in the doorway. He was holding a pistol to the head of a terrified girl and prodding her ahead of him. "With tears streaming from her eyes, the girl, who couldn't have been more than twelve, cried out shrilly in Hungarian. The AVH major, a thin man wearing sunglasses with only one lens still intact, waved for the students to clear a path for him.

He made the fatal mistake of waving with the hand that held the pistol. The girl ducked and scampered away. From behind the blinding glare of the headlights, a rifle whispered. Clutching his throat, the major stumbled back drunkenly and then fell onto his back, stone dead. Behind him the other AVH agents panicked and starred running in different directions only to be gunned down by rifle and pistol fire. One of the women had almost reached Ebby's taxicab when a burst of automatic fire hit her skull, shearing off the top of it.

From inside the police station came the muffled reports of individual pistol shots; Ebby guessed that the Communist Party district bosses remaining in the building had committed suicide. Students stormed through the front door and returned minutes later dragging out two bodies by their arms. Both were dressed in civilian clothing. One of them was bleeding from a superficial head wound but still very much alive. Ulrik and several others tied a rope around his ankles and hauled him across the street to one of the city's ornate pre-war gas lampposts. Flinging the end of the rope over an iron curlicue on the lamppost, they strung him head-down above the sidewalk. American twenty-dollar bills spilled from the pockets of his suit jacket. The students piled the money, along with leaves and twigs and pages torn from a magazine, on the sidewalk under his head and touched a match to them. As the flames leaped up to singe his hair the man cried hysterically, "Long live world Communism."

A mad gleam dilating the pupils of his eyes. Arpad strode over to the torso twisting at the end of the rope. Holding his rifle with one hand, he forced the tip of the barrel into the man's mouth and jerked the trigger. Turning away, the poet casually brushed fragments of bone and brain off of his leather jacket with the back of a hand.

A ghostly calm—the kind that exists in its purest form at the eye of a hurricane—gripped Budapest. A light snow had blanketed the Buda hills during the night, dampening the churr of the yellow trolley cars that had been put back into service. In the morning, glaziers began fitting new glass into store windows shattered during the fighting; it was a point of pride among Hungarians that, despite the broken windows, there had been almost no looting. In churches across the city candles burned to mark All Souls' Day, when the practicing Catholics of this largely Catholic country offered prayers for the souls of the dead in purgatory.

By midday, the sun had melted the snow in Buda and blunted the wet rawness of the wind sweeping off the Danube. Bundled in borrowed duffle coats, strolling along the embankment on the Pest side of the river, Ebby and Elizabet could hear church bells across the city tolling the end of the morning's All Souls' services. To Elizabet, at least, it sounded as if the bells were celebrating the triumph of the revolution and the start of a new epoch for Hungary, and she said as much.

Ebby was less optimistic. There had been too much killing, he told her. It was true that the two Russian divisions had pulled back from Budapest. But if the Russians returned in force, the AVH and the Communists would come back with them, and there would be a bloody reckoning.

Elizabet bridled. "For years they tortured us, they imprisoned us, they slaughtered us," she said with great passion, "and you talk of them settling scores with us!" Since her imprisonment she tended to break into tears easily and took several deep breaths to head them off now.

Stepping around open suitcases on the sidewalk, set out to collect donations for the wounded, they strolled on past walls plastered with poems and caricatures and the omnipresent slogan "New Kelt Komunizmus"—"We don't want Communism!" At one corner, Elizabet stopped to chat with two young journalists who were handing out free copies of one of the four-sheet independent newspapers that had sprung up in the early days of the revolution. Coming back to Ebby, she held up the hand-set Literary Gazette and translated the headline over the front page editorial: '"In revolution, as in a novel, the most difficult part is to invent the end'—de Tocqueville." Crossing a street, Elizabet stopped to look at the two rows of fresh graves in a small triangle of grass at the middle of the intersection; each of the dozen or so mounds of earth was piled high with flowers and red-white-and-green ribbons. Tacked to sticks hammered into the ground at the heads of several graves were photographs of smiling young boys and girls, some dressed in school uniforms, others in makeshift battle fatigues.

"The Russians won't invade," Elizabet predicted emotionally, "for the same reason they didn't invade Yugoslavia all these years: because they know our young people are ready to die for the revolution, and they'll take a lot of Russian soldiers with them." Again her eyes teared; again she flung the tears away with the back of her finger. She looked across the river at the statue of the martyred Archbishop Gellert, his crucifix raised high, atop one of the Buda hills. "Purgatory is not big enough to contain all the Russian soldiers who will go to hell if the Soviets make the mistake of returning," she said.

She slipped a hand inside the duffle coat to massage her mutilated breast. Again her eyes filled with tears. "The truth is that I am afraid to cry," she confessed.

"You've earned the right to a good cry," Ebby said.

"Never," she said, spitting out the word. "I am terrified that if I start I will never be able to stop."

While the wound on her breast cicatrized, Elizabet took to prowling the Corvin Cinema. She sat in on Council sessions in the movie theater or impromptu committee meetings in the rooms off it, or pulled Ebby after her down the long tunnel that connected Corvin with the Kilian Barracks across the street to chat with the officers of the 900-man construction battalion that had gone over to the revolution. Evenings they listened (with Elizabet providing a running translation) to the endless bull sessions raging in hallways that had been transformed into dormitories for the hundreds of students crowded into Corvin. Arpad occasionally was called upon to read one of his poems, but for the most part the discussions revolved around how fast and how far the students and workers dared push the new leadership, headed by the reformer Nagy, to break with the Soviet Union and the country's Communist past.

According to the radio, negotiations were already underway concerning the departure of all Soviet forces from Hungary; the Russian delegation, headed by the tall, humorless Soviet Ambassador, Yuri Andropov, and the Soviet Politburo idealogue, Mikhail Suslov, was demanding only that the troops be allowed to quit the country with their banners flying and bands playing to avoid humiliation. In the hallways of Corvin, the few voices brave enough to question the wisdom of withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact and calling for free elections, two moves that were bound to test the patience of Moscow, were shouted down. The revolution had triumphed, Arpad proclaimed during one of the hallway discussions. What was the point of making concessions that undermine this triumph?

"What if the Russians decide we have gone too far and invade Hungary?" a boy with long blond hair asked.

"We will defeat them again," Arpad responded.

"And if they return with two thousand tanks?" another student persisted.

"The Americans," Arpad promised, stabbing the air with a hand-rolled cigarette to emphasize his point, "will come to our assistance. NATO planes will bomb the Russian tanks before they reach Budapest. NATO airdrops will supply us with anti-tank weapons to deal with the few that get through the bombardment." Arpad gazed over the heads of the students to stare defiantly at Ebby. "If we don't lose our nerve," he said, "we will soon live in a free and democratic Hungary." Then, his Roman face burning with pious fervor, he pumped his fist in the air. "Ne Bdntsd a Magyart!" he cried. And the students, clapping in unison, took up the refrain.

"With soldiers like these," Elizabet shouted into Ebby's ear, "how can we possibly lose?"

Ebby could only shake his head. He hoped to God that Arpad had gotten it right; hoped to God the Russians stayed in Russia. If they did come back, they would return in overwhelming numbers and with overwhelming fire power. And the world would not lift a finger to help as Arpad and others like him led the courageous Hungarian lambs to the slaughter.

In the darkness one night, Ebby could hear Elizabet flinging herself from one side of the mattress to the other in the hunt for a position that would ease the ache of her injury. He wondered what time it was. A cheerful young mason with a bandaged ear had bricked in the sniper's hole in the wall, which had the advantage of making the room less drafty but the disadvantage that Ebby was no longer woken up by the daylight. From time to time he could hear members of the Corvin Battalion stirring in the hallway, but that didn't necessarily mean it was sunup; small groups of them came and went through the night, relieving others on guard duty or heading out to patrol the city on foot or in one of the commandeered taxi cabs. On the other side of the room, Elizabet scraped her mattress across the floor and propped half of it against the wall to create a makeshift chair; she seemed to suffer less pain when she slept in a sitting position.

"Elliott—"

Ebby propped himself up on elbow. "What is it?"

"It hurts. I hurt. Can't sleep. Can't not sleep. Worried sick."

Ebby pulled his mattress over to the wall alongside hers. He felt her hand groping for his in the darkness and twined his fingers through hers.

"I'm glad you're here," she confided in a whisper.

"Want to talk?" he asked.

"I have a child... a daughter..."

"What's her name?"

"Her Christian name is Nellie. She will be six in January."

"Is Arpad her father?"

"Yes." Ebby could hear her brushing tears from her eyes. I was still living with my husband when Arpad and I... when we..."

"You don't need to go into details," Ebby said. "Where is your husband—what was his name again?"

"Nemeth. Nandor Nemeth. His father was a high-ranking Communist. When we married, Nandor was an undersecretary in the Ministry for External Affairs. He was posted to the Hungarian embassy in Moscow two years ago. He knew about Arpad by then. I decided not to go with him..."

"What happened to Nellie?"

"She's living with Nandor's sister on a collective farm near Gyor, about ninety kilometers from Budapest. Until all this started"—Elizabet sighed into the darkness—"I used to drive out to see her every other weekend. Before Arpad went underground, the AVH used to pick him up once or twice a month; sometimes they would question him for an entire week. When Arpad was in prison I used to bring Nellie back with me to Budapest for days at a time."

"Why didn't you bring her to Budapest when Arpad was here?"

Elizabet thought about that for a moment. "You have to understand Arpad—he is an ardent fighter for the freedom of people in general, but individual freedoms, the right to bring your daughter to live with you, are subject to his veto." She cleared a lump from her throat. "The fact is he doesn't like children around. I was free to leave him, of course. I tried to several times. But in the end I always came crawling back. I am addicted to Arpad—he is like a drug habit that is impossible to kick..."

The hollowness Ebby detected in the timbre of Elizabet's voice frightened him. To distract her he told her he had a son three years older than Nellie. "His name is Manny, which is short for Immanuel. He's a bright boy, bright and serious. He lives with my former wife... I don't really know him all that well... I spend so much time abroad."

"It must be difficult for you— "

Ebby didn't say anything.

Elizabet tightened her grip on his hand. "When all this is finished—the revolution, the killing, the hurting, the exhilaration—we must both of us spend more time with our children."

"Yes. We'll find a way to do that."

"You look like you've been run over by a steam roller," the young embassy counselor Jim Doolittle remarked to Ebby. It was Friday evening and the two were gazing out of a window on the second floor of the Parliament Building, which had a splendid view of the vast square. There had been a trace of a sunset earlier in the evening; now the last pigments of color in the sooty sky had been blotted up by the darkness. A bonfire burned in the middle of the square and a pick-up Tzigane orchestra stood around it playing Gypsy melodies. Every now and then a small open truck would pull up and the gypsies would unload chairs swiped from neighborhood Communist Party offices, smash them on the pavement and feed the wood into the fire. Ebby could make out Zoltan dancing around the flames as he sawed away at the violin jammed into his collarbone.

Did Zoltan have his own sources of information? Was the gypsy violinist warming up to lead the Hungarians into battle against the Russians?

Doolittle turned away from the window to watch the American ambassador, along with his political charge d'affaires (Doolittle's immediate superior) and the Company's chief of station talking in urgent undertones with the Hungarian premier, Nagy, on the other side of the large mirrored reception hall. In a corner one of Nagy's aides fed documents into the fire burning in a marble fireplace. "Washington ought to have warned us you were Company," Doolittle told Ebby. "We could have kept closer tabs on you. When you went missing we could have started ringing the gong sooner."

Ebby touched his eye, which was still tender. "Wouldn't have changed anything," he remarked.

"I guess not," Doolittle conceded.

Arpad and a tall, lanky officer in a crisp uniform of the armored corps appeared at the double doors of the reception room and walked in lockstep across the marble floor to join Nagy and the Americans. "Who's the guy with Zeik?" Ebby asked.

"That's Nagy's minister of defense. Pal Maleter, the commander of the Kilian Barracks. He's the one who's been negotiating the Soviet pullout with the Russians."

The chief of station waved for Ebby to join them. Nagy was talking to Maleter in Hungarian. The premier turned to the Americans. "If you please, Mr. Ambassador, tell him what you told me."

The ambassador, an old-school diplomat who agonized over the situation in Hungary, tugged a message blank from the inside pocket of his double-breasted suit jacket. Pasted across the paper in strips was a deciphered top secret cable that had come into the embassy earlier in the day. "We have reports—" he began. He cleared his throat; he felt as if he were reading out a death sentence. "—reports that two trains filled with the latest model Soviet tank, the T-54, crossed the Hungarian frontier at Zahony, then offloaded and dug in around Szolnok and Abony. We have intelligence that old Soviet T-34 tanks that pulled out of Budapest a few days ago went no further than Vecses, nine miles from the city, where they turned around and blocked roads. French diplomats who flew out of Budapest in the last twenty-four hours reported seeing Soviet tanks closing in on the three Budapest airports—Ferihegy, Budaors, and Tokol. Finally, one of our own reconnaissance aircraft flying from a base in Austria spotted two hundred tanks and long column of new Soviet armored personal carriers, designated BTR-152 heading in the direction of Budapest near Vac and Cegledopen."

Nagy puffed agitatedly on an American cigarette. Ashes tumbled onto one of the lapels of his brown suit jacket but he didn't appear to notice. "We also have had information," he told the ambassador, "indicating that a great many Soviet tanks have crossed the Tisza into Hungary." He turned to his Minister of Defense and, speaking in English for the benefit of the Americans, asked, "Did you raise the subject of these sightings with the Soviet side at tonights negotiations?"

"I did, Mr. Prime Minister," Maleter replied. "Ambassador Andropov became enraged—he claimed it was a provocation of the American CIA designed to ignite full scale fighting between the Russian side and the Hungarian side before we could conclude the terms of the Soviet withdrawal. He cautioned us against falling into the American trap."

"Whom do you trust," Ebby asked bluntly, "Andropov or us?"

Maleter sized up Ebby. "I can say that we are obliged to trust him. The alternative is too tragic to contemplate. If the Soviets invade Hungary we will of course fight. But for us there can be only one issue—death with honor."

Arpad Zeik added grimly, "We harbor no illusions about surviving— without American intervention we have no possibility of defeating the Russians if it comes to full scale war."

"Do you, sir, believe the Russians will invade?" the American charge d'affaires asked Nagy.

The premier took his time before answering. "If one judges from history, he said finally, "the response must be yes. The Russians always come in."

"Let us look at this realistically," Maleter said. "There are bound to be some in the Soviet superstructure who will argue that if Hungary is permitted to remove itself from the Soviet sphere, other satellite states will follow."

Nagy became aware of the ashes on his lapel and flicked them away with his fingernails. "History will judge us harshly if we went too far, too fast," he confided in a gruff voice. He concentrated on his cigarette for a moment. "It comes down to this: In the event of war what will the Americans do?

"We have been clear about this from the start," the ambassador said. "Mr. Ebbitt here, at great personal risk, brought an unambiguous message to Mr. Zeik. The day you assumed the powers of premier, I delivered the same message to you, Mr. Nagy. Neither the Americans nor NATO are prepared to intervene in Hungary"

"What if we were to provide a casus belli for the Western powers to intervene by taking Hungary out of the Warsaw Pact and declaring neutrality?"

The ambassador said, "It would not alter anything—except perhaps infuriate the Soviets even more."

"Our only hope, then, rests on the Russians being unsure of the American attitude," Maleter said. "As long as they are in doubt, there is always a chance that Khrushchev and the doves on the Soviet politburo will restrain Zhukov and his hawks."

As the Americans were leaving the Parliament building, the chief of station pulled Ebby into a vestibule. "I think it might be wise if you came back to the embassy with me. We'll supply you with diplomatic cover—"

"What about Zoltan, my radioman? What about Elizabet Nemeth?"

"If word gets out that we're giving asylum to Hungarians we'll be swamped—mobs will beat down our doors."

"A lot of these people went out on the limb for us."

"What they were doing, they were doing for Hungary, not for us. We don't owe them anything."

Ebby said, "That's not how I see things. I'll stay with them."

The chief of station hiked his shoulders. "I can't order you. Officially, I don't even know you're in Budapest—you're reporting directly to the DD/0. For the record, if the Russians do invade I strongly urge you to change your mind."

"Thanks for the advice."

"Advice is cheap."

Ebby nodded in agreement. "The advice you gave me is cheap."

8

WASHINGTON, DC, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 1955

AT SUNUP, BERNICE SHIFTED ONTO HER SIDE IN THE NARROW BED, pressing the large nipples of her tiny breasts into Eugene's back. The previous night he had turned up at her third-floor walkup later than usual—the candles she always lit when she knew he was coming had almost burned down to their wicks—and their love-making had lasted longer than usual. He hadn't wanted to do any peyote; he seemed to be walking on air without it. "So are you awake?" Bernice whispered into his neck. "I think there's something you need to know, baby."

Stirring lazily, Eugene opened an eye and, squinting, played with the sunlight streaming through slits in the window shade. "What do I need to know?"

"I figured out where you don't come from."

"Where don't I come from?"

"Canada is where you don't come from, baby."

Eugene maneuvered onto his back and Bernice crawled on top of him, her long bony body light as a feather, her fingers reaching down to comb through his pubic hair.

"If I don't come from Canada, where do I come from?"

The tip of her tongue flicked at the inside of his ear. "You come from ...Russia, baby. You're Russian."

Both of Eugene's eyes were wide open now. "What makes you think that?"

"You mutter things in your sleep, things I don't understand, things in a foreign language."

"Maybe I'm speaking Canadian."

Bernice's body trembled with silent laughter. "You said something about knigi"

"Knigi sounds Canadian to me."

"Max speaks pigeon Russian from when he visited Moscow before the war. Hey, don't worry—I told him I overheard two customers speaking what I thought was Russian. Max says I must have been right—he says knigi means 'book' in Russian."

"Book?"

"Yeah, baby. Book! So don't act innocent. You say other Russian-sounding things, too. You say something that sounds like starik. Max says starik is Russian for 'old man.' He says Starik with a capital S was Lenin's nickname. Almost everyone around him was younger and called him 'the old man.' Honest to God, Eugene, it gives me goose pimples thinking about it—I mean, actually talking to Comrade Lenin in your sleep!"

Eugene tried to pass it off as a joke. "Maybe I was Russian in a previous incarnation."

"Maybe you're Russian in this incarnation. Hey, there's more. Reasons why I think you're Russian, I mean."

Eugene propped himself up in bed, his back against a pillow, and reached for a cigarette on the night table. He lit it and passed it to Bernice, who sat up alongside him. He lit a second one for himself.

"So you want to hear my reasons?"

"Anything for a laugh."

"Remember when Max lent us the station wagon two weeks ago and we drove down to Key West? You did something real funny before we left— after you packed your valise you sat down on it."

"I was trying to lock it."

"It was locked when you sat down on it, Eugene, baby." Eugene sucked pensively on the cigarette.

"After we left, you remembered you'd forgotten the antenna for your Motorola. Shows how dumb I am, I didn't even know Motorolas needed antennas. Long as we were going back, I went up to pee. You found the antenna in the closet and then you did something funny again—you looked at yourself in the full-length mirror on the wall next to the john."

"That doesn't make me Russian, Bernice. That makes me narcissistic."

"Remember me telling you about my grandfather coming from Vilnus? Well, he always used to sit on his valise before setting out on a trip—us kids used to kid him about it. He said it brought good luck. He flat-out refused t0 go back across the threshold once he started out—he said it meant the trip would end badly. And if he absolutely had to, like the time when my grandmother forgot the sulfa pills for her heart, he did what you did—he looked at himself in the mirror before starting out again." She reached across Eugene's stomach to flick ashes into a saucer on the night table. "I don't know how you got to talk American with a Brooklyn accent but if you're not Russian, Eugene, I'm a monkeys uncle."

Eugene regarded his girlfriend of five years. "This started out as a joke, Bernice, but it has stopped being funny."

Leaning toward him, Bernice pressed her lips against his ear and whispered into it. "When I was vacuuming your apartment over the store yesterday, I discovered the hiding place under the floorboards in the closet. I found the antenna. I found packs of money. Lots and lots of it. More money than I've ever seen before. I found stuff—a miniature camera, rolls of film, a small gizmo that fits in your palm and looks like some kind of microscope. I found matchbooks with grids of numbers and letters on the inside covers." Bernice shuddered. "I'm so proud of you, Eugene, I could die. I'm proud to be your friend. I'm proud to fuck you." She reached down with her right hand and cupped it protectively over his testicles. "Oh, baby, it takes my breath away when I think of it. It's the bee's knees. It's the cat's pajamas. Its completely colossal! You're a spy for Soviet Russia, Eugene! You're a Communist warrior battling on the front line against capitalism." She began sliding down his body, sucking on his nipples, planting moist kisses on his stomach, pulling his penis up toward her lips and bending to meet it. "You don't need to worry, Eugene. Bernice would die before she tells a soul about you being a spy for the Motherland."

"Even Max, Bernice. Especially Max."

Tears of joy streamed from Bernice's shut eyes. "Even Max, baby," she whispered breathlessly. "Oh my God, I love you to death, Eugene. I love what you are, I love you the way a woman loves a soldier. This secret will be an engagement ring between us. I swear it to you."

She rambled on about the permanent revolution that would bring Marxism to the world and the dictatorship of the proletariat that would follow. She kept talking but gradually her words became garbled and he had difficulty understanding them.

Eugene had met SASHA the previous night at the rendezvous marked as

X 0 X

0 X 0

X 0 0

in the tic-tac-toe code: the McClellan statue on California Avenue. A face-to-face meeting between an agent and his handler was a rare event; when the
matter was more or less routine, Eugene usually retrieved films and enciphered messages from dead drops. Both SASHA and Eugene had taken the usual precautions to make sure they weren't being followed; doubling back their tracks, going the wrong way on one-way streets, ducking into stores through a main entrance and leaving through a side door. Despite the chilly weather, two old men were playing chess under a streetlight on a nearby park bench. SASHA nodded toward them but Eugene shook his head no. He'd reconnoitered the site before leaving the coded tic-tac-toe chalk marks on the mailbox near SASHA's home; the same two old men, bundled in overcoats and scarves, had been playing chess then, too.

"Know anything about General McClellan?" Eugene asked, looking up at the statue.

"He won a battle during the Civil War but I don't remember which one," SASHA said.

"It was what the North called Antietam, after a creek, and the South called Sharpsburg, after the town. McClellan whipped Lee's ass but he was too cautious for Lincoln when it came to exploiting the victory. Lincoln grumbled that 'McClellans got the slows' and fired him."

"Khrushchev's got the slows, if you ask me," SASHA said moodily. "If he doesn't go into Hungary and put down the goddamn insurrection, all of Eastern Europe will break away. And there will be no buffer zone left between the Soviet Union and NATO forces in the west."

"If Khrushchev's dragging his feet, it's because he's worried about starting a world war," Eugene guessed.

"There won't be a world war," SASHA said flatly, "at least not over Hungary. That's why I phoned in the order to the girl at the liquor store. That's why I asked for this meeting." He held out a small brown paper bag filled with peanuts. "Under the peanuts you'll find two rolls of microfilms that will change history. There are contingency papers, there are minutes of a high-level telephone discussion, there are messages from Vienna Station, there's even a copy of a CIA briefing to President Eisenhower on American military preparedness in Europe in the event of war. I sat in on the briefing. When it was finished Eisenhower shook his head and said, 'I wish to God I could help them, but I can't.' Remember those words, Eugene. They're not on any of the microfilms but they're straight from the horses mouth."

"'I wish to God I could help them, but I can't."'

"Starik's been peppering me with interrogatives since this business in Budapest exploded. Here's his answer: The Americans won't move a tank or a unit to assist the Hungarians if Khrushchev takes the leash off Zhukov."

Eugene plucked a peanut from the bag, cracked it and popped the nut into his mouth. Then he accepted the bag. "I'll have the remark from Eisenhower in Starik's hands in two hours."

"How will I know it's been delivered?" SASHA asked.

"Watch the headlines in the Washington Post," Eugene suggested.

Philip Swett had a hard time rounding up the usual movers and shakers for his regular Saturday night Georgetown bash. Sundry stars of the Washington press corps, senior White House aides, Cabinet members. Supreme Court justices, members of the Joint Chiefs, State Department topsiders and Pickle Factory mavens had asked for rain checks; they were all too busy following the breaking news to socialize. Joe Alsop, who had popularized the domino theory in one of his columns, dropped by but fled in mid-cocktail when he received an urgent phone call from his office (it seemed that Moscow had just threatened to use rockets if the Israelis didn't agree to a Middle East ceasefire and the British and French continued to menace Egypt). Which left Swett presiding over a motley crew of under-secretaries and legislative assistants and the stray guest, his daughter Adelle and his son-in-law Leo Kritzky among them. Putting the best face on the situation, he waved everyone into the dining room. "Looks like Stevenson is going down in flames next Tuesday," he announced, motioning for the waiters to uncork the Champagne and fill the glasses. "Latest polls give Ike fifty-seven percent of the popular vote. Electoral college won't even be close."

"Adlai never had a chance," a State Department desk officer observed. "No way a cerebral governor from Illinois is going to whip General Eisenhower, what with a full-fledged revolution raging in Hungary and the Middle East in flames."

"People are terrified we'll drift into world war," remarked a Republican speech writer. "They want someone at the helm who's been tested under fire. "

"It's one thing to be terrified of war," maintained a Navy captain attached to the Joint Chiefs. "It's another to sit on the sidelines when our allies—the British and French and Israelis—attack Egypt to get back the Suez Canal. If we don't help out our friends, chances are they won't be there for us when we need them."

"Ike is just being prudent," explained the State Department desk officer. "The Russians are already jittery over the Hungarian uprising. The Israeli invasion of Sinai, the British and French raids on Egyptian airfields, could lead Moscow to miscalculate."

"In the atomic age it would only take one teeny miscalculation to destroy the world," declared Adelle. "Speaking as the mother of two small ones, I don't fault an American president for being cautious."

Leo said, "Still and all, there's such a thing as being too cautious."

"Explain yourself," Swett challenged from the head of the table.

Leo glanced at Adelle, who raised her eyebrows as if to say: For goodness sake, don't let him browbeat you. Smiling self-consciously, Leo turned back to his father-in-law. "The data I've seen suggests that Khrushchev and the others on the Politburo have lost their taste for confrontation." he said. "It's true they rattle their sabers from time to time, like this threat to intervene in the Suez matter. But we need to look at their actions, as opposed to their words—for starters, they pulled two divisions out of Budapest when the Hungarians took to the streets. If we play our cards right, Hungary could be pried out of the Soviet sphere and wind up in the Western camp."

"Russians believe in the domino theory as much as we do," said a much-published think tank professor who made a small fortune consulting for the State Department. "If they let one satellite break away others are bound to follow. They can't afford to run that risk."

"Is that what you're telling the State Department—that you think the Red Army will invade Hungary?" Swett asked.

"Count on it, the Red Army will be back, and in force," the professor predicted.

"If the Russians do invade Hungary," Leo said, "America and NATO will be hard put to sit on their hands. After all these years of talking about rolling back Communism, we'll have to put up or shut up if we want to remain credible."

Adelle, who worked as a legislative assistant for Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, looked surprised. "Are you saying we ought to go to war to keep our credibility?" she asked.

Before Leo could answer, the State Department desk officer said, "Mark my words, nobody's going to war over Hungary. Knowing Ike, knowing John Foster Dulles, if push comes to shove my guess is we'll back down."

"I hope you're wrong," Leo persisted earnestly. "I hope, at the very least, they have the nerve to bluff the Russians. Look, if the Russians can't be sure how America will react, then the doves on the Politburo, Khrushchev among them, might be able to keep the hawks in line."

The grandfather clock was closing in on midnight by the time the last of the guests had departed. With only family remaining—since the birth of his twin granddaughters, two years before, Philip Swett grudgingly included Leo under 'family'—the host broke out a bottle of very aged and very expensive Napoleon cognac and filled three snifters. "To us," he said, raising a glass. A grunt of pure pleasure escaped his lips after he swallowed the first sip of cognac. Turning the snifter in his fingers, he gazed sideways at his son-in-law. "Knew you were an ardent anti-Communist, Leo—suppose you wouldn't be in the Company if you weren't—but never thought you were madcap about it. This Hungary business brings out the gung-ho in you."

"There is something exhilarating about a slave nation breaking free, " Leo admitted.

"I've got nothing against a slave nation breaking free long as it doesn't bring the world down around our ears."

"Each of us has his own idea of where American national interest lies—" Leo started to say.

"By golly, it's not in America's national interest to bring on a nuclear war which could reduce America to volcanic ashes!" Swett squinted at Leo. "You appear to be pretty damn sure of yourself when you say Khrushchev and Company went and lost their taste for confrontation. What do you know that's not in the newspapers? Has that Pickle Factory of yours got a spy in the Politburo?"

Leo smiled uncomfortably. "It's just an educated guess."

Swett snorted. "Ask me, sounds more like an uneducated guess."

"I don't agree with what he's saying any more than you do, Daddy," Adelle said, "but Leo's entitled to his opinion."

"Not saying he isn't. Just saying he's full of crap."

Swett was grinning as he spoke, which made it impossible for Leo to take offense. "On that note," he said, setting the snifter on a table, pushing himself to his feet, "we ought to be heading home to relieve the baby-sitter. He nodded at his father-in-law. "Phil."

Swett nodded back. "Leo."

Adelle sighed. "Well, at least the two of you know each other's name.

Leaning over the small table in the inner sanctum off the library of the Abakumov mansion outside of Moscow, matching the numbers on the message to the letters on the grid of the one-time pad, Starik meticulously deciphered the bulletin from his agent in Rome; he didn't want messages dealing with KHOLSTOMER passing through the hands of code clerks. The several sums of US dollars, transferred over the past six months to a Swiss bank from SovGaz and the Soviet Import-Export Cooperative, then speedily paid out to various shell companies in Luxembourg that channeled the money on to the Banco Ambrosiano, Italy's largest private bank, and finally to the Vatican Bank itself, were accounted for.

Starik burned the enciphered message and the one-time pad in a coal stove, then inserted the deciphered message in the old-fashioned file box with an iron hasp. The words Soversheno Sekretno ("Top Secret") and KHOLSTOMER were written in beautiful Cyrillic script across the oak cover. He placed the box on the shelf of the large safe that was cemented into the wall behind the portrait of Lenin, enabled the destruction mechanism, closed the heavy door and carefully double-locked it at the top and at the bottom with the only existing key, which he kept attached to the wrought silver chain hanging around his neck.

Then he turned his attention to the next message, which the code clerks working in the top floor room-within-a-room had just broken out of its cipher. It had come in marked "Urgent Immediate" fourteen minutes earlier. The clerk who had delivered the deciphered version to Starik mentioned that the Washington rezidentura, using emergency contact procedures, had come on the air outside its regularly scheduled transmissions, which underscored the importance of the matter.

As Starik read through SASHA's brief message—"I wish to God I could help them, but I can't." —his eyes brightened. He reached for the phone and dialed the gatehouse. "Bring my car around to the front door immediately," he ordered.

Starik extracted the last of the hollow-tipped Bulgarian cigarettes from the packet and thrust it between his lips. He crumpled the empty packet and tossed it into the corrugated burn bin on his next turn around the anteroom. One of the half-dozen KGB heavies sitting around on wooden benches reading photo magazines noticed Starik patting his pockets and offered a light. Bending over the flame, Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov sucked the cigarette into life.

'How long have they been at it?" he called across the room to the secretary, a dreary-faced young man wearing goggle-like eyeglasses, who was sitting behind the desk next to the door.

"Since nine this morning," he answered.

'Seven hours," one of the bodyguards grunted.

From behind the shut door of the Politburo conference room came the muffled sound of riotous argument. Every now and then someone would raise his voice and a phrase would be audible: "Simply not possible to give you a written guarantee." "No choice but to support us." "Matter of days at the most." "Weigh the consequences." "If you refuse the responsibility it will be on your head."

Starik stopped in front of the male secretary. "Are you certain he know I am here?"

"I placed your note in front of him. What more can I do?"

"It is vital that I speak to him before a decision is taken," Starik said "Ring through to him on the phone."

"I am under strict instructions not to interrupt—"

"And I am instructing you to interrupt. It will go badly for you if you refuse."

The young man was caught in an agony of indecision. "If you give me another written message, Comrade Colonel General, I can attempt to deliver it in such a way as to ensure that he has read it."

Starik scribbled a second note on a pad and ripped it off. The secretary filled his lungs with air and plunged into the room, leaving the door partly open behind him. "Run unacceptable risks if we do not intervene." "Still recovering from the last war." "Only thing counterrevolutionists understand is force."

The door opened wider and the secretary returned. The round figure of Nikita Sergeyovich Khrushchev materialized behind him. The six heavies lounging around the room sprang to their feet. Starik dropped his cigarette on the floor and stubbed it out with the toe of one of his soft boots.

Khrushchev was in a foul mood. "What the devil is so important that it cannot wait until—"

Starik produced a plain brown envelope from the inside pocket of his long peasant's jacket, pulled several sheets of paper from it and held them out to Khrushchev. "These speak for themselves."

The First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party fitted on a pair of steel-rimmed reading glasses and started to skim the documents. As he finished the first sheet, his thick lips parted. From time to time he would glance up and pose a question.

"How sure are you of the source of these reports?"

"I would stake my life on him."

"These appear to be minutes of a meeting—"

"There was a three-way conversation on a secure telephone line between CIA Director Dulles; his brother, John Foster Dulles, who is recuperating in a Washington hospital; and Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson. A stenographer in the office of CIA Director Dulles recorded the conversation."

Khrushchev chuckled. "I will not ask you how these records came into your possession."

Starik did not smile. "I would not tell you if you did."

Khrushchev bristled. "If I instruct you to tell me, you will tell me."

Starik stood his ground. "I would quit first."

Nikolai Bulganin, the one-time mayor of Moscow who, on Khrushchev's insistence, had been named premier the previous year, appeared at the door behind the First Secretary.

"Nikita Sergeyevich, Marshal Zhukov is pressing for an answer—"

Khrushchev passed the pages he'd already read to Bulganin. "Look through these, Nikolai Aleksandrovich," he ordered crisply. He read through the remaining pages, reread two of them, then looked up. His small eyes danced excitedly in his round face. "The parenthetical observation at the top," he said, lowering his voice, "suggests that these words were spoken in the White House."

Starik permitted himself a faint smile.

Khrushchev showed the last document to Bulganin, then returned the papers to Starik. "My thanks to you, Pasha Semyonovich. Of course, this permits us to assess the situation in a different light." With that, both the First Secretary and the Soviet premier returned to the conference room, closing the door behind them.

The KGB heavies settled back onto the benches. The young secretary breathed a sigh of relief. Behind the thick wooden door the storm seemed to have abated, replaced by the droning of unruffled men moving briskly in the direction of a rational decision.

9

BUDAPEST, SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 1956

ON THE STAGE OF THE CORVIN CINEMA, AMID A CLUTTER Of orange peels and empty sardine tins and broken ammunition crates and discarded clothing and heaps of mimeographed tracts and assorted weaponry, the players in the drama waited for the curtain to rise on the third act. Half a dozen teenage girls fitted machine gun bullets, smuggled in from a Hungarian Army base the previous night, into cartridge belts as they giggled over boys who had caught their eye. Several older women, sitting in a semicircle under the stage, filled empty beer bottles with petrol and then stuffed cloth wicks into them. In a corner, Zoltan, Ebby's gypsy radioman, sharpened the long curved blade of his father's father's knife on a snakestone, testing it every now and then against the ball of his thumb. A young squad leader, just back from patrolling the Pest bank of the Danube, stripped off his bandolier, leather jacket and knitted sweater and crawled onto a pallet alongside his sleeping girlfriend, a freckle-faced teenager with blonde pigtails; she stirred and turned and buried her head in the boy's neck, and the two whispered for several minutes before falling asleep in each other s arms. In the back of the auditorium Ebby dozed on one of the folding wooden seats, his head propped against a window curtain rolled into a makeshift pillow. Elizabet lay stretched across three seats in the row behind him, a Hungarian Army greatcoat covering her body, a sailor s watch cap pulled over her eyes and ears shutting out the light and sound, but not the tension. Shortly before four in the morning Arpad lumbered through the double door of the theater and looked around. He spotted Ebby and strode across the auditorium to sink wearily onto the seat next to him.

Ebby came awake instantly. "Are the rumors true?" he demanded.

Arpad, his eyes swollen from lack of sleep, nodded gloomily. "You must get the news to your American friends in Vienna. Pal Maleter and the other members of the delegation were invited to continue the negotiations at the Russian command post on the island of Tokol in the Danube. Sometime after eleven last night, Maleter phoned to say everything was in order. An hour later his driver turned up at the Parliament and reported that Maleter and the others had been arrested. The KGB burst into the conference room during a coffee break. Maleter's driver was napping in the cloakroom. In the confusion he was overlooked. Later he managed to slip out a back door. He said the Russian general negotiating with Meleter was furious with the KGB. He'd given him his word as a soldier that the Hungarian delegation would be safe. The leader of the KGB squad took the general aside and whispered something in his ear. The general waved his hand in disgust and stalked out of the room. The KGB threw burlap sacks over the heads of our negotiators and led them away."

"This can only mean one thing," Ebby whispered.

Arpad nodded grimly. "We are betrayed by everyone," he said dully. "There is nothing left for us except to die fighting."

From beyond the thick walls of the Corvin Cinema came the dry thud of cannon fire; it sounded like someone discreetly knocking on a distant door. Somewhere in Pest several artillery shells exploded. Around the auditorium students were climbing to their feet in alarm. A shell burst on Ulloi Avenue, shaking the building. Everyone started talking at once until an Army officer clambered onto a stepladder and shouted for silence. He began issuing orders. Grabbing their weapons, filling their overcoat pockets with Molotov cocktails, the students headed for the exits.

Elizabet was on her feet in the row behind Ebby and Arpad, shivering under the greatcoat pulled over her shoulders like a cape. Clutching her mutilated breast, she listened for a moment to the distant thunder and the explosions. The blood drained from her already pale lips. "What is happening?" she whispered.

Arpad stood up. "The Russians have come back, my dear Elizabet. They have declared war on our revolution." He started to say something else but his voice was lost in the burst of a shell between the Corvin Cinema and the Kilian Barracks across the street. The explosion cut off the electricity. The lights in the cinema blinked out as a fine powdery dust rained down from the ceiling.

Around the auditorium flashlights flickered on. Ebby buttonholed Zoltan and the two of them made their way by flashlight to the makeshift passageway that had been cut in the walls between the Cinema and the adjoining apartment building, and climbed up to the top floor room that had been turned into a radio shack. With the stub of a pencil Ebby started printing out a CRITIC to Vienna Station. "Don't bother enciphering this," he told Zoltan. "The most important thing now is—"

The whine of Russian MiGs screaming low over the rooftops drowned out Ebby. As the planes curled away, he heard the dry staccato bark of their wing cannons. Racing to a window, he saw flames leaping from the roof of the building next to the Kilian Barracks across the intersection. Zoltan, his face creased into a preoccupied frown, wired the transceiver to an automobile battery and fiddled with the tuning knob until the needle indicated he was smack on the carrier signal. Then he plugged in the Morse key. Ebby finished the message and passed it to Zoltan, and then held the flashlight while the gypsy radioman tapped out his words: soviet artillery on Buda hills began shelling Pest 4 this morning explosions heard throughout city one shell landed street outside corvin soviet jets strafing rebel strongpoints according unconfirmed report kgb arrested nagy defense minister pal meleter and other members hungarian negotiating team last night hungarians at corvin preparing for house to house resistance but unlikely prevail this time

Bending low over the Morse key, working it with two fingers of his right hand, Zoltan signed off using Ebby's code name. Ebby caught the sound of tank engines coughing their way down Ulloi. He threw open the window and leaned out. Far down the wide avenue, a long line of dull headlights could be seen weaving toward the Cinema. Every minute or so the tanks pivoted spastically on their treads and shelled a building at point blank range. As Zoltan had predicted when they installed the radio shack on the top floor, the Russian tanks were unable to elevate their cannons in the limited space of the streets. So they were simply shooting the ground floors out from under the buildings, and letting the upper floors collapse into the basements. "I think we'd better get the hell out of here," Ebby decided. Zoltan didn't need to be told twice. While Ebby retrieved the antenna attached to the stovepipe on the roof, he stuffed the battery and the transceiver into his knapsack. The gypsy led the way back through the deserted corridors to the apartment that connected to the Corvin Cinema. Then the Russian tanks started blasting away at the ground floor of their building.

They ducked through the double hole in the bricks and made their way down a narrow staircase to the alleyway behind the cinema. The clouds overhead turned rose-red from the fires raging around the city. Groups of Corvin commandos, boys and girls wearing short leather jackets and black berets, white-and-green armbands, crouched along the alleyway, waiting heir turn to dash out into the street to hurl Molotov cocktails at the tanks that were blasting away at the thick concrete walls of the Cinema and the fortress-like facade of the massive barrack building across the avenue. Someone switched on a battery-powered radio and, turning up the volume, set it atop a battered taxi sitting on four flat tires. For a moment the sound of static filled the alleyway. Then came the hollow, emotional voice of the premier, Imre Nagy.

Gesturing with both hands as if he himself were giving the speech, Zoltan attempted a running translation. "He says us that Soviet forces attack our capital to overthrow the legal democratic Hungarian government, okay. He says us that our freedom fighters are battling the enemy. He says us that he alerts the people of Hungary and the entire world to these goddamn facts. He says us that today it is Hungary, tomorrow it will be the turn of—"

There were whistles of derision from the crouching students waiting their turn to fling themselves against the Russian tanks; this was not a crowd sympathetic to the plight of a bookish Communist reformer caught between the Soviet Politburo and the anti-Communist demands of the great majority of his own people. One of the young section-leaders raised a rifle to his shoulder and shot the radio off the roof of the taxi. The others around him applauded.

There were sporadic bursts of machine gun fire from the avenue. Moments later a squad of freedom fighters darted back into the alleyway, dragging several wounded with them. Using wooden doors as stretchers, medical students wearing white armbands carried them back into the Corvin Cinema.

The students nearest the mouth of the alleyway struck matches and lit the wicks on their Molotov cocktails. The freckled girl with pigtails, who looked all of sixteen, burst into tears that racked her thin body. Her boyfriend tried to pry the Molotov cocktail out of her fist but she clutched it tightly. When her turn came she rose shakily to her feet and staggered from the alleyway. One by one the others got up and dashed into the street. The metallic clack of Russian machine guns drummed in the dusty morning air. Bullets chipped away at the brick wall across the alleyway and fell to the ground.

Zoltan picked up a bullet and turned it in his fingers; it was still warm to the touch. He leaned close to Ebby's ear. "You want an opinion, okay, need to get our asses over to the American embassy."

Ebby shook his head. "We'd never make it through the streets alive."

In the stairwell inside the doorway to the cinema Arpad and Elizabet were arguing furiously in Hungarian. Several times Arpad started to leave but Elizabet clung to the lapel of his leather jacket and continued talking. They stepped back to let two medical students haul a dead girl—the freckled sixteen-year-old who had broken into tears before she ran into the street—down the stairs to the basement morgue. Arpad waved an arm in dismay as they carried the body past, then shrugged in bitter resignation. Elizabet came over to kneel behind Ebby. "Remember the tunnel that runs under the street to the Kilian Barracks? I talked Arpad into going with us—there are hundreds of armed freedom fighters still in the barracks, plenty of ammunition. The walls are three meters thick in places. We can hold out there for days. Even if the rest of the city falls we can keep the ember of resistance alive. Perhaps the West will come to its senses. Perhaps the Western intellectuals will oblige their governments to confront the Russians." She nodded toward the knapsack on Zoltan's back. "You absolutely must come with us to send reports of the resistance to Vienna. They will believe messages from you."

Zoltan saw the advantages immediately. "If things turn bad at Kilian," he told Ebby, "there are tunnels through which you can escape into the city."

"The reports I send back won't affect the outcome," Ebby said. "At some point someone with an ounce of sanity in his brain has to negotiate a truce and stop the massacre."

"You must send back reports as long as the fighting continues," Elizabet insisted.

Ebby nodded without enthusiasm. "I'll tell them how the Hungarians are dying, not that it will change anything."

The four of them descended the steel spiral stairs to the boiler room and then made their way single file along a narrow corridor into a basement that had been used to store coal before the cinema switched to oil, and had been transformed into a morgue. Behind them the medical orderlies were carrying down still more bodies and setting them out in rows, as if the neatness of the rows could somehow impose a shred of order on the chaos of violent and obscenely premature death. Some of the dead were badly disfigured from bullet wounds; others had no apparent wounds at all and it wasn't obvious what they had died of. The smell in the unventilated basement room was turning rancid and Elizabet, tears streaming from her eyes, pulled the roll collar of her turtleneck up over her nose.

Threading their way through the bodies, the group reached the steel door that led to the narrow tunnel filled with thick electric cables. On one stone someone had carefully chiseled "1923" and, under it, the names of the workers on the construction site. About forty meters into the tunel—which put them roughly under Ulloi Avenue—they could hear the treads of the tanks overhead fidgeting nervously from side to side as they hunted for targets. Arpad, in the lead, pounded on the metal door blocking the end of the tunnel with the butt of his pistol. Twice, then a pause, then twice more. They could hear the clang of heavy bolts being thrown on the inside, then the squeal of hinges as the door opened. A wild-eyed priest with a straggly gray beard plunging down his filthy cassock peered out at them. Several baby-faced soldiers wearing washed-out khaki and carrying enormous World War I Italian bolt-action naval rifles trained flashlights on their faces. When the priest recognized Arpad, he gave a lopsided smile. "Welcome to Gehenna," he cried hysterically, and with a flamboyant gesture he licked his thumb and traced an elaborate crucifix on the forehead of each of them as they passed through the door.