NEW YORK, TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1960

"WE KNOW THIS JACK KENNEDY INDIVIDUAL AWRIGHT. WE KNOW his father, Joe, awright also," Johnny Rosselli was saying. "What we don't know—"

The consigliere lazily turned his head and gazed through horn-rimmed shades at the Fallen Angel, who was leaning against the fender of the Sorcerer's dirty-orange Chevrolet parked on President Street outside the small park, his angelic face raised toward the sun, his eyes closed. "What didja say was his name again?"

"I didn't say," Harvey Torriti replied. "His name is Silwan II."

"That don't sound completely American."

"He's Rumanian. We call him the Fallen Angel."

"What'd he do to fall?"

The Sorcerer wondered if Rosselli's interest was purely professional; one killer appreciating another, that kind of thing. Tall, silver-haired, impeccably dressed with a silk handkerchief spilling from his breast pocket, Rosselli looked like someone Hollywood would cast as a mortician. He had started out in the Cosa Nostra working for Al Capone in Chicago; along the way he'd been involved in more than a dozen gangland murders. "It's not the kind of question I'd encourage you to ask him," Torriti finally said. "Curiosity has been known to lower the life expectancy of pussy cats." He nudged the conversation back on theme. "You were talking about Jack Kennedy, you were saying how you knew him—"

"Like I was saying, Jack's got his head screwed on right. What we don't know is his kid brother. Who is this Bobby Kennedy? What ideas are rattling around between his ears, makes him go around the country shooting off his mouth about how he's gonna go and shut down organized crime? Maybe the Micks are jealous of Italians, maybe that's it."

"It's not about race," Torriti said. "It's about politics."

Rosselli shook his head. "I do not understand politics."

"The way I see it," the Sorcerer said, "politics is the continuation of war by other means."

"Come again!"

The Sorcerer surveyed the park. Except for five of Rosselli's hoods scattered around the benches, it was empty, which was odd. It was lunch hour. The sun was shining full-blast. At this time of day old men speaking Sicilian would normally be playing bocce on the dirt paths. Which meant that Rosselli, a man with connections in South Brooklyn, had requisitioned the park for the meeting. The hood nearest the Sorcerer leaned forward to scatter breadcrumbs to the pigeons milling around his thick-soled shoes. Under a loud checkered sports jacket, the leather harness of a shoulder holster was visible coming over the narrow collar of the man's shirt; for some reason it reminded Torriti of the times he'd caught a glimpse of Miss Sipp's garter belt.

The meeting with Rosselli was supposed to have taken place in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. When the Sorcerer turned up in the lobby, a slight man had approached him. One of his eyes had looked straight at Torriti. The other had stared off over his shoulder. "You need to be Torriti."

The Sorcerer could feel the Fallen Angel slip around to one side, his right hand fondling a five-inch switchblade in the pocket of his windbreaker. Across the lobby, at the newsstand, Sweet Jesus watched over the top of his newspaper. "So how'd you pick me out, sport?" Torriti asked.

The slight mans wild eye seemed to take in the Fallen Angel. Not at all intimidated by the presence of Torriti's bodyguard, he said, "Like I was told to look for a gentleman who oughta go on a crash diet real quick."

He handed Torriti a note. "PLAN B," it said in block letters. "WAITING FOR YOU IN SOUTH BROOKLYN IN CARROLL PARK CORNER OF SMITH AND CARROLL USE THE GATE ON CARROLL." There was a crude diagram on the reverse side showing how to get there from the Brooklyn Bridge.

Coming off the bridge into Brooklyn, Torriti immediately recognized the turf. Young toughs in leather jackets lounged around on stoops, sizing up with insolent eyes everyone who passed. Brownstones had statues of the Virgin visible in their bay windows. President Street, Carroll Street, Smith Street—this wasn't a low crime neighborhood; this was a no crime neighborhood. And it wasn't the police who enforced law and order. At the entrance to Carroll Park one of Rosselli's hoods frisked the Sorcerer (he was obviously looking for wires as well as weapons) just as a blue-and-white patrol car from the 76th Precinct cruised by; the two officers in it kept their eyes fixed straight ahead. Rosselli's hood came away empty-handed. Torriti had left his guns in the Chevrolet. He didn't like people he didn't know fingering them.

"I hope the last-minute switch did not piss you off," Rosselli said now.

"It was good tradecraft," Torriti said.

"What's tradecraft?"

"It's when you take precautions."

Rosselli laughed. "Precautions is how come I am still alive."

"Before the revolution," the Sorcerer said, "you used to run the Sans Souci casino in Havana."

"Nice town, Havana. Nice people, Cubans. All that ended when Castro came down from the Sierra Maestras." Without a change in tone or expression, the consigliere added, "I do not know Castro."

"Aside from the fact that he closed down the casinos, what don't you know about him?"

Sunlight glinted off Rosselli's manicured fingernails. "I do not know what makes a Commie tick. I do not know what they got against free enterprise. Free enterprise has been good to we Italians."

Torriti thought he knew what Rosselli meant by free enterprise. After the Chicago period he'd been the mob's man in Hollywood. He'd been caught trying to shake down some film companies and been sent up—for three years, to be exact. These days he ran the ice concession on the Strip in Las Vegas. Judging from the alligator shoes, the platinum band on his wristwatch, the diamond glistening in the ring on his pinkie, he must sell a lot of ice.

"I represent a joker who represents some Wall Street people with nickel interests and properties in Cuba," Torriti said. "My clients would like to see free enterprise restored in the island."

Rosselli watched him, the barest trace of a smile on his lips. It was evident he didn't swallow a word of this. "For that to happen Castro would need to disappear," he said.

"You have contacts in Cuba. You ought to be able to get ahold of someone who could disappear him."

You want us to knock off Castro!"

"There'd be a packet of money in it for you, for the hit man—"

Rosselli's mournful face wrinkled up in an expression of pained innocence. "I would not pocket a thin dime," he said with vehemence. "The United States of America has been good to me and mine. I am as patriotic as the next guy. If whacking Castro is good for the country, that is good enough for me."

"There might be other ways of showing our appreciation."

Rosselli's muscular shoulders lifted and fell inside his custom-made suit jacket. "I ask for nothing."

"Are you saying you can organize it?"

"I am saying it could be organized. I am saying it would not be a pushover—Castro is no sitting duck. I am saying I might be able to fix you up with a friend who has friends in Havana who could get the job done."

"What is your friend's name?"

Out on President Street a passing car backfired. Rosselli's hoods were on their feet and reaching inside their sports jackets. The pigeons, startled, beat into the air. The concigliere raised a forefinger and cocked a thumb and sighted on one and said "Bang bang, you just won a one-way ticket to bird heaven." Turning back to the Sorcerer, he said, "People who are friendly with my friend call him Mooney."

Martin Macy waved a palm as the Sorcerer appeared in the door of La Nicoise, an upper Georgetown restaurant popular with many of the Company's mandarins. Torriti slalomed between the crowded tables, stopping to shake hands with Dick Bissell and his ADD/O/A, Leo Kritzky, before he lowered himself onto a seat across from his old FBI pal.

"So is there life after retirement, Martin?" he inquired. He signaled to the waiter and pointed to Macy's drink and held up two fingers for more of the same.

Macy, a wiry man with a square Dick Tracy jaw and cauliflower ears, the result of a hapless welter-weight college boxing career, shook his head in despair. "My pulse is still beating, if that's what you mean," he said. He threaded his fingers through his thinning hair. "Getting tossed to the dogs after twenty-nine years of loyal service—twenty-nine years, Harvey—really hurt."

"No question, you got a rough deal," Torriti agreed.

"You can say that again."

"What'd Hoover hold against you?"

Macy winced at the memory. "One of Bobby Kennedy's people wanted the file on Hoffa and the Teamsters, and I made the mistake of giving it to him without first checking with the front office, which had already refused the request." Macy polished off the last of his drink as the waiter set two new ones on the table. "Hoover hates the Kennedys, Harvey. Anyone who gives them the time of day winds up on his shit list. I had to hire a lawyer and threaten to sue to collect my pension."

"Kennedy wasn't born yesterday. If Hoover hates them so fucking much, why is Jack keeping him on as Director?" Macy rolled his eyes knowingly.

"He has something on him?" Torriti guessed.

"You didn't hear it from me," Macy insisted.

"What kind of stuff?"

Macy looked around to make sure they couldn't be overheard. "Broads, for starters. There's that Hollywood sex queen, Marilyn Monroe. One of Sinatra's girlfriends, an eyeful name of Exner, is bed-hopping—when she's not holding Kennedy's hand she's thick with the Cosa Nostra boss of Chicago. When the regulars aren't available the President-elect invites the girls who lick envelopes up for tea, two at a time."

"Didn't know Jack was such a horny bastard," Torriti said with a certain amount of admiration; in his book it was horniness that was next to godliness. "What are you up to these days, Martin?"

"I do some consulting for district attorneys who want to make a name for themselves going after local Cosa Nostra dons. If Jack listens to his father and names Bobby Attorney General, I'll do some consulting for him, too— Bobby's going to take out after Hoffa and the Teamsters, bet on it."

Torriti fitted on a pair of reading glasses. "Figured out what you want to eat?" he asked. They glanced at the menu. Torriti crooked a finger and the waiter came over and took their orders.

Macy leaned across the table and lowered his voice. "Isn't that your house paranoid sitting over there?"

The Sorcerer peered over the top of his eyeglasses. Sure enough, James Angleton was holding the fort at his usual table, his back to the restaurant, a cigarette in one fist, a drink in the other, deep in conversation with two men Torriti didn't recognize. While he talked, Angleton kept track of what was going on behind him in the large mirror on the wall. He caught Torriti's eye in the mirror and nodded. The Sorcerer elevated his chins in reply. "Yeah, that's Angleton, all right," he said.

"Doesn't sound like there's any love lost between you."

"He's ruining the Company with his goddamn suspicions. A lot of good people are being passed over for promotion because they're on Angleton's long list of possible moles, after which they say 'fuck it' and head for the private sector, where they make twice as much money and don't have an Angleton busting their balls. Trust me, Martin, this is not the way to run a goddamn intelligence shop."

For a while they both concentrated on the plates of cassoulet that were set in front of them. Then Macy raised his eyes. "To what do I owe this lunch, Harvey?"

"Do you think you could fit another consulting client into your schedule?"

Macy perked up. "You?"

"My money's as good as Bobby Kennedy's, isn't it?" Torriti uncapped pen and scratched the dollar sign and a number on the inside of the matchbook, then passed it across the table.

Macy whistled through his teeth. "Retirement's looking rosier by the minute."

"I'll pay you that every time we have a conversation. In cash. No bills. No receipts."

"You could have picked my brain for free, Harvey."

"I know that." The Sorcerer scratched his forehead in embarrassment. "We go back a long way, Martin."

Macy nodded. "Thanks."

"My pleasure. Does the name Mooney mean anything to you?"

Macy's eyes narrowed. "You're not rubbing shoulders with the Mafia rubes again, Harvey? I thought you got that out of your system in Sicily during the war."

The Sorcerer snorted. "I had a conversation with a joker named Rosselli in a park in Brooklyn. He's fixing me up on a blind date with another joker called Mooney."

"Make sure you're armed," Macy advised. "Make sure someone's backing you up. Mooney goes by the alias of Sam Flood but his real name is Sal 'Mo-Mo' Giancana—he's the Cosa Nostra boss of Chicago I told you about, the one who's sharing the Exner woman with Jack Kennedy."

"Like they say in Hollywood, the plot thickens!"

Macy, who had been one of the FBI's experts on the Cosa Nostra, leaned back, closed his eyes and recited chapter and verse: "Giancana, Salvatore, born 1908. On his passport application he listed his profession as motel operator. Motel operator, my foot! He's a foul-mouthed Cosa Nostra hit man who murdered dozens when he was clawing his way up the mob's ladder. Eventually he reached the top of what people in Chicago call The Outfit. He's the godfather of the Chicago Cosa Nostra—they say he has six wards in his hip pocket. Back in the fifties he skimmed millions off mob-run casino operations in Havana and Las Vegas. When he's not in Chicago he hangs out with Sinatra, which is where he met Judy Exner." The Sorcerer's small eyes burned with interest. "There's more," Macy said. "We've been bugging Giancana for years— his telephones, his home, his hotel rooms when he's on the road, also a joint called the Armory Lounge, which is where he hangs out when he's in Chicago. We have miles of tape on him. That's what Hoover really has on Kennedy. It's not the women—even if he leaked it nobody would print it. If's the Giancana tapes."

"I don't get it."

"We have Joe Kennedy on tape asking Mooney to get out the vote for his boy's election. Joe owns the Merchandise Mart in Chicago; when he talks people listen, even people like Giancana. Mooney s hoods turned to in his six wards. Jack Kennedy won Illinois by nine thousand or so votes. He won the election by a hundred thirteen thousand out of sixty-nine million cast. It was no accident that the three states where the Cosa Nostra rule the roost— Illinois, Missouri and Nevada—all wound up in Kennedy's column."

"The mob doesn't work for free. There must have been a quid pro quo."

"Papa Kennedy promised Giancana that if his son became President, he'd appoint Bobby Attorney General. On paper at least, Hoover reports to the Attorney General. Joe indicated that Bobby would take the heat off the Chicago Cosa Nostra." Macy reached for the bottle of Sancerre in the bucket, refilled both of their glasses and took a sip of wine. "Hoover has other tapes. Last August, a few weeks after he won the nomination in Los Angeles, Jack disappeared from the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan for twenty-four hours. The Secret Service guys assigned to him went crazy. We happened to pick him up on tape—he was in Judy Exner's hotel room. There was the usual screwing around. At one point Jack told Judy that if he didn't win the election he was probably going to split with Jackie. The tryst turned out to be coitus interruptus—the doorman called up to announce a visitor named Flood."

"Kennedy met with Giancana!"

Macy nodded. "It was all very innocent. Judy excused herself to use what she called the facilities. Jack opened the door. The two men chatted in the living room for a few minutes. They talked about the weather. Mooney described Floyd Patterson's knockout of Johansson in the fifth—turns out he had a ringside seat. Jack said he'd heard from his father that Sal—"

"They were on a first-name basis?"

Macy nodded. "Sal, Jack—Jack, Sal, sure. Jack said he'd heard Sal would get out the vote in Chicago. He thanked him for his help. Judy returned and made them drinks. When it came time for Mr. Flood to leave there was talk of a satchel in a closet—Judy was asked to bring it and give it to Sal."

"What was in it?"

'Your guess is as good as mine. Money, probably. To pay off the people to come out to vote early and often in Giancana's six wards."

The Sorcerer stole a glance in Angleton's direction. The counterintelligence chief had turned away from the mirror to talk to someone passing next to his table. Torriti produced an envelope and slid it across the table to Macy, who quickly slipped it into a pocket.

"Walk on eggshells," Macy said. "Rosselli, Giancana—these guys play for keeps."

"This is turning into a fucking can of worms," the Sorcerer muttered. "I think we're barking up the wrong tree—we maybe ought to give some serious thought to taking our business elsewhere."

Dick Bissell signed off on a message being dispatched to Jack McAuliffe in Guatemala. He went over to the door and handed it to his secretary. "Doris, start this down the tube right away," he said. He closed the door and made his way back to the seat behind the desk and began torturing a paperclip. "Where'd you get this information, Harvey?"

"I consulted with an old pal from Hoover's shop, is where. Listen, Dick, Johnny Rosselli was only too happy to appear helpful. I'm supposed to meet Mooney in Miami tomorrow afternoon. He's going to sing the same lyrics. These jokers have got nothing to lose, Rosselli and Giancana. Helping us knock off Castro—whether they succeed or not; whether they actually try or not—gives them a working immunity against prosecution. Bobby's not going to let a federal prosecutor put them onto a witness stand and make them swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but, for fear they might."

"On the other hand," Bissell said, "the Company doesn't have a pot to piss in when it comes to Cuba. Almost all of our assets have been rolled up. These guys have contacts in Havana. And they have an incentive to help us—with Castro out of the way they'll be able to get back into the casino business. I know it's a long shot, Harvey. But it's a shot. They might just get the job done, if only because they'd have more leverage with the Justice Department if they actually succeeded in knocking off Castro. And without Castro, the road from the invasion beaches to Havana will turn into a cakewalk for the brigade. Bissell rummaged through a drawer and came up with an inhaler. He closed one nostril with a forefinger and breathed in the medication through the other to clear a stuffed sinus. "I was raised in the house in Hartford where Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huck Finn," he said. "Maybe that's why I'm tantalized by the idea of starting down a river on a raft—you have a rudder that can give you a semblance of control over the craft, but basically you go with the current." He shook his head reflectively. "Someone in my shoes has to weigh alternatives. In the great scheme of things, two thugs avoiding prosecution is a small price to pay for neutralizing Castro." Bissell accompanied the Sorcerer to the door. "They'll probably get knocked off themselves one of these days," he told him. "Keep the raft heading downriver, Harvey—let's see where the current takes you. Okay?"

Torriti touched two fingers to an eyebrow. "Aye, aye, captain."

The Sorcerer couldn't take his eyes off Mooney's fingers. Long and skeletal, with tufts of black hair protruding from the joints below the knuckle and a sapphire ring (a gift from Frank Sinatra) on one pinkie, they drummed across the bar, took a turn around the ashtray overflowing with cigar butts, caressed the side of a tall double Scotch, picked wax out of an ear, then jabbed the air to emphasize the point he was making. "Bobby Kennedy's uh fuckin' four-flusher," Mooney sneered. "He is cross-examinin' me in front of dis fuckin' Senate committee last year, right? I keep uh fuckin' smile plastered on my puss while I take duh fifth like my mouthpiece tells me to, an what does dis fucker say?"

"What does the fucker say?" Rosselli asked.

"Duh fucker says, 'I thought only little fuckin' girls giggled, Mr. Giancana' is what he says. Out loud. In front of deze fuckin' senators. In front of deze fuckin' reporters. Which makes some of them laugh out loud. Nex' thing you fuckin' know, every fuckin' newspaper in duh fuckin' country has uh headline about fuckin' Bobby Kennedy callin Mooney Giancana uh little fuckin' girl." Giancana's fingers plucked the Havana from his lips and pointed the embers straight at Torriti's eye. "Nobody insults Mooney Giancana. Nobody. I'm gonna fuckin' whack dis little prick one of deze days, fuckin' count on it."

The three of them were sitting on stools at the half-moon bar in a deserted cocktail lounge not far from the Miami airport. Heavy drapes had been drawn across the windows, blotting out the afternoon sunshine and dampening the sound of traffic. Rosselli's people were posted at the front door and the swinging doors leading down a hallway to the toilets and the kitchen. The bartender, a bleached blonde wearing a flesh-pink brassiere under a transparent blouse, had fixed them up with drinks, left the bottle and ice on the bar and vanished.

Rosselli delivered his verdict on Bobby Kennedy. "The cocksucker was grandstanding."

Nobody fuckin' grandstands at my expense." Giancana chomped on his cigar and sized up the Sorcerer through the swirl of smoke. "Johnny here tells me you're all right," he said.

Rosselli, looking debonair in a double-breasted pinstriped suit, said, "I know people in Sicily who remember him from the war—they say he is okay."

"With a recommendation like that I could have gone to an Ivy League college," Torriti said with a snicker.

The idea seemed to amuse Rosselli. "What would you have done in Ivy League college?"

"Educate them as to the facts of life."

Giancana, a short, balding man who bared his teeth when something struck him as funny, bared his teeth now; Torriti noticed that several of them were dark with decay. "Dat's uh fuckin' good one," Mooney said. "Go to uh fuckin' college to educate duh fuckin professors."

The Sorcerer gripped the bottle by its throat and poured himself a refill. "I think we need to lay out some ground rules if we are going to collaborate," he said.

"Lay away," Giancana said cheerfully.

"First off, this is a one-shot arrangement. When its over we never met and it never happened."

Giancana waved his cigar, as if to say this was so obvious it was hardly worth mentioning.

"Johnny here," the Sorcerer continued, "has already turned down compensation—"

Giancana eyes rolled in puzzlement.

"Like I told you, Mooney, he is ready to pay cold cash but I told him we decide to get involved, we get involved out of patriotism."

"Patriotism is what dis is all about," agreed Giancana, his hand on his heart. "America has been fuckin'—"

"—fucking good to you," said the Sorcerer. "I know."

"So like you want for us to whack Castro?" Giancana gave a nervous little giggle.

"I was hoping you would have associates in Havana who could neutralize him."

"What's with dis fuckin' neutralized" Giancana asked Rosselli.

"He wants us to rub him out," Rosselli explained.

"Dat's what I said in duh first place—you want us to whack him. You got dates dat are more convenient than other dates?"

"The sooner, the better," said the Sorcerer.

"Deze things take time," Giancana warned.

"Let's say sometime before next spring."

Giancana nodded carefully. "How do deze people you represent see duh hit?"

The Sorcerer understood they had gotten down to the nitty-gritty, "we imagined your associates would figure out Castro's routine and waylay his car and gun him down. Something along these lines..."

Giancana looked at Rosselli. His lower lip curled over his upper lip as he shook his head in disbelief. "You can see duh Wall Street pricks don't have no fuckin' experience in deze matters." He turned back to the Sorcerer. "Guns is too risky. I don't see no one usin' guns on Castro. For duh simple reason dat one pullin' off duh hit could get away with all doze bodyguards or what have you around. If we specify guns nobody's goin to volunteer."

"How do you see the hit, Mooney?"

Giancana puffed thoughtfully on his cigar, then pulled it out of his mouth and examined it. "How do I see duh hit? I see duh hit usin' poison. Let's say, for argument's sake, you was to give me uh supply of poison. Castro likes milkshakes—"

Rosselli told Torriti, "Mooney is a serious person. He has given serious thought to your problem."

"I am very impressed," the Sorcerer said. "Like I was sayin, he has dis thing for milkshakes. Chocolate milkshakes, if you want to know everythin'. He buys them in duh cafeteria of duh Libre Hotel, which was duh Havana Hilton when I was there. He always offers to pay for deze milkshakes but they don't never take his money. Then sometimes he goes to dis Brazilian restaurant—it's uh small joint down on duh port uh Cojimar, which is where dat Hemingway character used to hang out before duh fuckin' revolution. Castro goes there uh lot with his lady friend, uh skinny broad, daughter of uh doctor, name of Celia Sanchez, or with the Argentine, what's his fuckin' name again?"

"Che Guevera," said Torriti.

"Dat's duh guy. Someone with uh fast boat could spike Castro's milkshake in duh hotel or his food in duh restaurant an get away by sea." Giancana slid off the stool and buttoned the middle button of his sports jacket. He nodded toward the two men guarding the door to the cocktail lounge. "Bring duh car around, huh, Michael." He turned back to the Sorcerer. "How about if we meet again, say around duh middle of January. If you need me, Johnny here knows how to get hold of me. I'll nose around Havana an' see what I can see. You nose around Wall Street"—Rosselli smiled knowingly and Giancana giggled again—"an see if your friends can come up with uh poison dat could do duh trick. It needs to be easy to hide—it needs to look like ordinary AlkaSeltzer, somethin like dat. It needs to work fast before they can get him to uh fuckin' hospital an pump his fuckin' stomach out."

"I can see I've come to the right place with my little problem," Torriti said.

"You have," Rosselli said. "Mooney here does not fuck around."

"I do not fuckin' fuck around," Giancana agreed.

3

PALM BEACH, TUESDAY, JANUARY 10, 1961

A SWARM OF SECRET SERVICE AGENTS, WEARING DARK GLASSES AND distinctive pins in their lapels, descended on the visitors as they walked up the gravel driveway.

"Would you gentlemen kindly identify yourselves," the section leader said. Allen Dulles, hobbling along because of an attack of gout, seemed insulted not to have been recognized. "I'm the Director of Central Intelligence," he said huffily. "These gentlemen and I have an appointment with the President-elect."

"We'd appreciate it if you produce IDs," the section leader insisted. Dulles, Dick Bissell, Leo Kritzky, and the Sorcerer all dragged laminated identity cards from their wallets. The section leader studied each photograph and then looked up to compare it to the face in front of him. "Anyone here carrying?" he wanted to know.

DCI Dulles looked bewildered. Dick Bissell said, "They're asking if we're armed, Allen."

"Holy cow, I haven't had a weapon on me since the war."

Both Bissell and Leo Kritzky shook their heads. Torriti, a bit shamefaced, plucked the pearl-handled revolver from under his armpit and handed it, grip first, to one of the agents, who deposited it in a brown paper bag. Bissell coughed discreetly to attract the Sorcerer's attention. "Oh, yeah, I almost forgot," Torriti said. He pulled the snub-nosed Detective Special from its makeshift ankle holster and gave it to the astonished agent.

At the end of the driveway, a young aide holding a clipboard checked off their names and then led them through Joseph Kennedy's rambling house, across a very manicured garden toward the summer pavilion in the back of the compound. From behind a high hedge came the peal of female laughter and the sound of people splashing in a pool. Passing a gap in the hedge, Leo caught a glimpse of a very slim and suntanned young woman, wearing only the bottom half of a bikini, sunning herself on the diving board. Up ahead he could see Jack Kennedy sitting in a wicker rocking chair, his shirt sleeve rolled up, looking off to one side as a woman administered an injection.

Bissell, trailing behind with Leo, murmured, "Penicillin shots for ch ronic non-gonorrheal urethritis."

"That's a venereal disease," Leo whispered. "How do you know that?"

"Keep my ear to the ground. Want to wager the first words out of his mouth have to do with the New York Times?"

"It's a sucker's bet."

The doctor who had given Kennedy the injection said, "See you next Tuesday in Washington, then" as she turned to leave.

Kennedy rose from the chair to greet Dulles. "I take it you saw the article in the Times," he said, clearly peeved. He pulled a copy off a stack of newspapers on a low wicker table. "Front page, no less. 'US Helps Train Anti-Castro Force at Secret Guatemalan Base.' My God, Allen, they've even printed a map of the camp! Castro doesn't need spies in America. He's got the New York Times'." He shook hands with the CIA men. "Dick, good to see you again. Kritzky, I remember you briefed me last summer."

Bissell introduced the Sorcerer. "This is Harvey Torriti, a key member of our team."

Kennedy held on to Torriti's hand. "I've heard about you—you're supposed to be our James Bond."

The Sorcerer laughed under his breath. "As you can see, Mr. Kennedy, I am not equipped for some of Bond's more daring sexual escapades."

Kennedy waved the CIA people to seats. His brother Bobby and his father, Joe Kennedy, wandered over from the pool. Jack bunched his hand into a fist and his father wrapped his fingers around it. The two smiled into each other's eyes. Joe Kennedy took the last folding chair. Bobby sat on the ground with his back against one of the pavilion stanchions. Jack settled into the wicker rocker. "Why don't you begin, Allen," he said.

"Mr. President-elect," Dulles said, opening the briefing, "ten days from today you will be taking the oath of office as President of the United States, at which point, as Harry Truman liked to say, the buck will stop at your desk. Its obviously vital to bring you up to snuff on the details of the operation that General Eisenhower"—Dulles's use of the word General, as opPposed to President, wasn't lost on anyone—"authorized."

"It's my understanding, Director, that President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to work up plans and an infrastructure for an operation, as opposed to actually authorizing the operation itself," commented Kennedy. Dulles cleared his throat. "I thought that that was what I conveyed, Jack.

Kennedy, rocking gently in his chair, said softly, "I wanted to be sure we were on the same wavelength, Allen." He motioned for Dulles to go on.

Dulles, rattled, looked at the notes he had jotted on the back of an envelope. "Make no mistake about it, Mr. President-elect, Moscow has installed a Communist puppet regime ninety miles off the coast of Florida. Castro has rigged elections, muzzled the press and nationalized sugar plantations and industry, most of which, I might add, belonged to Americans. He has executed more than five hundred political opponents and jailed thousands of others, he's surrounded himself with Marxist advisors and turned to the Soviet Union for weapons. He currently has fifty Cuban pilots training to fly Soviet MiGs in Czechoslovakia. These planes are expected to become operational by next summer. And if all this isn't reason enough to go after him, the CIA has developed intelligence proving that Castro is dispatching teams to stir up revolutions in the Dominican Republic, in Panama, in Haiti and in Nicaragua. Working hand in glove with the Kremlin, Castro's ultimate aim is to surround the United States with a string of Communist satellites and isolate us in our own hemisphere."

Bobby Kennedy rubbed at an eye. "No one doubts that Castro's a pain in the butt, Mr. Dulles," he said, dragging out the vowels in a lethargic New England drawl. "Question is: What is the Kennedy administration"—Bobby managed to linger over the words Kennedy administration—"going to decide to do about it?"

Dulles said, "The anti-Castro operation, code named JMARC, is directed by Dick Bissell here. Dick, why don't you run with the ball."

Bissell, in his element, casually uncrossed his legs and, speaking without notes, his toe drumming impatiently on the floor, began walking the three Kennedys through what he called "the new paramilitary concept of the Trinidad plan." "We are thinking along the lines of putting somewhere between six and seven hundred fifty men from the brigade ashore at Trinidad, a shore city in southern Cuba that has a reputation as a hotbed of anti-Castro sentiment. The dawn landing will be preceded by a series of air strikes starting on D-day minus two. The strikes will be flown by Cuban pilots now being trained to fly surplus B-26s out of a secret airfield in Guatemala.

Bobby mumbled, "The airstrip's less secret today than it was yesterday."

Bissell wasn't accustomed to being interrupted. He turned toward Bobby, who at thirty-five had honed the fine art of playing bad cop to Jack's good cop, and asked coolly, "Did you say something, Mr. Kennedy?"

Jack Kennedy said quickly, "Please go on, Dick."

Bissell kept his gaze on Bobby for a moment, then turned back to Jack. "As you are surely aware, Mr. President-elect, we don't expect the brigade, even with tactical air support, to defeat Castro's two-hundred-thousand-man army in combat. But we do expect the landing, which will coincide with the establishment of a provisional government on Cuban soil, to spark a general uprising against the Castro regime. It's our estimate that the brigade will double in size in four days, at which point it will break out of the beachhead. We have intelligence estimates that seventy-five to eighty percent of Cuban army personnel disagree with Castro's political system. A great percentage of the officers are believed to be ready to rebel against the government and take their troops with them. The peasant populations of several provinces, especially in western Cuba, are likely to rise up as soon as the first shots are fired. Castro's political prisoners on the Isle of Pines can be counted on to join the brigade."

"How are you going to arm all these peasants and political prisoners if they do rise up?" Jack Kennedy asked.

Leo Kritzky, who was monitoring the brigade's logistical profile for Bissell, said, "The ships carrying the Cuban exiles to the landing site will be crammed with arms packages—there'll be enough recoilless rifles, mortars, ammunition, grenades, walkie-talkies to supply fifteen hundred men."

"How long can the brigade survive if it doesn't double in size and breakout?" the President-elect wanted to know.

"We figure that, with the air umbrella overhead, it could hold out on its own for four days," Bissell said.

Jack Kennedy abruptly stopped rocking. "Then what happens?"

"You're talking worst-case scenario," Dulles put in.

"Expect the worst, that way you're tickled pink when it doesn't happen," Joe Kennedy snapped.

"In the worst case, Mr. President-elect," Bissell said, "the brigade will take to the hills—in this case the Escambray Mountains—and go guerrilla. We'll be able to keep them supplied by air. They'll join forces with existing bands of guerrillas. If nothing else, Castro will have difficulty exporting his revolution t0 Latin America if he's putting down a counterrevolution in Cuba."

Jack Kennedy resumed his rhythmic rocking. The CIA men exchanged looks; it was hard to judge how the briefing was going. From beyond the high hedge came the shriek of someone being thrown into the pool, and then the splash. "Teddy's pushing the girls in again," Jack Kennedy said with a chuckle.

"Naturally we don't expect you to react until you've had an opportunity to mull JMARC over," Dulles said.

Kennedy kept the rocker in motion. He nodded to himself. He looked down at Bobby, who raised his eyebrows. "Too noisy," the President-elect finally said.

Dulles leaned forward. "How's that, Jack?"

"I am fully aware that the smaller the political risk, the greater the military risk," Kennedy said. "The trick is to find the prudent balance between the two. Trinidad is too spectacular, too loud. The whole thing sounds too much like a full-fledged World War II invasion. I want you to reduce the noise level. I would feel more comfortable signing off on this if it were a quiet landing on a remote beach, and preferably at night. By dawn I'd want the ships that brought them there to be out of sight over the horizon. That way we can plausibly deny any American involvement—a group of Cuban exiles landed on a beach, some war surplus B-26s flown by pilots who defected from Castro's air force are providing them with air cover, that sort of thing."

Joe Kennedy shook his head. "What are you people doing about Castro? He ought to be assassinated before the invasion or it will fail."

There was an embarrassed silence. Torriti opened his mouth to say something but Bissell touched his arm and he shut it. Jack Kennedy told his father, very gently, "Dad, that is just not the kind of thing we want to get into."

Joe Kennedy got the message. "Of course, of course. I withdraw the question."

The President-elect asked about the nuts and bolts of JMARC. Bissell provided answers. The few details he couldn't come up with, Leo Kritzky had at his fingertips. Yes, Castro had a small air force, he said: a few dozen planes that could get off the ground, old Sea Furies and a few T-33 jet trainers, possibly jury-rigged with cannon, that the United States had given to Batista. Absolutely, the brigade's B-26s could be expected to control the skies over the invasion beaches without assistance from American jets flying from aircraft carriers. No question about it, brigade morale was high and the exiles' combat proficiency excellent; each recruit had fired off more rounds than the average GI in an American army boot camp. Yes, it was true that there had been a minor uprising in Oriente province but it had been crushed by the Cuban army. Yes, the CIA did have raw reports from Camagu Province that the Castro regime was on the ropes, that civil strife and even anarchy were a real possibility, which is why they believed that the brigade's
landing in concert with the establishment of a provisional government would lead to a massive uprising.

As the briefing dragged on, Bobby looked at his watch and reminded his brother that, in ten minutes, he would be talking on the telephone with Charles de Gaulle. Kennedy thanked the CIA men for coming down and asked Allen Dulles to accompany him back to the main house. "Eisenhower urged me to go ahead with this," he told Dulles, who limped along beside him. "But I want you to remember two things, Allen. Under no circumstance will I authorize American military intervention. Everything we're trying to do in Latin America, my entire Alliance for Progress initiative, will go down the drain if we're seen beating a tiny country over the head. The brigade has to sink or swim on its own. Also, I reserve the right to cancel the landings right up to the last moment if I judge the risks unacceptable."

"When the time comes to decide, Jack, bear in mind that we'll have a disposal problem if we stand down."

"What do you mean, a disposal problem?"

"What do we do with the brigade if we cancel? If we demobilize them in Guatemala, it could turn into a nightmare. They might resist being disarmed, they might invade on their own. We can't have them wandering around Latin America telling everyone what they've been doing. If word got around that we'd backed down it could trigger a domino effect— Communist uprisings elsewhere."

Kennedy stopped in his tracks and touched Dulles's shirtfront with a fingertip. "You're not going to back me into a corner on this. Allen."

"That wasn't my intention, Jack. I'm only alerting you to problems that we'll have to deal with if you decide to cancel."

Across the garden, Bobby led Bissell, Leo and the Sorcerer through his father's house to the bar and offered them one for the road. He knew that Bissell was being groomed to step into Dulles's shoes as DCI when the veteran spy master retired, which made Bissell a mover and shaker in Washington. Bobby didn't want to get off on the wrong foot with him. At the same time he wanted to make sure that Bissell, like the Washington pundits, understood that he was the second most important man in the capitol. I think your briefing was effective," he told Bissell now. "My brother likes the CIA—he always says, if you need something fast the Pickle Factory is the place to go. The pencil pushers over at the State Department take four or five days to answer a question with a simple yes or no."

Through a partly open door. Jack Kennedy could be seen talking animatedly on the telephone while his father stood by, his arms folded across his chest, listening to the conversation. "Let's be clear about one thing," Bobby went on. "Cuba is my brother's top priority. Everything else plays second fiddle. No time, no money, no effort, no manpower is to be spared. We want you to get rid of Castro one way or another." Bobby's eyes suddenly turned to ice; his voice became soft and precise. "We're in a hurry, too. We want to start the Kennedy administration off with a grand slam." He looked hard at Bissell. "Frankly, we're concerned that the CIA will lose its nerve."

The Sorcerer, feeling better with alcohol in his veins, let a satanic smile work its way onto his lips. Bobby's arrogance had rubbed him the wrong way. "We won't lose our nerve," he muttered, crunching ice between his teeth. "But we're worried you might."

Bobby's eyes narrowed. "Iron the wrinkles out of your plan, my brother will sign off on it. Like my father suggested, it'd certainly make the decision easier if Castro were out of the picture."

In a Company limousine on the way to the airport, where a private plane was waiting to fly them back to Washington, the four CIA men were lost in contemplation. Leo finally broke the silence. "Bobby sure is a sinister little bastard."

"Trouble is," Dulles remarked, "every time he uses the imperial we, you don't know if he's speaking for Jack or just trying to sound important."

"I thought I was brought along so I could brief Jack on Executive Action," the Sorcerer said.

"Jack obviously doesn't want to talk about Executive Action in front of witnesses," Bissell said. "In any case, your presence on the team was more eloquent than a briefing."

"Bobby didn't mince words," Dulles noted. "Get rid of Castro one way or another. It's evident the Kennedys won't shed any tears if we can manage to neutralize Fidel."

"I hope to hell that that's not a condition for giving the green light to JMARC," Bissell said.

"Jack's nobody's fool," Dulles told him. "Getting rid of Castro would certainly be the icing on the cake. But I can't believe he's counting on it."

Bissell, worried sick about his project, gazed out the window of the speeding car. After a while Dulles said, "I remember dining with Jack in his home on N Street right after he was elected to the Senate. After dinner the men went off to smoke cigars. The conversation turned to American presidents—it turned out that Jack was especially fascinated with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. My brother, Foster, asked him, why those two. Jack replied that they were the two greatest presidents. Then he said"— Dulles shut his eyes in an effort to recapture the scene—"he said, 'In order to be a great president you have to be a wartime president."' He opened his eyes and punched Bissell playfully in the elbow. "He'll go ahead with JMARC, Dick. Mark my words."

The Technical Service elves, as they were known in-house, lived in a world of their own: a sealed-off warren of top-floor rooms in one of the Company's "temporary" World War II buildings on the Reflecting Pool. The single entrance off the stairwell to their shop, protected by a hermetically sealed door with a skull and crossbones stenciled on it, was manned day and night by armed security guards. The elves themselves, stooped men with a tendency toward thick eyeglasses and thinning hair, favored white lab coats, the pockets of which were usually filled with disposable syringes. Some of the rooms were climate-controlled, with the temperatures hovering in the greenhouse range because of the spoors germinating on moist cotton in petri dishes. Cardboard labels were propped up everywhere: bacteria, fungi, algae, neurotoxins were growing like weeds. The man who directed the division, Dr. Aaron Sydney, a cantankerous five foot two biochemist with tufts of wiry hair on his cheekbones, had worked for a giant pharmaceutical firm before joining the Company. His most recent triumph had been the development of the infected handkerchief that the CIA mailed to General Abdul Karim al-Kassem, the Iraq military strongman who had fallen afoul of the wonks who masterminded American foreign policy. "Oh, my, no, we certainly don't expect it to kill the poor man," Dr. Sydney was supposed to have told Dulles when he brought him the finished product. "With any luck, it will only make him ill for the rest of his life."

"I didn't catch your name when Mr. Bissell called to arrange the appointment," Dr. Sydney told the Sorcerer when he turned up in his office.

"Torriti, Harvey."

"What can we do for you, Mr. Harvey?"

The Sorcerer looked around the room with a certain amount of discomfort. The walls were lined with shelves filled with sealed jars containing white mice and the occasional small monkey preserved in formaldehyde. each jar was carefully labeled in red ink: clostridium botulinum, toxoplasma gundii, typhus, small pox, bubonic plague, Lupus. Torriti repeated the question to jump-start the answer. "What can you do for me? You can give me Alka-Seltzer."

"Oh, dear, do you have an upset stomach?"

"I want to arrange for someone else to have an upset stomach."

"Ahhhhh. I see. Male or female?"

"Does it make a difference?"

"Indeed it does. Matter of dosage."

"Male, then."

Dr. Sydney uncapped a fountain pen and jotted something on a yellow legal pad. "Would it be asking too much to give me an idea of his age height, weight and the general state of his health?"

"He's in his early thirties, tall, on the solid side, and in excellent health as far as I know."

"Excellent... health," Dr. Sydney repeated as he wrote. He ogled the Sorcerer through his reading glasses. "Just how upset do you want his stomach to become?"

Torriti was beginning to get a kick out of the conversation. "I want his stomach to stop functioning."

Dr. Sydney didn't miss a beat. "Suddenly or slowly?"

"The suddener, the better."

Dr. Sydney's brows knitted up. "Is that a word, suddener?"

"It is now."

"Suddener. Hmmmm. Which would suggest that you don't want to give anyone time to pump his stomach."

"Something along those lines, yeah."

"Will the product need to be disguised in order to get past an inspection at a border?"

"That'd be a smart idea. Yes. The answer is yes."

"Obviously, you won't want a powder—police at borders of certain countries tend to get all hot under the collar when they see powders. A pill, perhaps?"

"An Alka-Seltzer would be about right."

"Oh, dear, Mr. Harvey, I can see you are a novice at this. Alka-Seltzer is far too big. I'm afraid you'll want something smaller. The smaller it is, the easier it will be for the perpetrator to slip it into a liquid without anyone noticing. You do want the perpetrator to get away with the crime, I take it."

"I suppose so."

"You only suppose?"

"To tell the truth, I haven't given it much thought." The Sorcerer scratched at his nose. "Okay. I've thought about it. I want the perpetrator to get away with the crime."

"How many specimens will you require, Mr. Harvey?"

Torriti considered this. "One."

Dr. Sydney seemed surprised. "One?"

"Is something not right with one?"

"We generally supply more than one in case something goes wrong during the delivery process, Mr. Harvey. To give you a for-instance, the product might be dropped into the wrong glass. Or it might be delivered to the right glass which, for one reason or another, is not consumed. If the perpetrator possessed a backup supply, he—or, why not? she—could get a second shot." Dr. Sydney aimed a very nasty smile in the Sorcerer's general direction. "If at first you don't succeed—"

"Skydiving is not for you."

"I beg your pardon?"

"That was a joke. Listen, right, I hadn't thought about a backup supply. As long as you're going to all this trouble you might as well give me a bunch of pills."

"How does three sound to you?"

"Three sounds fine to me."

Dr. Sydney scratched the number three on the pad. "May I ask if you are working on a tight schedule, Mr. Harvey."

"Let's say I'm hurrying without rushing."

"Dear me, that's nicely put; oh, nicely put, indeed. The hustle without the bustle. The haste without the waste." Dr. Sydney rose to his feet and looked up at the Sorcerer. "Would that everyone in the Pickle Factory functioned the way you do, Mr. Harvey. Mr. Bissell generally wants things done by yesterday. If you could manage to drop by again in, say, four days, chances are I will have what you need."

Leo Kritzky was in the process of tacking the photographs to the wall when Dick Bissell and his Cuba task force people trooped into the war room on the ground floor of Quarters Eye. "How does it shape up?" Bissell demanded. He hooked a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles over his ears and, leaning forward on the balls of his feet, examined the black-and-white blow-ups. Taken from a height of 70,000 feet during the previous day's U-2 mission over the southon coast of Cuba, they showed what appeared to be a long stretch of beach, part of which was filled with tiny one-room bungalows set in neat rows.

"If anything," Leo said, "it looks even better than Trinidad."

Waving everyone to wooden seats pulled up in a semicircle facing the wall, Bissell nodded. "Walk us through this, will you, Leo?"

"Dick, gentlemen, what you're looking at is the Bahia de Cochinos—in English, the Bay of Pigs. It's a stretch of beach roughly thirteen miles long and averaging four miles in depth. On one side is the bay and, beyond that the Caribbean. On the other are the Zapata swamps, which for all practical purposes are impassable—they're crawling with marabu bushes with lone thorns that'll flay the skin off you, poisonous guao plants, the occasional deadly snake, not to mention the cochinos cimarrones, the wild pigs that have been known to attack humans and give their name to the bay."

"Sounds like a description of Capitol Hill," someone quipped.

"There are three ways across the Zapata, three causeways"—Leo traced them with a pointer—"built up from land fill and rising above the swamp."

"Do we have an idea what Castro has down there in the way of troops?" Bissell asked.

Leo pointed out what looked like four long low structures next to an unpaved road behind the town of Giron, which consisted of a few dozen wooden buildings set back from a wide main street. "There are roughly a hundred militiamen from the 338th Militia Battalion stationed in these barracks. Notice the antennas on the third building—it must be the radio shack. Here is a blow-up of their motor pool—we can read the license plates so we know these are militia trucks. Seven, all told. No armor, no artillery in sight."

E. Winstrom Ebbitt, who recently had been brought in as Bissell's deputy chief of planning in charge of logistics, leaned forward. People who knew Ebby well understood that he had grave doubts about JMARC but tended, like everyone else, to nibble around the edges of the operation to avoid a head-on confrontation with Bissell and his gung-ho top-floor planning staff. "That looks like more barracks—down there, Leo, more to the left, north of the road that runs parallel to the beach."

"No, that's civilian housing, according to our photo interpreters," Leo said. "The construction workers who are building the Playa Giron bungalow resort down at the beach"—Leo pointed out the neat rows of one-room structures—"live up there. Again, you can read the license plates on the Jeeps and trucks and the two earth movers parked in the field behind the housing—it's all civilian. Judging from the sign on the roof of the shack near the pier—it says 'Blanco's'—this must be the local watering hole. The two piers here appear to be in good condition—one is made of concrete, the other of wood pilings and planks. Between them there is what amounts to a small harbor, which appears to be deep enough to accommodate landing craft. There is some evidence of seaweed but no serious obstacles. I'm getting our people to work up tide charts—"

Bissell interrupted. "It's the airport that attracts me."

"The strip, it goes without saying, is a godsend," Leo said. His pointer traced the runway angling off to the left beyond Giron. "That's a Piper parked next to the control tower. Working from that we were able to calculate the length of the runway. Its long enough to handle B-26s, which means that the air strikes could plausibly look Cuban from D-day onward. Once we secure the beachhead and get fuel ashore, planes could actually fly from the runway."

"Have we had a reaction from the Joint Chiefs?" someone asked.

"We ran it by them late yesterday," Leo reported. "They said it looked okay to them."

"They weren't bursting with enthusiasm," Ebby remarked.

"This isn't a Joint Chiefs operation," Bissell said, "so they're keeping their distance—they're not going to come straight out for or against anything. That way, if JMARC falls on its face they can say, 'we told you so."'

"I like the causeways," one of Bissell's military planners, a marine colonel sheepdipped to the Company for the Cuban project, commented. "If the brigade can seize and hold the points where they reach the beach area, Castro's columns will be trapped on the causeways and sitting ducks for the B-26s."

Ebby shook his head. "There's a downside to your Bay of Pigs," he told Leo. "We'll be losing the guerrilla option if things turn sour."

"How's that?" someone asked.

Ebby walked over to the giant map of Cuba on the next wall. "Trinidad is at the foot of the Escambray Mountains. From your Bay of Pigs, the mountains are"—he stepped off the distance with his fingers and measured it against the scale—"roughly eighty miles away across impassable swamps. If the B-26s can't break Castro's grip on the causeways, the brigade won't have the guerrilla option available. They'll be trapped on the beaches."

"There's an upside to your downside," Bissell said. "Havana will be nearer when the brigade breaks out of the beachhead."

"There's no fallback if the brigade air strikes don't destroy Castro's armor," Ebby insisted.

Bissell bridled. "The brigade won't need a fallback."

"Things can go wrong..."

"Look," Bissell said, "we'll have a carrier off the coast. If the B-26s can't hack it, we'll fly strikes from the carrier. One way or another Castro's forces will be cut to ribbons."

"Kennedy specifically told Director Dulles he'd never authorize overt American intervention," Leo noted in a flat voice.

"If push comes to shove," said Bissell, "he'll have to, won't he?" He stood up. "I like it, Leo. Except for a handful of militiamen and some construction workers, it's uninhabited, which will make it less noisy than Trinidad, which is what Kennedy wants. Let's ail head back to the drawing boards and work up an operation order predicated on early April landings at the Bay of Pigs. As for the business about going guerrilla, I see no reason to raise the matter again when we brief the President, one way or the other."

Squatting in front of the office safe to hide the combination lock with his body, Dr. Sydney twirled the dials and pulled open the heavy door. He took a metal box from the safe and placed it on the desk. Producing a key from the pocket of his lab coat, he inserted it into the Yale lock on the lid and opened the box. Fitted into a bed of Styrofoam was a small half-filled bottle of what appeared to be ordinary Bayer aspirin. Dr. Sydney removed the bottle and set it on the desk. "Looks like garden-variety aspirin, doesn't it, Mr. Harvey?" he said proudly. "In point of fact, all but three of the tablets are ordinary aspirin."

"How will the perpetrator know which three are extra-ordinary?" Torriti asked.

"Child's play," said Dr. Sydney. He unscrewed the cap, spilled the pills onto the blotter and separated them with a spatula. "Go ahead. See if you can spot them," he challenged.

The Sorcerer fitted on his reading glasses and poked through the pills with the tips of his fingers. After a while he shook his head. "Damn things all look alike to me."

"That would be the reaction of a customs inspector or policeman," Dr. Sydney agreed. He bent over the blotter. "If you study my precious pills attentively, Mr. Harvey, you will discover that on three of them the word Bayer is misspelled Bayar." The head of the Technical Service Division set three pills apart from the others. Torriti picked one up and inspected it. Sure enough, the lettering across the pill spelled out Bayar.

"The pill you are holding, along with its two companions, contains a botulism toxin that I personally tested on three monkeys—all were clinically dead within minutes. I obtained the poison from the Army Chemical Corps stockpile at Fort Detrick in Maryland. I don't mind telling you that I had the run of their biological warfare laboratory. They offered me the bacterium Francisew tularensis that causes tularemia, which you know as rabbit fever. They offered me brucellae, which causes undulant fever. Oh, I did have a choice, I promise you. I could have had tuberculosis or anthrax or smallpox, I could have had encephalitis lethargica, better known as sleeping sickness. But I preferred to stick with the tried-and-true botulism toxin, which cause paralysis of the respiratory muscles and suffocation. There are several things you should take note of. These particular aspirins should not be used in boiling liquids—I am thinking of soup or coffee or tea. They can be used in water, beer, wine—"

"How about milkshakes?"

"Yes, yes, milkshakes would be ideal. But I must caution you that the potency will not last forever."

"How long have I got?"

"I would highly recommend that my little treasures be employed inside of three months. Anything longer and the pills risk becoming unstable— they might disintegrate in your fingers before you could use them, they might lose enough potency to produce only severe stomach cramps."

"You did a terrific job," the Sorcerer said. He carefully popped the pill with the word Bayar back into the bottle. "Anything else I need to know, doctor?"

"Let me see... Oh, dear, yes, Mr. Harvey, there is one more thing—you will want to wash your hands very thoroughly before going out to lunch."

Rising with excruciating slowness, the large freight elevator worked its way up to the third floor of the warehouse on Chicago's Printer s Row, south of the Loop. Through the steel grating over his head, the Sorcerer could make out the giant spool reeling in the cable. The disfigured man operating the elevator worked the control knob and brought it, in a series of small jerks, flush with the floor. Two of Giancana's boys, wearing gray coveralls with "Southside Gym" emblazoned on their chests, pulled open the double grilled doors as if they were parting a curtain and Torriti ambled off the elevator into the most enormous room he'd ever been in. Except for several hundred cartons of alcohol marked "Duty Free Only" stacked against one wall, the space was empty. A football field away, or so it seemed to Torriti, he could see Mooney Giancana sitting behind the only piece of furniture in view, a very large table that once might have served for cutting fabric. Behind Giancana, gossamer threads of light pierced the grimy windowpanes. Several men wearing sports jackets with shoulder padding—or was that their natural build?—lounged against iron stanchions, their eyes glued to the television set on one end of the table.

At the elevator, one of the men in coveralls held out a shoebox and nodded toward the Sorcerer's chest and ankle. Torriti removed his hand guns and deposited them in the box. "You jokers going to give me a baggage check?" he asked, an irritable smirk squirming onto his face.

One of the Southside gymnasts took the question seriously. "You're duh only one here—we ain't gonna mix nothin' up."

From across the room Giancana called, "Come on duh fuck over. Kennedy's gettin' sworn in on duh TV."

The Sorcerer moseyed across the room. Giancana, smoking a thick Havana as he watched the television screen through dark glasses, pointed to a chair without looking at it or his visitor. One of Giancana's heavies splashed Champagne into a plastic cup and handed it to Torriti.

"You celebrating something, Mooney?" the Sorcerer inquired.

"Fuckin' right—I'm celebratin' Kennedy movin' into duh fuckin' White House." Giancana laughed. The heavies laughed along with him.

On the television, Kennedy, bareheaded and dressed in formal tails, could be seen standing at the podium and delivering, in the clipped nasal voice that Torriti instantly recognized, his inaugural address. "Let the word go forth, from this time and place, to friend and foe alike..."

"Who would have thought Joe's kid would become President?" one of the heavies said.

"I thought, is who fuckin' thought," Giancana said.

"...born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace..."

"To fuckin' Jack," Giancana said, raising his plastic glass to the TV. "Salute."

"I didn't know you were interested in politics, Mooney," the Sorcerer said with a straight face.

"You're pullin' my fuckin' leg," Giancana said. "I voted for duh fucker. Uh bunch of times. You could even say I campaigned for him. If it wasn't for me he wouldn't be in duh fuckin' White House."

"...every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price..."

"You got out the vote," the Sorcerer said.

Giancana glanced sideways at Torriti. "Fuckin' right I got out duh vote. I got out so many votes he won Illinois."

"...support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and the success of liberty."

"Enough of dis bullshit aready," Giancana muttered.

"You want for me to turn it off, Mooney?" one of the heavies asked.

"Turn duh sound off, leave duh pitcher on." Giancana scraped his chair around so that he was facing Torriti across the vast expanse of table. "So what brings you to duh Windy City?"

"Sightseeing." He glanced at the four leather dog collars screwed into the wood of the table, wondering what they could be used for. "People tell me Lake Michigan is worth seeing."

Giancana snickered. "I seen it so many times I don't fuckin' see it no more when I look."

Torriti held out his glass for a refill. Giancana exploded. "For cryin' out loud, you guys are supposed to fill his fuckin' glass before he asks. Where were you brought up, in uh fuckin' garbage dump?"

One of the heavies lurched over and filled the Sorcerer's glass. Torriti drained off the Champagne as if it were water, then waved off another refill. "Do you think you could—" He tossed his head in the direction of the hoods listening to the conversation.

"Leave duh fuckin' bottle an take uh powder," Giancana ordered. The men retreated to the other side of the warehouse floor.

"So have you made any progress in our little matter?" Torriti inquired.

"Yeah, you could say dat. I got uh guy who works in duh Libre Hotel in Havana. In duh cafeteria, as uh matter of fact, which is where Castro goes once, twice uh week for his milkshakes."

"What's your friend's name?"

Giancana's eyes rolled in their sockets. "Don't be uh fuckin' wise guy." It hit Torriti that the dog collars could be used to tie down the wrists and ankles of a wise guy spread-eagled on the table. "At least tell me something about him," he said. "Why's he willing to take the risk..."

"He owes me uh favor."

"That's some favor."

Giancana flashed a brutal smile. "Favors is what makes duh world go round." He puffed on the cigar and blew a perfectly round circle of smoke into the air, then a second one and giggled with pleasure. "So do you got duh Alka-Seltzer?"

Torriti pulled the half-filled aspirin bottle from the pocket of his jacket. "There are three aspirins at the bottom of the bottle—any one of them can kill a horse."

Giancana kept his eye on the bottle as he sucked thoughtfully on his cigar. "How will duh guy in Havana know which three are spiked?"

Torriti explained about the word Bayer being spelled wrong. Giancana's face actually creased into a smile. "Awright," he said. "We're ln business."

The Sorcerer pushed himself to his feet. "So when do you figure this can be taken care of?"

The Cosa Nostra boss of Chicago turned to watch Kennedy on the television screen. "I used to know uh guy who could read lips even though he wasn't deaf," he said. "He told me he learned how in case he went deaf. Duh moral of duh story is you got to plan ahead." He looked back at Torriti. "Like I told you in Miami, deze things take time. I got to get deze aspirins to Havana. I got to organize duh fast boat dat'll pick up my friend afterwoods. After dat he's got to find duh right occasion."

"So what are we talking about?"

Giancana tittered. "You tell me what'd be convenient for your Wall Street friends."

"We're January twentieth," Torriti said. "You need to make sure that the friend pays back the favor he owes anytime before, say, ten April."

"Ten April," Giancana repeated. "Dat ought to work out awright."

Philip Swett came away from the luncheon with Jack Kennedy feeling mighty pleased with himself. It had been a private affair in a small dining room off the President's living quarters on the second floor. Dean Rusk, Kennedy's Secretary of State, and McGeorge Bundy, the President's special assistant for national security, had joined them. CIA Director Allen Dulles, who had been conferring with Bundy and his staff in the basement of the White House all morning, was invited at the last minute when Kennedy discovered he was still in the building. Presiding over a light lunch of cold Virginia ham, cucumber salad, and white wine, Kennedy had gone out of his way to publicly thank Swett for his fund-raising efforts. "My father always said he was willing to buy me the election," Kennedy had joked, "but he flat-out refused to pay for a landslide, which is why the vote was so close. Kidding aside, you made a big difference, Phil."

"Believe me, Mr. President," Swett had responded, "a lot of people, me included, sleep better at night knowing it's your hand that's on the helm, and not Nixon's."

Over coffee and mints the talk had turned to Cuba. Rusk had filled in the President on the contents of an overnight cable from Moscow: the American embassy's political officer had been told by a Soviet journalist with close ties to the Politburo that Khrushchev would respond to any overt American attack on Cuba by closing off access routes into Berlin and constructing a great wall separating East and West Germany. Kennedy had
pulled a long face and, paraphrasing the opening line from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," had remarked, "April is going to be the cruelest month after all." To which Dulles had remarked, in a booming voice, "Assuming he's still around to see it, the Bay of Pigs will go down in history as Fidel Castro's Waterloo, Mr. President. I can promise you that."

Kennedy had favored Dulles with a wintry smile. "You and Bissell have countersigned the check, Allen."

McGeorge Bundy had caught the President's eye and had gestured imperceptibly with his head in Swett's direction. Kennedy had gotten the message and had changed the subject. "Anyone here had a chance to read the Heller novel, Catch-22? I think it may be the best damn book to come out of the war. He has this character named Yossarian who decides to live forever or die in the attempt."

Speeding away from the White House in the limousine, Swett sat back and lit up the fat cigar that Kennedy had slipped into his breast pocket after the lunch. He had noticed Bundy warning the President off the subject of Cuba. Even without the gesture, Swett would have understood he had overheard things that were not common knowledge in the nations capitol; his own son-in-law, for Christ's sake, worked for the CIA and still didn't have the foggiest idea what Bissell and Dulles were cooking up. But Swett had put two and two together: at some point in the cruelest month, April, Cubans trained and armed by the CIA would land at a place known as the Bay of Pigs. Assuming he's still around to see it! Swett chuckled into the haze of cigar smoke swirling through the back of the car. Of course! How could he have missed it? Dulles and his people would have to be horses' asses not to get rid of Castro before the fireworks started.

By golly, the people over at the Pickle Factory were many things, Swett reflected. But his son-in-law aside, they were certainly not horses' asses.

4

WASHINGTON, DC, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1961

EUGENE, WHO HAD BEEN DELIVERING LIQUOR SINCE LATE AFTERNOON, decided to go straight to Bernice's without touching base at his studio apartment over the store. He parked Max's station wagon on a side street in Georgetown, locked the doors and started down Wisconsin toward his girlfriend's. He sensed something was different as soon as he turned the corner into Whitehaven. It was nine-twenty, a time when the residential street was normally deserted. Now it seemed to crawl with activity. A man and a woman, both dressed in duffel coats, stood talking on a brownstone stoop diagonally across from Bernice's building; from a distance they could have been lovers making up after a quarrel. A middle-aged man Eugene had never seen before in all the years he'd been sleeping with Bernice was walking a dog he'd never seen before either. Further along, Eugene passed a white panel truck with "Slater & Slater Radio-TV" printed on its side parked in front of a fire hydrant. Why would the Messrs. Slater leave their vehicle in front of a hydrant for the entire night when there were parking spaces to be had on the side streets off Wisconsin? Up ahead, near the intersection with 37th Street, he spotted a gray four-door Ford backed into a driveway; the area was well-lit and Eugene could make out two figures in the front seat and a long antenna protruding from the rear bumper. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the bay windows of Bernice's third-floor walkup across the street. They were awash with light, which was curious; when Bernice was expecting him she made a fetish of switching off the electric lights and illuminating the room with candles.

Eugene could hear his own footsteps echoing in the wintry night as he made his way along Whitehaven. With an effort he mastered the riot of panic rising to his gorge. Bits and pieces of basic training at the First Chief Directorate's compound in the woods at Balashikha came back to him: innocent people act innocently, which was to say they didn't break into a sprint at the first whiff of peril. It was lucky he'd taken the precaution of parking the car before he got to Whitehaven; if the FBI had staked out Bernice's apartment, they would surely be looking for him to arrive in Max's station wagon. He was lucky, too, to be walking down the wrong side of the street—it would raise doubts in their minds. They would be wary of stopping the wrong person for fear the right person might round the corner, spot the stakeout and be frightened off. Willing himself to remain calm, Eugene pulled his woolen cap down across his forehead, buried his chin in his turned-up collar and continued on his way—past the man walking the dog, past Bernice's bay windows, past the two lovers making up after a quarrel, past the four-door Ford with the two men in the front seat and the whip antenna on the back. He could feel the eyes of the men in the Ford following him down the street; he thought he heard the quick burst of static a radio produces when you switch it on. At the corner he turned right and made his way down 37th. Where it met Calvert, he walked back up Wisconsin until he came to the People's Drugstore that he and Bernice often went to when they became famished after making love.

Pushing through the door, Eugene waved to the Greek behind the lunch counter. "Hey, Loukas, how's tricks?"

"Not bad, considering. Where's your lady friend?"

"Sleeping it off."

The Greek smiled knowingly. "You want I should maybe cook you up something?"

Eugene hadn't had anything to eat since lunch. "How about sunnysides over easy with bacon and a cup of coffee."

Loukas said, "Over easy, with, coming up."

Eugene went around the side to the phone on the wall opposite the rest room. He fed a dime into the slot and dialed Bernice's number. Maybe he was jumping at shadows. Philby's nerves had been shot toward the end, he remembered. On the other hand, the last thing he wanted was to finish up like the Russian colonel he'd met in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden when he first arrived in America in 1951. Rudolf Abel's arrest by the FBI six years later had made headlines across the country and sent a shiver up Eugene's spine; unless he were lucky enough to be exchanged for an American spy caught by the Soviets, Colonel Abel would probably spend the rest of his life in prison.

Eugene could hear the phone ringing in Bernice's floor-through. This, too, was bizarre; when she knew he would be coming over and he didn't turn up on time, she always answered on the first or second ring. After the seventh ring he heard her pick up the phone.

"Hello," she said. "Bernice?"

"That you, Eugene?" Her voice seemed strained. There was a lone pause, which Eugene didn't try to fill. "Where are you?" she finally asked.

"I stopped for gas. Everything all right?"

She laughed a little hysterically. "Sure everything's all right. It's all right as rain." Then she yelled into the mouthpiece, "Run for it, baby! They pinched Max. They found the stuff in your closet—"

There was the scrape of scuffling. Bernice shrieked in pain. Then a man's voice came through the earpiece. He spoke quickly, trying to get his message across before the line went dead. "For your own good, Eugene, don't hang up. We can cut a deal. We know who you are. You can't run far. We won't prosecute if you cooperate, if you change sides. We can give you a new iden—"

Eugene slammed his finger down on the button, cutting off the speaker in mid-word. Then he said "Fuck you, mac," to the dead line that surely had a tracer on it. Back at the cash register, he pulled out two dollar bills from his wallet and a quarter from his pocket and put them on the counter. "Something's come up, Loukas," he muttered.

"At my counter you don't pay for what you don't eat," Loukas said, but Eugene left the money next to the cash register anyway. "Next time your over easy is on the house," the Greek called after him.

"I'll remember that," Eugene called just before the heavy door closed behind him.

Outside, the night seemed suddenly icier than before and Eugene shivered. There would be no next time, he realized. Everything that was part of his old life—Max, Bernice, his delivery job, his studio apartment over Kahn's Wine and Beverage, his identity as Eugene Dodgson—had slipped into a fault; the various crusts of his life were moving in different directions now. Even Max's station wagon was of no use to him anymore.

He started walking rapidly. He needed to think things through, to get them right; there would be no margin for errors. A bus passed him and pulled up at the next corner. Eugene broke into a sprint. The driver must have seen him in the sideview mirror because he held the door open and Eugene swung on board. Out of breath, Eugene nodded his thanks, paid for the ticket and lurched to the back of the nearly empty bus.

He looked up at the ads. One of them, featuring the Doublemint twins, reminded Eugene of the twin sisters at Yasenovo, Serafima and Agrippina, drilling him day after day on his two legends: the first one, Eugene Dodgson, he would be using; the second, Gene Lutwidge, he would fall back on if the first identity was compromised. "You must shed your identity the way a snake sheds its skin," Serafima had warned him. "You must settle into each legend as if it were a new skin."

Only a new skin could save him from Colonel Abel's fate. But how had the FBI stumbled across Eugene Dodgson? Max Kahn had severed his ties with his Communist Party friends when he went underground. Still, Max might have run into someone he knew by chance, or telephoned one of them for old times sake. The person he contacted might have become an informer for the FBI or the line may have been tapped. Once the FBI agents latched onto Max they would have become curious about his two employees, Bernice and Eugene; would have taken photographs of them from their panel truck through a small hole in the "0" of the word "Radio." They would have searched Bernice's floor-through and his studio over the liquor store the first chance they got.

"They found the stuff in your closet," Bernice had cried before being dragged away from the phone. Discovery of Eugene's espionage paraphernalia— the Motorola antenna (and, eventually, the short-wave capabilities of the Motorola itself), the microdot viewer, the ciphers, the carefully wrapped wads of cash—would have set off alarm bells. The FBI would have realized that it had stumbled across a Soviet agent living under deep cover in the nation's capitol. They would have assumed that Max and Bernice and Eugene were all part of a larger spy ring. The Feds had probably decided not to arrest them immediately in the hope of identifying other members of the ring. J. Edgar Hoover himself would have supervised the operation, if only to be able to take the credit when the spies were finally arrested. Eventually, when the Soviet spies working out of Kahn's Wine and Beverage didn't lead them to anyone—Max and Bernice had no one to lead them to; Eugene hadn't contacted SASHA in weeks—Hoover must have decided that it would be better to take them into custody and, playing one off against the other with a combination of threats and offers of immunity, break them. By sheer luck Eugene had avoided the trap. And Bernice, courageous to the end, had given him the warning he needed to run for it. Now, grainy mug shots of Eugene Dodgson, taken with one of the FBI's telephoto lenses, would circulate in Washington. They would show an unshaven, longhaired, stoop-shouldered young man in his early thirties. The local police would be covering the train and bus stations and the airports; flashing the photograph at night clerks, they would make the rounds of motels and flophouses. If Eugene was apprehended, the FBI would compare his fingerprints to the samples lifted from the studio over Kahn's liquor store. Eugene's arrest, like Colonel Abel's before him, would make headlines across America.

Eugene had long ago worked out what to do if his identity was blown. As a precaution against the proverbial rainy day he had hidden ten fifty-dollar bills, folded and refolded lengthwise and ironed flat, in the cuffs of his chinos; the $500 would tide him over until he could make contact with the rezident at the Soviet embassy. The first order of business was to go to ground for the night. In the morning, when the city was crawling with people heading for work, he would mingle with a group of tourists, take in a film in the afternoon and then retrieve the box he had squirreled away in the alley behind the theater. Only then would he make the telephone call to alert the rezident, and eventually Starik, that his identity had been discovered and his ciphers had fallen into the hands of the FBI.

Changing buses twice, Eugene made his way downtown to New York Avenue. Prowling the back streets behind the intra-city bus station, he noticed several prostitutes huddled in doorways, stamping their feet to keep them from turning numb.

"Cold out tonight," he remarked to a short, plump bleached-blonde wearing a shabby cloth coat with a frayed fur collar and Peruvian mittens on her hands. Eugene guessed she couldn't have been more than seventeen or eighteen.

The girl pinched her cheeks to put some color into them. "I can warm it up for you, dearie," she replied.

"How much would it set me back?"

"Depends on what you want. You want to hump and run, or you want to go 'round the world?"

Eugene managed a tired smile. "I've always loved to travel."

"A half century'll buy you a ticket 'round the world. You won't regret it, dearie."

"What's your name?"

"Iris. What's yours?"

"Billy, as in Billy the Kid." Eugene produced one of the folded $50s from his jacket pocket and slipped it inside the wristband of her mitten. "There's a second one with your name on it if I can hang out with you until morning.

Iris hooked her arm through Eugene's. "You got yourself a deal, Billy the Kid." She pulled him into the street and stepped out ahead of him in the direction of her walk-up down the block.

Iris's idea of "around the world" turned out to be a more or less routine coupling, replete with murmured endearments that sounded suspiciously like a needle stuck in a groove ("Oh my god, you're so big... oh, baby, don't stop") whispered over and over in his ear. In the end the prostitute had other talents that interested her client more than sex. It turned out that she had worked as a hairdresser in Long Branch, New Jersey, before moving to Washington; using a kitchen scissors, she was able to cut Eugene's neck-length locks short, and then, as he bent over the kitchen sink, she dyed his hair blond. And for another half-century bill she was talked into running an errand for him while he made himself breakfast; she returned three-quarters of an hour later with a used but serviceable black suit and an overcoat bought in a second hand shop, along with a thin knitted tie and a pair of eyeglasses that were weak enough for Eugene to peer through without giving him a headache. While she was out Eugene had used her safety razor to shorten his sideburns and to shave. At midmorning, dressed in his new finery and looking, according to Iris, like an unemployed mortician, he ventured into the street.

If he had owned a valise he would have sat on it for luck; he had the sensation that he was embarking on the second leg of a long voyage.

Strolling around to the front of Union Station, he made a point of walking past two uniformed policemen who were scrutinizing the males in the crowd. Neither gave him a second glance. Eugene picked up a Washington Post at a newsstand and carefully checked to see if there was a story about a Russian spy ring. On one of the local pages he found a brief item copied from a precinct blotter announcing the arrest of the owner of Kahn's Wine and Beverage, along with one of his employees, on charges of selling narcotics. They had been arraigned the night before; bail had been denied when it was discovered that both the girl and Kahn had been living for years under assumed names, so the article reported.

To kill time, Eugene bought a ticket for a bus tour that started out from Union Station to visit historical houses dating back to Washington's Washington. When the tour ended in mid-afternoon, he ate a cheese sandwich at a coffee shop and then made his way on foot to the Loew's Palace on F Street. He sat through Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which he had seen with Bernice the previous week. Remembering how she had turned away from the screen and buried her head in his shoulder when Janet Leigh was hacked to death in the shower, he had a pang of regret for what Bernice must be going through now. She had been a good trooper and he had become attached to her over the years; chances were she would wind up doing time in prison for aiding and abetting a Soviet agent. Eugene shrugged into the darkness of the theater; the front line soldiers like Max and Bernice were the cannon fodder of the Cold War.

The film ended and the houselights came on. Eugene waited until the neater had emptied and then pushed through a fire door at the back into the alleyway. It was already dark out. Heavy flakes of snow were beginning to fall, muffling the sounds of traffic from the street. Feeling his way along the shadowy alley, he came to the large metal garbage bin behind a Chinese take-out restaurant. He put his shoulder to the bin and pushed it to one side, and ran his hand over the bricks in the wall behind it until he came to the one that was loose. Working it back and forth, he pried it free, then reached in and touched the small metal box that he had planted there when he first came to Washington almost ten years before. He had checked it religiously every year, updating the documents and identity cards with fresh samples provided by the KGB rezident at the Soviet Embassy.

Grasping the packet of papers—there was a passport in the name of Gene Lutwidge filled with travel stamps, a Social Security card, a New York State drivers license, a voter registration card, even a card identifying the bearer as a member in good standing of the Anti-Defamation League—Eugene felt a surge of relief; he was slipping into his second skin, and safe for the time being.

The phone call to the Soviet embassy followed a carefully rehearsed script. Eugene asked to speak to the cultural attache, knowing he would fall on his secretary, who also happened to be the attache's wife. (In fact, she was the third-ranking KGB officer at the embassy.)

"Please to say what the subject of your call is," intoned the secretary, giving a good imitation of a recorded announcement.

"The subject of my call is I want to tell the attache"—Eugene shouted the rest of the message into the phone, careful to get the order right—"fuck Khrushchev, fuck Lenin, fuck Communism." Then he hung up.

In the Soviet embassy, Eugene knew, the wife of the cultural attache would report immediately to the rezident. They would open a safe and check the message against the secret code words listed in Starik's memorandum. Even if they hadn't noticed the item in the police page of the Washington Post, they would understand instantly what had happened: Eugene Dodgson had been blown, his ciphers were compromised (if the FBI tried to use them to communicate with Moscow Centre, the KGB would know the message had not originated with Eugene and act accordingly), Eugene himself had escaped arrest and was now operating under his fallback identity.

Precisely twenty-one hours after Eugene's phone call to the wife of the cultural attache, a bus chartered by the Russian grade school at the Soviet embassy pulled up in front of Washington's National Zoological Park. The students, who ranged in age from seven to seventeen and were chaperoned by three Russian teachers and three adults from the embassy (including the attache's wife), trooped through the zoo, ogling the tawny leopards and black rhinoceroses, leaning over the railing to laugh at the sea lions who ventured into the outdoor part of their basin. At the Reptile House, the Russians crowded around the boa constrictor enclosure while one of the teachers explained how the reptile killed its prey by constriction, after which its unhinged jaw was able to open wide enough to devour an entire goat. Two of the Russian teenagers in the group were carrying knapsacks loaded with cookies and bottles of juice for a late afternoon snack; a third teenager carried a plastic American Airlines flight bag. In the vestibule of the reptile house, the Russians crowded around as the cultural attache s wife distributed refreshments from the knapsacks. Several of the boys, including the one carrying the flight bag, ducked into the toilet. When the boys emerged minutes later the flight bag was nowhere to be seen.

Its disappearance was not noticed by the two FBI agents monitoring the school outing from a distance.

When the Russians returned to their bus outside, dusk was settling over Washington. Eugene, coming through the reptile house from the other direction, stopped to use the toilet. A moment later he retraced his steps, going out the other door and heading in the opposite direction from the Russians visiting the zoo.

He was carrying an American Airlines flight bag. Back in the tiny apartment he had rented over the garage of a private house in the Washington suburb of Tysons Corner, he unpacked its contents. There was a small General Electric clock radio and instructions on how to transform it into a shortwave receiver; an external antenna coiled and hidden in a cavity inside the back cover; a microdot viewer concealed as the middle section of a working fountain pen; a deck of playing cards with ciphers and new dead drop locations, along with their code designations, hidden between the faces and the backs of the cards; a chessboard that could be opened with a paperclip to reveal a spare microdot camera and a supply of film; a can of Gillette shaving cream, hollowed out to cache the rolls of developed film that would be retrieved from SASHA; and $12,000 in small-denomination bills bunched into $1,000 packets and secured with rubber bands.

That night Eugene tuned into Radio Moscow's 11 P.M. shortwave English language quiz program. He heard a contestant identify the phrase "Whiffling through the tulgey wood" as a line in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. "Whiffling through the tulgey wood" was one of Gene Lutwidge's personal code phrases. At the end of the program Eugene copied down winning lottery number, then took his lucky ten-dollar bill from his wallet, subtracted the serial number from the lottery number, which left him with a Washington phone number. At midnight, he dialed it from a phone booth.

"Gene, is that you?" the woman asked. To Eugene s ear, she sounded half a world and half a century away, a delicate bird whose wings had been clipped by age. She spoke English with a heavy Eastern European accent. "I placed an advertisement in the Washington Post offering for sale a 1923 Model A Duesenberg, the color of silver, in mint condition, one of only one hundred and forty sold that year."

"I understand," Eugene said. Starik was notifying SASHA that Eugene Dodgson had dropped from sight and Gene Lutwidge had taken his place. the cryptic advertisement would automatically activate an entirely different set of dead drops, as well as the code names identifying them.

"I received nine responses," the woman continued. "One of the nine inquired whether I would be interested in trading the Duesenberg for a black 1913 four-door Packard in need of restoration."

"What did you say?"

The woman on the other end of the phone line sighed. "I said I would think about it. The caller said he would phone again in two days' time to see if I agreed to the trade. The appointed hour passed at seven this evening but he never called."

Eugene said, "I hope you find a customer for your Duesenberg." Then he added, "Goodbye and good luck to you."

The woman said, "Oh, it is for me to wish you good luck, dear child," and hung up.

Back in his apartment, Eugene consulted his new list of dead drops. A black 1913 four-door Packard in need of restoration—that was the code phrase indicating that SASHA would be leaving four rolls of microfilm, fifty exposures to a roll, in a hollowed-out brick hidden in the bushes behind the James Buchanan statue in Meridian Hill Park.

Bone-tired, Eugene set the clock radio's alarm for six and stretched out on the bunk bed. He wanted to be at the park by first light and gone by the time people started walking their dogs. He switched off the light and lay there for a long time, concentrating on the silence, staring into the darkness. Curiously, the specter of his mother, a ghostly figure seen through a haze of memory, appeared. She was speaking, as she always did, in a soft and musical voice, and using their secret language, English; she was talking about the genius and generosity of the human spirit. "These things exist as surely as greed and ruthlessness exist," she was saying. "It is for Lenin's heirs, the soldiers of genius and generosity, to vanquish Lenin's enemies."

The battle was, once again, joined. Eugene Dodgson had disappeared from the face of the earth. Gene Lutwidge, a Brooklyn College graduate who had been raised in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and was struggling to make a living writing short stories, had taken his place and was now operational.

The tall, rangy Russian with a scraggy pewter beard ducked through the door of the Ilyushin-14 and, blinded by the brilliant Cuban sunlight, hesitated on the top step of the portable stairs. The thin metal dispatch case in his left hand was attached to his left wrist by a stainless steel wire. Descending the steps, the Russian caught sight of a familiar figure leaning against the door of the gleaming black Chrysler idling near the tail of the plane. As the other passengers headed in the direction of the customs terminal, the Russian broke ranks and started toward the Chrysler. Two Cuban policemen in blue uniforms ran over to intercept him but the man at the car barked something in Spanish and they shrank back. The Cuban stepped forward from the Chrysler and embraced the Russian awkwardly. Tucking an arm behind his visitor's elbow, he steered him into the back seat of the car. A bodyguard muttered a code phrase into a walkie-talkie and climbed into the front seat alongside the driver. The Cuban translator and a middle-aged secretary settled onto jump seats facing the Russian and his Cuban host. The driver threw the Chrysler into gear and sped across the tarmac and the fields beyond toward an airport gate guarded by a squad of soldiers. Seeing the Chrysler approaching they hauled the gate open. A lieutenant snapped off a smart salute as the Chrysler whipped past. The car jounced up an embankment onto an access road and roared off in the direction of the Havana suburb of Nuevo Vedado. Its destination: the tree-shaded villa two houses down the street from Point One, Castro's military nerve center.

Speeding along a broad boulevard lined with flame trees and bougainvillea, Manuel Piñeiro, the chief of Castro's state security apparatus, instructed the translator to tell their guest how pleased the Cubans were to welcome Pavel "emyonovich Zhilov on his first visit to Communist Cuba. Starik caught sight of a group of elderly men and women doing calisthenics in a lush park and nodded his approval; this was the Cuba he recognized from dozens of Soviet newsreels. Turning back to Piñeiro, he offered an appropriate response: it went without saying that he was delighted to be here and eager to be of service to the Cuban revolution. The two men filled the quarter-hour ride to Nuevo Vedado with small talk, chatting—through the interpreter, a diffident young man hunched forward on his seat and nodding at every word—about what they'd been up to since they'd last met in Moscow. They brought each other up to date on common acquaintances: the German spy chief Marcus Wolf who had achieved considerable success infiltrating Reinhard Gehlen's West German intelligence organization; a former Soviet ambassador to Cuba, who had fallen afoul of Khrushchev and been sent off to manage a shoe factory in Kirghizstan; a gorgeous Cuban singer, who was rumored to be having a lesbian affair with the wife of a member of the Soviet Central Committee. Piñeiro, an early and ardent Fidelista who had been educated at New York's Columbia University before joining Castro and his guerrillas in the Sierra Maestras, wanted to know if the stories in the American press about Leonid Brezhnev, currently chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, were accurate. Had Brezhnev set his sights on succeeding Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Party? Did he have supporters in the Politburo? How would the tug-of-war between the two factions affect Soviet policy toward Cuba?

It was only when the two men and the young translator were alone in the "secure" room-within-a-room on the top floor of Piñeiro's villa that they got down to the serious business that had brought Starik to Cuba.

"I have come to alert you to the critical danger that confronts the Cuban revolution," Starik announced. Producing a small key, he unlocked the stainless steel bracelet, opened the dispatch case and took out four manila folders with security notations marked on the covers in Cyrillic. He opened the first folder, then, eyeing the translator, frowned uncertainly. Piñeiro laughed and said something in Spanish. The young translator said in Russian, "He tells you that I am the son of his sister, and his godson."

Piñeiro said, in English, "The boy is my nephew. It is okay to speak in front of him."

Starik sized up the translator, nodded and turned back to Piñeiro. "The information we have developed is too important, and too secret, to risk sending it through the usual channels for fear the Americans may have broken our ciphers, or yours. For reasons that will be apparent to you we do not want them to know that we know. The American Central Intelligence Agency"—Starik remembered Yevgeny teaching him the English words for glavni protivnik, and used them now—"the principal adversary..." He reverted to Russian, "...is arming and training a force of Cuban exiles, recruited in Miami, for the eventual invasion of Cuba. This force includes a brigade of ground troops and several dozen pilots of B-26s expropriated from a fleet or mothballed bombers near the city of Tucson in the state of Arizona. The CIA's B-26 bombers differ from your Cuban air force B-26s in as much as they are fitted with metal nose cones where yours have plastic nose cones."

Piñeiro extracted some deciphered cables from a thick envelope and ran his thumb nail along lines of text. "What you say does not come as news to us, my dear Pasha," he said. "We have, as you can imagine, made an enormous effort to develop assets in Miami; several of them actually work for the CIA's Miami Station, located on the campus of the University of Miami. According to one of my informants the Cuban mercenaries, known as Brigade 2506, are being trained by the Americans at Retalhuleu in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Guatemala and now numbers four thousand."

Starik, an austere man who, in a previous incarnation, might have been a monk, permitted a weak smile onto his lips; the expression was so rare for him that it somehow looked thoroughly out of place. "The number of four thousand is inaccurate," he told Piñeiro. "This is because they began numbering the exiles starting with twenty-five hundred to mislead you. The mercenary bearing the number twenty-five-oh-six was killed in a fall from a cliff and the brigade adopted his number as its official name."

"There are only fifteen hundred, then? Fidel will be happy to learn of this detail."

"The invasion is scheduled for early in the month of April," Starik said. "Current plans call for three civilian freighters to ferry half the brigade of mercenaries, some seven hundred and fifty men, to Cuba, though it is not excluded that this number could increase to fifteen hundred if more ships are brought into the operation."

Piñeiro pulled another of the deciphered cables from the pile. "We have an agent among the longshoremen loading one of the freighters, the Rio Escondido, at its anchorage on the Mississippi River. The ship is carrying a communications van, large stores of ammunition and a quantity of aviation gasoline."

"A portion of the aviation gasoline is in tanks below deck, the rest in two hundred fifty-five-gallon drums lashed to the deck's topside," Starik told the Cuban. "With all this gasoline on the main deck, the Rio Escondido will be a juicy target for your planes. Note, too, that the brigade's B-26 bombers will strike three times before the landings, once on D-day minus two, a second time on D-day minus one, a third on the morning of the landings. The principal targets of the first two raids will be the airplanes parked at your air bases, and the air base facilities themselves. The third raid will attack any or your planes that survived the first two raids, plus your command-and-control centers, your communications facilities and any armor or artillery spotted by the U-2 overflights near the invasion site."

"We know that the Americans plan to send the Cuban counterrevolutionists ashore at Trinidad," Piñeiro said. He was anxious to impress his guest with the work of the Cuban intelligence community. "They selected Trinidad because of its proximity to the Escambray Mountains. They reasoned that if the landing failed to spark a general uprising or an Army' mutiny and the invaders then failed to break out of the beachhead, they could slip away into the mountains and form guerrilla bands that, sustained by air drops, could prove to be a thorn in the side of the revolution."

Starik consulted a second folder. "It is true that the CIA originally targeted Trinidad but, at the insistence of the new President, they recently moved the landings to a more remote area. Even Roberto Escalona, the leader of the brigade, has not yet been informed of the change. The plan now calls for the establishment of a bridgehead on two beaches in a place called the Bay of Pigs."

Piñeiro had assumed that the KGB had excellent sources of information in America but he had never quite realized how excellent until this moment. Though he was too discreet to raise the subject, it was clear to him that Starik must be running an agent in the upper echelons of the CIA, perhaps someone with access to the White House itself.

"The Zapata swamps, the Bay of Pigs," he told Pasha excitedly, "is an area well known to Fidel—he goes down there often to skin-dive." He pulled a detailed map of southern Cuba from a drawer and flattened it on the table. "The Bay of Pigs—it is difficult for me to believe they could be so foolish. There are only three roads in or out—causeways that can be easily blocked."

"You must be careful to move your tanks and artillery down there in ones and twos, and at night, and camouflage them during the day, so that the CIA does not spot them and realize you have anticipated their plans."

"Fidel is a master at this sort of thing," Piñeiro said. "The mercenaries will be trapped on the beach and destroyed by artillery and tank fire."

"If the American Navy does not intervene."

"Do you have information that it will?"

"I have information that it will not." Starik opened yet another folder. "The Americans will have the aircraft carrier Essex and a destroyer squadron standing off your coast, not to mention the air-bases available in Key West, fifteen minutes flying time from Cuba. The young Kennedy has specifically warned the CIA that he has no intention of committing American forces overtly, even if things turn against the Cuban mercenaries on the beaches. But the CIA people in charge of the operation believe that, faced with the destruction of the Cuban brigade on the Bay of Pigs, the President will give in to the logic of the situation and, to avoid a debacle, commit American planes and ships to the battle."

"What is your assessment?"

"The young President will come under enormous pressure from the CIA and the military clique to intervene if disaster threatens. My feeling, based nothing more than instinct, is that he will resist this pressure; that he will write off his losses and move on to the next adventure."

They discussed various details of the CIA operation that the Russians had knowledge of: the arms and ammunition that would be available to the Cuban invaders on the beach, the communications channels that would be used from the beach to the American flotilla off the coast, the makeup of the Cuban government in exile that would be flown to the invasion site if and when the beachhead was secured. Piñeiro asked what the Soviet reaction would be if the American President gave in to the pressure and used American ships and plans overtly. Starik himself had briefed Nikita Khrushchev on the CIA plans to mount an invasion of Cuba, he told his Cuban colleague. They had not discussed what mthe Soviet side would do in the event of overt—as opposed to covert—American aggression; that was a subject that Fidel Castro would have to take up with First Secretary Khrushchev, either directly or through diplomatic channels. Again, all exchanges between the two sides should be limited to letters carried by hand in diplomatic pouches, lest the America code-breakers learn that the CIA plans had leaked. Pressed, Starik offered his personal opinion: in the event of overt American intervention, the best that the Soviet side could do would be to threaten similar intervention in, say, Berlin. This would focus the attention of the American President on the risks he was running.

Piñeiro pointed with his chin toward Starik's manila folders. "There is a fourth folder you haven't yet opened," he said.

Starik kept his eyes fixed on Piñeiro's. "Hand in glove with the invasion," he said, "the CIA is planning to assassinate Castro."

The young translator winced at the word "assassinate." Piñeiro's high brow furrowed. The red beard on his chin actually twitched as his Russian visitor pulled a single sheet from the fourth folder and began reading from it aloud. Piñeiro's nephew translated the words phrase by phrase. The CIA had summoned home its Berlin Base chief of many years, a Sicilian-American who had been in contact with the Mafia during the war, and ordered him to develop a capability to neutralize foreign leaders who obstructed American foreign policy. Castro was the first target on the list. The former Berlin Base chief, whose name was Torriti, had immediately contacted various American Cosa Nostra figures, including the head of the Chicago Cosa Nostra, Salvatore Giancana. Giancana, in turn, had come up with a Cuban on the island willing to slip poison into one of Castro's drinks.

Giancana had refused to identify the killer even to the CIA, so the Russians were unable to pass his name on to the Cubans. "We know only that sometime in the next month he will be given a bottle filled with aspirins, three of which will contain deadly botulism toxin," Starik said.

Piñeiro asked how the poison pills could be distinguished from the ordinary aspirin. Starik had to admit that he was unable to provide an answer to that crucial question. Piñeiro, feverishly jotting notes on a pad, wanted to know if any other details of the plot, however small, were available. The Russian reread his sheet of paper. There was one other thing, he said. The Cosa Nostra apparently expected to exfiltrate the killer from Cuba after the assassination by means of a fast boat. To Piñeiro, this seemed to be a telling detail and he said so. It indicated that the attempt on Castro's life would be made not far from a port.

Starik could only shrug. "I leave it to your service," he said, "to fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle."

Piñeiro said with a cold glint in his eye, "We will."

Minutes after eleven there was a soft drumbeat on the door of the suite on the top floor of the hotel in a Havana suburb. His spidery legs jutting from a coarse nightshirt, Starik padded over to the door and looked through the fish-eye lens of the peephole. Three little girlies, their thin bodies squat and foreshortened in the lens, stood giggling outside the door. Starik threw the bolt and opened it. The girls, wearing white cotton slips, their bare feet dark with grime, filed silently past into the hotel room. The tallest of the three, whose dyed blonde hair curled around her oval face, started to say something in Spanish but Starik put a finger to his lips. He circled around the girls, taking in their jutting shoulder blades and flat chests and false eyelashes. Then he raised the hem of their slips, one by one, to inspect their crotches. The bleached-blonde turned out to have pubic hair and was immediately sent away. The two others were permitted into the enormous bed planted directly under the mirrors fixed in the ceiling.

In the immutable dusk of his corner office on the Reflecting Pool in Washington, James Jesus Angleton crawled like a snail across "Eyes-Only cables and red-flagged index cards and hazy black-and-white photographs, leaving behind a sticky trail of conjecture.

Lighting a fresh cigarette, Angleton impatiently whisked ashes off the open file folder with the back of his hand. (His two-and-a-half pack a day habit had left his fingertips stained with nicotine, and his office and everything in it saturated with tobacco smoke; people who worked in Angleton's counterintelligence shop liked to say they could sniff the paperwork and tell from the odor whether a given document had already passed through the chief's hands.) He reached again for a magnifying glass and held it above one of the photographs. It had been taken with a powerful telephoto lens from a rooftop half a mile from the airport and enlarged several times in one of the Company's darkrooms, leaving a grainy, almost pointillistic, image of a man emerging from the dark bowels of an Ilyushin freshly landed at Jose Marti Airport after one of the twice-weekly Moscow-Havana runs. The man appeared to shrink away from the dazzling burst of sunlight that had struck him in the face. Speckles of light glanced off something metallic in his left hand. A dispatch case, no doubt; standard KGB procedures would require that it be chained to the courier's wrist.

But this was clearly no run-of-the-mill courier. The figure in the photo was tall, his face thin, his eyes hooded, his hair thinning, his civilian suit badly cut and seriously in need of a pressing. A long, unkempt wispy white beard trickled off of his chin.

Angleton shuffled through a pile of top-secret cables and dragged one out onto his blotter. A Company asset in Havana had reported on a conversation overheard at a cocktail party; Che Guevara and Manuel Piñeiro had been describing a meeting in Moscow with a bearded KGB chief known to the Russians as Starik. The Cubans, always quick to assign nicknames to people, had taken to calling him White Beard.

The cigarette glued to Angleton's lower lip trembled at the possibility— at the likelihood even!—that he was, after all these years, looking at a photograph, albeit a blurred one, of his nemesis, the infamous Starik.

Angleton stared intently at the photograph. The word KHOLSTOMER came to his lips and he uttered them aloud into the silence of his office. Recently, one of the legal assistants in the Public Prosecutor's office in Rome— a middle-aged paper pusher who, unbeknownst even to the Rome CIA station, was on Angleton's personal grapevine—reported hearing rumors that the institute for Religious Works, the Vatican bank, may have been laundering large amounts of hard currency being siphoned out of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The original tip had come from an Italian Communist who worked as an informer for the Prosecutor's Office; according to the informer, the money-laundering operation, some of it tied to loans to the Banco Abrosiano, Italy's largest private bank, went under a code name known only to a handful of the bankers involved: KHOLSTOMER. The sums of moneys mentioned had so many digits that the Public Prosecutor had actually laughed in derision when the rumors were brought to his attention. A very junior prosecutor had been assigned to the case, nevertheless; his investigation had been cut short when a speedboat he was riding in capsized while crossing the lagoon off Venice and he drowned. Soon after, the Communist tipster was found floating face down in the Tiber, the apparent victim of a drug overdose. The Public Prosecutor, unmoved by the coincidence of these deaths and convinced that the whole affair was political propaganda, had decided to drop the matter.

Angleton shifted the magnifying glass to a second photograph. Like the first, it had been enlarged many times and was slightly out of focus. Piñeiro himself could be seen reaching up awkwardly to embrace the taller man. The fact that Piñeiro, the chief of Cuban intelligence, had personally come to the airport to greet the Russian reinforced the idea that the visitor, and the visit, must have been extraordinarily important.

Grabbing the bottle, Angleton poured himself a refill and gulped down a dose of alcohol. The warm sensation in the back of his throat steadied his nerves; these days he needed more than the usual amount of alcohol in his blood to function. Assuming, for the moment, that the man in the photograph was Starik, what was he doing in Havana? Angleton peered into the twilight of his office, looking for the thread that would lead him in the direction of answers. The only thing that would bring Starik himself to Cuba was to deliver intelligence that he didn't want to trust to other hands or send by cipher for fear that American cryptoanalysts would be able to read his mail. Castro already knew what every Cuban in Miami knew (the New York Times had, after all, published the details): the Company was training Cuban exiles on a coffee plantation in Guatemala with the obvious intention of infiltrating them into Cuba in the hope of sparking a counterrevolution. What Castro didn't know was where and when the exiles would strike. Within the CIA itself this information was closely held; there weren't more than half a hundred people who knew where, and two dozen who knew when.

Over the years, American cryptographers had broken out snippets of clear text from enciphered Soviet messages and discovered garbled references which, when pieced together, seemed to point to the existence of a Russian operating under deep cover in Washington using the code name SASHA. Assuming, as Angleton did, that SASHA was a Russian mole in the heart of the Company, one had to presume the worst case: that he was among the happy few who knew the date and precise target of the Cuban operation. SASHA might even have caught wind of the super-secret ZR/RIFLE, the executive action program being organized by Harvey Torriti to assassinate Castro. In his mind's eye Angleton could follow the chain links: SASHA to cutout to Starik to Piñeiro to Castro.

The existence of a cutout intrigued Angleton. Weeks before, he had been on the receiving end of a private briefing from one of Hoover's underlings. The department had unearthed an old Communist named Max Cohen, who had changed his identity and gone underground in 1941, probably on orders from his KGB handler. Kahn, as he was now called, wasn't giving the FBI the time of day: he claimed his arrest was a case of mistaken identity; claimed also that he knew nothing about the young man named Dodgson who delivered liquor for him, or the cache of espionage paraphernalia the FBI discovered under the floorboards of the closet in Dodgson's studio apartment over the store.

The FBI had stumbled across Kahn by chance. He had mailed a greeting card to an old Party friend on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his marriage; Kahn had been the best man at the wedding. The card, which the FBI intercepted, had been signed "Your old comrade-in-arms who has never forgotten our friendship or abandoned the high road, Max." Fingerprints on the envelope and the card matched those of the Max Cohen who had dropped from sight in 1941. The card had been mailed from Washington, DC. Working from the cancellation stamp on the envelope the FBI had been able to pin down the post office, then (on the assumption that Max Cohen might have kept his given name) went over the phone book looking for white males with the given name of Max in that neck of the Washington woods. There turned out to be a hundred and thirty-seven Maxes in that particular postal zone. From there it was a matter of dogged legwork (photographs of the young Max Cohen were doctored to see what he might look like twenty years later) until the FBI narrowed the search down to Max Kahn of Kahn's Wine and Beverage. Agents had shadowed him and his two employees for weeks before they decided to risk searching the suspects' homes when they were out. It was then that the FBI hit pay dirt: in the studio over the store, the agents discovered a cache of ciphers and microfilms, a microdot reader, a small fortune in cash, along with a radio that could be tuned to shortwave bands. Hoover had hoped that one of three Soviet agents would lead him to Americans who were spying for the Soviet Union but, after ten days, he lost his nerve; fearful that one of the three might have spotted the FBI surveillance, he decided to take them into custody. The one who went by the name of Dodgson—a male Caucasian, age 31, medium height, sturdy build with sandy hair—had somehow slipped through the FBI net.

When he phoned the girl she managed to blurt out a warning. After that he simply vanished, which indicated to Angleton that he must have been meticulously trained and furnished with a fallback identity. Although Eugene Dodgson was said to speak American English without a trace of a foreign accent, Angleton didn't rule out the possibility that he might be a Russian passing himself off as an American.

Angleton would have given up cigarettes for the rest of his life to interrogate this Dodgson character. Agonizing over the problem, he reflected once again on the central reality of counterintelligence: everything was related in some way to everything else. A North Vietnamese defector who asked for asylum in Singapore was related to the fragment of a message that MI6 had deciphered from the London KGB rezident to Moscow Centre, which in turn was related to the disappearance in Germany of a secretary who worked part time for Gehlen's organization. Hoping to stumble across missing pieces of the puzzle, Angleton had asked the FBI for a list of Kahn's customers since the liquor store opened for business in the early 1940s. Philby's name had leapt off the page. On several occasions in 1951 Eugene Dodgson had delivered liquor to Philby's address on Nebraska Avenue. Suddenly it all made sense: Philby had been too valuable to let the KGB people at the Soviet embassy, constantly surveilled by FBI agents, come into contact with him. Starik would have set up a cutout operation, using someone living under deep cover. Dodgson, whether Russian or American, had been the link between Philby and his Soviet handler from the time he came to work at Kahn's. Which meant that Dodgson was also the cutout between the Soviet mole SASHA and the KGB.

Going over Kahn's list of deliveries since Philby quit Washington with a fine-tooth comb, Angleton discovered last names that corresponded to the names of one hundred sixty-seven current full-time CIA employees and sixty-four contract employees.

Fortifying his blood with another shot of alcohol, he started working down the list...

5

WASHINGTON, DC, TUESDAY, APRIL 4, 1961

"DO I HAVE IT RIGHT?" JACK KENNEDY ASKED DICK BISSELL AFTER the DD/0 finished bringing the President and the others in the room up to date on the invasion of Cuba. "For the first air strike, sixteen of the brigade's B-26s, flying from Guatemala, are going to attack Castro's three principal airports. An hour or so later two other B-26s filled with cosmetic bullet holes will land in Miami. The Cubans flying the two planes will claim that they defected from Castro's air force and strafed his runways before flying on to Miami to ask for political asylum."

Bissell, cleaning his eyeglasses with the tip of his tie, nodded. "That's the general idea, Mr. President."

Kennedy, his eyes wrinkling at the corners with tension, his brow furrowing in concentration, shook his head slowly. "It won't wash, Dick. Presumably—hopefully—your sixteen planes will inflict sixteen planes' worth of damage on Castro's air force. Castro will surely have footage of the damage. He may even have footage of the attack. How in heaven's name can you hope to pass off the raids as if they were done by two planes? Nobody will swallow it."

"The notion that we can plausibly deny American involvement will be compromised from the start," agreed Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State.

Decked out in a sports jacket, slacks and an open-necked shirt, Jack Kennedy presided from the head of a long oval table cluttered with coffee cups and packs of cigarettes, the saucers doubling as ash trays. The President had gone over to State late in the afternoon to witness the swearing-in of Anthony Drexel Biddle as ambassador to Spain, then ducked into the small conference room tucked away behind Rusk's office immediately after the 5:45 ceremony. It was D-day minus thirteen. A dozen people were alreauy crammed into the room. Some had been waiting for hours; in order not to attract attention to the meeting, they had been instructed to arrive by side doors throughout the afternoon. Now Bissell and Dulles exchanged knowing looks. Leo Kritzky underlined two sentences on a briefing paper and passed it to Bissell, who glanced at it, then turned back to Jack Kennedy. "Mr President, it's obvious that the key to the invasion is the success of the landings. And the key to the success of the landings, as we've pointed out before is complete control of the air space over the beaches. Castro has a small air force—we count two dozen machines which are air worthy and sixteen which are combat-ready. It is essential to the success of our project that they be destroyed on the ground before D-day. If the cover story is bothering you—"

"What's bothering me," Kennedy snapped, "is that no one in his right mind is going to believe it. We can count on the Communist bloc to raise a stink at the United Nations. The world will be watching. Adai Stevenson has to sound convincing when he denies—"

"Perhaps we could fly some additional B-26s into Miami—" Dulles started to suggest.

"Replete with bullet holes in the wings," Kennedy commented ironically. Rusk leaned forward. "Let's face it, no cover story is going to hold water until your Cubans have captured the runway at the Bay of Pigs. Only then can we argue convincingly that Cuban freedom fighters or Castro defectors are flying from an air strip that has nothing to do with the United States."

Kennedy asked, "Is there any way you scale back the raid, Dick, in order to make the story of the two B-26 defectors look plausible?"

Bissell could see which way the wind was blowing; if he didn't give way there would be no air attacks at all before D-day. "I could conceivably cut it back to six planes—two for each of Castro's three airports. Anything we don't destroy on the D-minus-two raid we could still get on the D-minus-one raid."

Kennedy seemed relieved. "I can live with six planes," he said. The President glanced at Rusk, who nodded reluctantly. "I'd prefer no planes," the Secretary of State said, "but I'll buy into six."

The people gathered around the table started shooting questions at Bissell. Was the Cuban brigade motivated? Was its leadership up to the challenge? Had the Company's people in Miami cobbled together a credible provisional government? How much evidence was there to support the idea that large segments of Castro's army would refuse to fight? That the peasants would flock to join the freedom fighters?

Bissell handled the concerns with a combination of gravity and cool confidence. The brigade was motivated and straining at the leash. When the moment of truth came the provisional government in Miami would pass muster. The latest CIA intelligence report—CS-dash-three-slant-four-sevenJ.Q., that had been distributed earlier in the morning showed that Castro was losing popularity steadily: sabotage was frequent, church attendance was at record highs and could be taken as a benchmark of opposition to the regime. Disenchantment of the peasants had spread to all the regions of Cuba. Castro's government ministries and regular army had been penetrated by opposition groups that could be counted on to muddy the waters when the actual landing took place.

From the far end of the table, Paul Nitze, Kennedy's Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, asked what would happen to the brigade if the invasion was called off. Kennedy caught Dulles's eye and smiled grimly. Bissell admitted that the Company would have a disposal problem. The 1,500 members of the brigade couldn't be brought back to Miami; they would have to be dumped somewhere out of sight of the American press.

"If we're going to dump them," Kennedy remarked with sour fatality, "there's something to be said for dumping them in Cuba."

At the last minute the President had invited Senator Fulbright to join the briefing; Fulbright had gotten wind of JMARC and had sent Kennedy a long private memorandum outlining why he was dead set against the operation. Now Kennedy turned to the Senator, who was sitting next to him, and asked what he thought. Fulbright's mastery of foreign affairs won respect even from those who disagreed with him. He sat back in his chair and eyed Bissell across the table. "As I understand your strategy, Mr. Bissell, your brigade is supposed to break out of the beachhead and march on Havana, with supporters swelling its ranks as it goes."

Bissell nodded warily; he wasn't at all pleased to discover that Fulbright was a member of the President's inner circle when it came to the Cuban project.

Fulbright favored the DD/0 with a wan smile. "Sounds like the game plan for Napoleon's return from Elba in 1815. "

"Napoleon started out with fifteen hundred men also," Bissell shot back. When he reached Paris he had an army."

"It only lasted a hundred days," Fulbright noted. He turned to the President. "Forgetting for a moment whether this adventure can or will succeed, let me raise another aspect of the problem, namely that the invasion of Cuba clearly violates several treaties, as well as American law. I'm talking about Title 18, US code. Sections 958 through 962, I'm talking about Title 50, Appendix, Section 2021, which specifically prohibits the enlistment or recruitment for foreign military service in the United States, the preparation of foreign military expeditions, the outfitting of foreign naval vessels for service against a country with which we are not at war."

Rusk waved a hand. "In my view success is self-legitimizing. It legitimized Castro when he seized power. It legitimized the founding fathers of this country when they rebelled against British rule. I've always taken it for granted that Jefferson and Washington would have been hanged as traitors if the revolution had failed."

Fulbright shook his head angrily. "The United States is forever condemning Moscow for meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign countries, Mr. President. Intervention in Cuba will open the door to Soviet intervention anywhere in the world—"

Dulles said, "The Soviets are already intervening anywhere in the world, Senator."

Fulbright didn't back off. "If we go ahead with this, if we invade Cuba, we won't have a leg to stand on when we condemn them."

"You're forgetting that the operation is going to look indigenous," Bissell remarked.

Fulbright fixed him with an intense gaze. "No matter how Cuban the operation is made to appear, everyone on the planet is going to hold the United States—hold the Kennedy administration—accountable for it." The Senator turned back to the President. "If Cuba is really so dangerous to the national interest we ought to declare war and send in the Marines."

Kennedy said, "I'd like to go around the room—I'd like to see what everyone thinks."

He looked to his right at Adolf Berle, the State Department's Latin American specialist. Berle, an old Liberal warhorse who had served under Franklin Roosevelt, began weighing the pros and cons. Kennedy cut him short. "Adolf, you haven't voted. Yes or no?"

Berle declared, "I say, let 'er rip, Mr. President!" Rusk, who had been in on the planning of guerrilla operations in the China-Burma theater during World War II, wasn't convinced that the Company's operation would succeed but he felt that the Secretary of State had to close ranks behind his President, and he did so now with a lukewarm endorsement of the operation. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Bundy's deputy, Walt Rostow all voted for JMARC. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lyman Lemnitzer, and the Chief of Naval Operations, Arleigh Burke, voiced reservations about whether the operation could be plausibly disavowed; when pressed, both conceded that the CIA and the President were better judges of this aspect than the military chiefs. Nitzer said he thought the chances of success were fifty-fifty but Bissell had made a convincing case that the Cuban people would join the freedom fighters, which prompted him to come down on the side of the project.

Kennedy glanced at his wristwatch. "Look, I know everyone is grabbing their nuts over this." He turned to Bissell. "Do you know Jack Benny's line when a mugger sticks a gun in his stomach and demands, 'Your money or your life?"' Bissell looked blank. "When Benny doesn't answer," Kennedy went on, "the mugger repeats the question. 'I said, your money or your life?' At which point Benny says, 'I'm thinking about it.'"

Nobody in the room so much as cracked a smile. The President nodded heavily. "I'm thinking about it. What's the time frame for my decision?"

"The ships put to sea from Guatemala on D-minus-six, Mr. President. The latest we can shut things down is noon on Sunday, D-minus-one."

Jack Kennedy's eyes narrowed and focused on a distant thought; in a room crowded with people he suddenly looked as if he were completely alone. "Noon," he repeated. "Sixteen April."

The Mosquito Coast was little more than a memory on the horizon astern as the five dilapidated freighters, half a day out of Puerto Cabaezas, Nicaragua, steamed north in a line, one ship plodding through the silvery-gray wake of another, toward the island of Cuba. Sitting on the main deck of the lead ship, the Rio Escondido, his back propped against a tire of the communications van, Jack McAuliffe caught a glimpse through binoculars of the distinctive bedspring airsearch radar antenna atop the mast of an American destroyer, hull down off to starboard. The aircraft carrier Essex, loaded with AD-4 Skyhawk jet fighters, would be out there beyond the escorting destroyers. It was reassuring to think the US Navy was just over the horizon, shadowing the dilapidated freighters and the 1,453 Cuban freedom fighters crowded onto them. Overhead, on the flying bridge, a merchant officer was lining up the mirrors of his sextant on the first planet to appear in the evening sky. Around the deck, amid the drums of aviation fuel lashed with rusting steel belts to the deck, the hundred and eighty men of the sixth battalion of La Brigada lay around on sleeping sacks or army blankets. Some of them listened to Spanish music on a portable radio, others played cards, still others cleaned and oiled their weapons.

"D-day minus six," Roberto Escalona said, settling down next to Jack. ''

"So far, so good, pal."

Up on the fo'c's'le forward of the foremast, some of the Cubans were lobbing empty number ten cans into the water and blasting away at them with Browning automatic rifles or M-3 submachine guns. Shrieks of pleasure floated back whenever someone hit one of the targets. From a distance the Cubans looked like kids trying their luck at the rifle range of a county fair, not warriors headed into what the brigade priest had called, in the evening prayer, the valley of the shadow of death. "D-minus-six," Jack agreed. "So far, so bad."

"What's your problem, hombre?"

Shaking his head in disgust. Jack looked around. "The logistics, for starters, Roberto—logistically, this operation is a keg of gunpowder waiting to explode. When's the last time you heard of a troop ship going into combat crammed with a thousand tons of ammunition below decks and two hundred drums of aviation fuel on the main deck?"

"We've been over this a hundred times," Roberto said. "Castro has only sixteen operational warplanes. Our B-26s are going to destroy them on the ground long before we hit the beaches."

"They might miss one or two," Jack said. "Or Castro might have stashed a few more planes away for a rainy day."

Roberto groaned in exasperation. "We'll have an air umbrella over the Bahia de Cochinos," he said. "Any of Castro's planes that survive the initial strikes will be shot out of the skies by carrier jets flown by pilots who don't speak a word of Spanish."

"You still think Kennedy's going to unleash the Navy if things heat up," Jack said.

Roberto clenched his fingers into a fist and brought it to his heart. "I believe in America, Jack. If I didn't I wouldn't be leading my people into combat."

"I believe in America, too, Roberto, but America hasn't told me how we're supposed to wrestle four-hundred-pound drums of gasoline off the ship and onto the beach. If we don't get them ashore, our B-26s won't be able to operate from the Bay of Pigs strip after you capture it."

Roberto only smiled. "When my kids get a whiff of victory in their nostrils they'll move mountains."

"Forget about moving mountains," Jack said. "I'll settle for drums of gasoline."

One of the mess boys made his way forward carrying a wooden tray , filled with tumblers of Anejo, a distilled rum that was taken with coffee in Cuba but sipped neat on the Rio Escondido because the electric coffee machine in the galley had broken down. Roberto clanked glasses with Jack and tossed back some of the rum. "Did you get to speak with your wife before we left?" he asked.

"Yeah. The loading master at Puerto Cabaezas let me use his phone. I got through to her right before we put to sea."

Jack turned away and grinned at the memory: "Oh, Jack, is that really you? I can't believe my goddamn ears," Millie had cried into the telephone. "Where are you calling from?"

"This isn't a secure line, Millie," Jack had warned.

"Oh, Christ, forget I asked. Anyhow, I know where you are. Everyone in the shop knows where you are. Everyone knows what you're doing, too."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Jack had said, and he had meant it. He had heard scuttlebutt about the New York Times story on the CIA's operation in Guatemala. "Hows my boy? How's Anthony?"

"He's only incredible, honey. He celebrated his eight-month birthday yesterday by standing up all by himself for the first time. Then he fell down all by himself, too. But he didn't cry, Jack. He picked himself up all over again. Oh, honey, I just know the first words out of his mouth's going to be your family motto—once down is no battle!"

"What about you, sweetheart? You hanging in there?"

The phone had gone silent for a moment. Jack could hear Millie breathing on the other end of the line. "I'm surviving," she had finally said. "I miss you, Jack. I miss your warm body next to mine in bed. I miss the tickle of your mustache. I get horny remembering the time you touched the hem of my skirt back in Vienna..."

Jack had laughed. "Jesus H. Christ, if this were a secure line I'd tell you what I miss."

"Screw the line, tell me anyhow," Millie had pleaded.

The loading master had pointed to the Rio Escondido tied to the pier. Through the grimy office window Jack could see the sailors singling up the heavy mooring lines. "I've got to go, sweetheart," Jack had said. "Give Anthony a big kiss from his old dad. With luck, I ought to be home soon."

Millie had sounded subdued. "Come home when you can, Jack. Just as long as you come home safe and sound. I couldn't bear it if—"

"Nothing's going to happen to me."

"I love you, Jack."

"Me, too. I love you, too, Millie." He had listened to her breathing a moment longer, then had gently placed the receiver back on its cradle.

"There's something I've been wanting to ask you, hombre," Roberto was saying now.

"What's stopping you?"

"I know why I'm here. I know why they're here," he said, waving toward the Cubans sprawled around the deck. "I don't know what you're doing here, Jack."

"I'm here because I was ordered to come out and hold your hand, Roberto.

"That's horseshit and you know it. I heard you volunteered."

"This is a hot assignment for a young officer looking for a promotion."

"More horseshit, hombre."

The shooting on the fo'cs'le had stopped. Darkness had fallen abruptly, as it does in the Caribbean. Stars were still dancing over the tips of the swaying masts. The bow wave, filled with phosphorescent seaweed, washed down the sides of the ancient hull. Jack polished off his rum. "In the beginning," he told Roberto, "it was inertia. I was in motion—been in motion since they sent me off to Berlin ten years ago. And a body in motion tends to continue in motion. Then it was curiosity, I suppose. Where I come from you're brought up to test yourself." He thought of Anthony. "You climb to your feet, you fall down, you climb to your feet again. It's only by testing yourself that you discover yourself."

"So what have you discovered?"

"A center, a bedrock, a cornerstone, the heart of the heart of the matter. On one level I'm the son of an Irish immigrant buying into America. But that's only part of the story. I came down here hoping to find the beginning of an answer to the eternal question of what life is all about. To give it a name, Roberto, I guess what I discovered was something worth rowing for besides speed."

Dick Bissell's Cuba war room on the ground floor of Quarters Eye had been transformed for what one Company clown had billed as a premortem autopsy on the cadaver known as JMARC, the last global review scheduled before the Cuban freedom fighters hit the beaches. Fifty or so folding chairs had been set up in semicircular rows facing a lectern. Folding metal tables off to one side were filled with sandwiches, soft drinks and electric coffee urns. There was a handwritten sign posted on the inside of the door advising participants that they could make notes for the purposes of discussion, but they were obliged to deposit them in the burn bin when they left the room. Dick Bissell, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his tie hanging loose around his neck, had been talking nonstop for one and a quarter hours. Now, turning to the wall behind him, he rapped the grease pencil marks on the plastic overlay to bring everyone up to date on the progress of the five freighters ferrying Brigade 2506 toward the beaches designated Blue and Red at the Bay of Pigs. "We're at D-minus-three and counting," he said. "Planes from the Essex, patrolling the airspace between Cuba and the invasion fleet, have seen no indication of increased air or sea activity on the part of Castro's forces. We haven't stepped up the U-2 overflights for the obvious reason that we don't want to alert Castro. The single overflight on D-minus-four showed no unusual activity either."

A Marine colonel sheepdipped to JMARC said from the front row, "Dick, the communications people on Swan Island did pick up a sharp increase in coded traffic between Point One and several militia units on the island. And the Pentagon is reporting more radio traffic than usual between the Soviet embassy in Havana and Moscow."

Leo raised a finger. "There's also that report from the Cuban government in exile in Miami about the two Cuban militiamen who fled in a fishing boat to Florida last night—the militiamen, from the 312th Militia Battalion stationed on the Isle of Pines, reported that all leaves have been cancelled until further notice."

Bissell took a sip of water, then said, "So far we've been unable to confirm the report from the militiamen, nor is there evidence of leaves being cancelled anywhere else in Cuba. As for the increase in Cuban military traffic, I want to remind you all that we've known since late February that the Cuban General Staff was planning to call a surprise alert sometime in late March or early April to test the readiness of the militia to respond to an emergency situation. The alert even had a code name—"

Leo said, "The Cubans were calling it Operation Culebras."

"That's it," Bissell said. "Culebras. Snakes."

"Which leaves the Russian traffic," Ebby noted from the second row.

Bissell worked a cap on and off of a fountain pen. "If you take the traffic between any given Soviet embassy in the world and Moscow, you'll see that it fluctuates from week to week and month to month. So I don't see what conclusions we can draw from an increase in Russian diplomatic traffic. For all we know, a Russian code clerk in the Havana embassy could be having a hot love affair with a code clerk in Moscow."

"That's not very convincing," Ebby muttered.

Bissell stared hard at him. "How would you read these particular tea leaves, Eb?"

Ebby looked up from some notes he had jotted on a scrap of paper. "It's the nature of the beast that every morsel of intelligence can have several interpretations. Still, every time we see a detail that would appear to warn us off JMARC, we somehow manage to explain it away."

And there it was, out in the open for everyone to see: the visceral misgivings of one of the Company's most respected middle-level officers, a veteran of the CIA's unsuccessful efforts to infiltrate agents behind the Iron Curtain in the early fifties, a holder of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for his exploits in Budapest in 1956. The room turned still—so still that it was possible to hear a woman in the back scratching away on a cuticle with a nail file. Bissell said, very quietly, "Your 'every time we see a detail' covers an awful lot of territory, Eb. Are you suggesting that we re institutionally incapable of criticizing an operation?"

"I guess I am, Dick. I guess I'm saying it is an institutional problem— the Company has the action in Cuba, so it has become the advocate, as opposed to the critic, of the action it has. What criticism I've seen always seems to be confined to this or that detail, never to whether the operation itself is flawed."

"D-minus-three seems to me to be pretty late in the game for second thoughts."

"I've had second thoughts all along. I did raise the problem of our losing the so-called guerrilla option when we switched the landing site from Trinidad to the Bay of Pigs. When I was brought in on the logistics end of the operation, I wrote a paper suggesting that the obsession with being able to plausibly deny an American role in the invasion had adversely influenced the choice of materiel—we are using old, slow cargo ships with limited storage space below decks, we are using antiquated B-26 bombers flying from air bases in Central America instead of southern Florida, giving them less time over target." Ebby, tormented by the possibility that the Company was treating the Cubans freedom fighters the way it had treated the Hungarians five years before, shut his eyes and massaged the lids with the thumb and third finger of his right hand. "Maybe I should have raised these points more forcefully—"

Bissell swatted at the air with a palm as if he were being strafed by an insect. "If those are your only objections—"

Ebby bristled. "They're not my only objections, not by a long shot—"

"Mr. Ebbitt seems to forget that we pulled off this kind of operation in Guatemala," a young woman working on the propaganda team commented from the back row.

Ebby was growing angrier by the second. "There's been nothing but regression in Guatemala since we got rid of Arbenz," he said, twisting around in his seat. "Ask the Mayan campesinos if we succeeded. Ask them if—"

Bissell tried to calm things down. "Okay, Eb. That's what we're here for. Let's hear your objections."

"For starters," Ebby began, "it's an open question whether the so-called Guatemala model will work in Cuba. Castro won't scare off the way Arbenz did in Guatemala simply because we land a brigade of emigres on one of his beaches. He's made of sterner stuff. Look at his track record. He and a handful of guerrilla fighters sailed to Cuba on a small yacht, took to the mountains and survived everything Batista could throw at them, and finally walked into Havana when Batista lost his nerve and ran for it. Today Castro is thirty-two years old, a confident and vigorous man on the top of his game, with zealous supporters in the military and civilian infrastructure."

Ebby pushed himself to his feet and walked around to one of the tables and drew himself a cup of coffee. Behind him, nobody uttered a word. He dropped two lumps of sugar into the cup and stirred it with a plastic spoon as he turned back to face Bissell. "Look at the whole thing from another angle, Dick. Even if the invasion does succeed, the whole world will see this for what it is: a CIA operation from start to finish. The fact of the matter is that JMARC is likely to cripple the Company for years to come. We're supposed to steal secrets and then analyze the bejesus out of them. Period. Using the Company to do covertly what the government doesn't have the balls to do overtly is going to make it harder for us to collect intelligence. What business do we have mounting an amphibious invasion of a country because the Kennedys are pissed at the guy who runs it? We have an Army and a Navy and the Marines and an Air Force— they're supposed to handle things like invasions." Ebby opened his mouth to say something else, then, shrugging, gave up.

At the lectern, Bissell had been toying with his wedding ring, slipping it up and back on his finger until the skin was raw. "Whoever called this a premortem certainly knew what he was talking about," he said uneasily. Nervous laughter rippled through the war room. "Anyone who assumes that we haven't agonized over the points Ebbitt raised would be selling us short. what you're saying, Eb—what we've said to ourselves so many times the words ring in my brain like a broken record—is that there are risks no matter what we do. There are risks in not taking risks. Risks in moving the invasion site to the more remote Bay of Pigs. Risks in using obsolete B-26s instead of Skyhawks. Risks in calculating how the Cuban people and the Cuban Army will respond to the landings. Our job up on the top floor is to calculate these risks and then weigh them against the downside. Which, believe me, is what we've done." Bissell's voice was hoarse and fading fast. He took another gulp of water. Then he straightened his stooped shoulders as if he were a soldier on a parade ground. "Let me be clear—I believe in the use of power, when it's available, for purposes that I regard as legitimate. Ridding the hemisphere of Castro, freeing the Cuban people from the oppression of Communism, is clearly legitimate. So we'll go forward, gentlemen and ladies, and win this little war of ours ninety miles from the coast of Florida."

The Marine colonel hammered a fist into the air. A dozen or so people in the room actually applauded. Bissell, embarrassed, shuffled through his notes. "Now, I want to say a word about the bogus coded messages we're going to broadcast from Swan Island..."

Later in the day, after the premortem, a number of old hands went out of their way to stop Ebby in the hallway and tell him that they shared some of his reservations on JMARC; they had gone along, they admitted, out of a kind of group-think that tended to confuse criticism with disloyalty. At one point Ebby ran across Tony Spink, his old boss from Frankfurt, in the men's room. Spink, who had been put in charge of air drops to anti-Castro guerrillas holed up in the mountains of Cuba, remarked that Bissell and the topsiders seemed so fucking sure of themselves, he'd begun to suspect there had to be an aspect of JMARC he didn't know about, something that would tilt the scales in favor of going ahead.

What are we talking about? Ebby wondered; what could tilt the scales, in your opinion? Maybe Kennedy has quietly signalled Bissell that he's ready to send in American forces if it looked as if Castro was getting the upper hand. Ebby thought about this for a moment. Bissell may be calculating that Kennedy, faced with defeat, will relent and send in the Skyhawks, Ebby said. But if this is what Bissell was thinking he was deluding himself; why would Kennedy go to all the trouble and expense of unleashing a covert operation if, in the end, he planned to bail it out with overt intervention? It just didn't make sense. You've got to be right, Spink said. It had to be something else, something such as... Spink, who was nearing retirement age and looking forward to returning to civilian life, screwed up his face. Didn't you work for Torriti in Berlin before you came to Frankfurt Station? he asked. Yes I did, Ebby acknowledged, I worked for him until something I said about his alcohol consumption got back to him. So what's the Sorcerer doing here in Washington? Spink asked. And he answered his own question: he's running something called Staff D, which is supposed to be dealing with communications intercepts. Ebby got his point. The Sorcerer wasn't a communications maven, he said. Spink nodded in agreement. He was liaising with the Mafia on Sicily at the end of the war, Spink remembered.

It dawned on Ebby what his friend was driving at. He smiled grimly. No he said. It's just not possible. Even Bissell wouldn't do that. Can you imagine the stink if it ever leaked. No.

Spink raised his eyebrows knowingly. Maybe. No. No.

But the idea was planted in Ebby's head and he couldn't dislodge it. Returning near midnight to the small house he and Elizabet rented in Arlington, Ebby found his wife sitting on the couch in the living room, one weak bulb burning in a lamp, her legs tucked under her, a Scotch in one hand, the half-empty bottle on the floor. "Elliott, my sweet love, you are not going to believe what happened to me today," Elizabet announced.

Ebby threw off his suit jacket and sank wearily onto the couch next to her; she stretched out with her head on his thigh. "Try me," he said.

"The school phoned me up at State late this afternoon," she began. "Nellie was at it again. She was caught fighting with a boy. This one was a year older and a head taller but that didn't faze her. I found her in the infirmary with wads of cotton stuffed in her nostrils to stop the bleeding. The principal warned me the next time she picked a fight they would treat her like a juvenile delinquent and call in the police. Parents were starting to complain, he said. My God, Elliott, the way he talked about her you would have thought Nellie was a hardened criminal." Elizabet laughed nervously. "She'll be the first eleven-year-old to make it onto the FBI's ten most wanted list. Naturally, Nellie s version of the fight was different from the principal's. She said the boy, whose name was William, had been teasing her because she spoke English with an accent. When she said she came from Hungary and spoke Hungarian to prove it, he announced to everyone within earshot that she was a dirty Communist. At which point Nellie socked him in the face. Which is when this William, bleeding from a cut lip, punched her in the nose. I have to admit, the first time this sort of thing happened I thought it was rather funny but I've stopped laughing, Elliott. What am I going to do with her? She can't go through life socking someone every time she gets pissed at him, can she?"

Ebby said grimly, "I don't see why not. That's how our government operates."

The cold fury in his voice made Elizabet sit up. She scrutinized what she could see of his face in the shadows of the living room. "Elliott, my love, I'm sorry—something's very wrong, and here I've been carrying on about Nellie. What's happening? What's happened?"

Ebby let his fingers drift from her waist to the breast that had been injured in prison. She pressed her palm over the back of his hand, validating the complicity between them.

After a moment she said, very softly, "Want to tell me about it?"

" Cant."

"Another of your goddamned secrets?"

He didn't say anything.

"How serious is it?"

"The people I work for are involved in something that's going to blow up in their faces. I don't want to be part of it. I've decided to resign from the Company. I've already written the letter. I would have given it to Dulles today but he'd gone by the time I got over to his office. I'm going to put the letter in his hands tomorrow morning."

"You ought to sleep on it, Elliott."

"Sleeping on it isn't going to change anything. I have to resign in protest against what they're doing. When the word gets around maybe others will do the same thing. Maybe, just maybe, we can head Bissell off—"

"So it's Bissell?"

"I shouldn't have said that."

"As usual, I don't have a need to know."

"You're a Company wife, Elizabet. You know the rules."

Elizabet was not put off. "If it's Bissell, that means we're talking about Cuba. Those Cubans who have been training in Guatemala are going to be turned loose. Oh my God, they're going to invade Cuba!" Elizabet immediately thought of the Hungarian revolution. "Is Kennedy going to order American planes to protect them?"

"Bissell's probably counting on it. He thinks he can force Kennedy's hand."

"What do you think?"

"I think... I think it's liable to be Hungary all over again. People are going to climb out on a limb, then the limb will be cut off and they will be obliged to fend for themselves, and a lot of them are going to wind up very dead."

Elizabet folded herself into his arms and buried her lips in his neck.

"Surely you can make them see the light—"

"They've told themselves over and over that it's going to work. If y0u repeat something often enough, it sounds possible. Repeat it some more and it begins to sound like a sure thing."

"You should still sleep on it, my love. Remember what you told Arpad Kilian the day you voted in favor of surrendering to the Russians? You belong to the live-to-fight-another-day school. Who will speak out against things like this if you're not around?"

"What's the good of speaking out if nobody listens?"

"There's always somebody listening to the voice of sanity," Elizabet said. "If we don't hold on to that, we're really lost."

Sleeping on it, however, only reinforced Ebby's determination to resign in protest; he had lived to fight another day, and fought—and nothing seemed to change. The CIA was still sending friendly nationals off to fight its wars, and watching from the safety of Fortress America to see how many would survive. At ten in the morning Ebby strode past two secretaries and a security guard and pushed through a partly open door into Dulles's spacious corner office. The Director, looking more drawn than Ebby remembered, sat hunched over his desk, studying a profile on him that was going to appear in the New York Times Magazine. "Ebbitt," he said, looking up, making no effort to hide his irritation; only the several Deputy Directors and the head of counter-intelligence, Jim Angleton, had no-knock access to the DCI's sacristy. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Director, I wanted to deliver this to you personally," Ebby said, and he dropped an envelope on the DCI's blotter.

"What is it?"

"My resignation."

Dulles pulled the paper from the envelope and read through it quickly. He folded the letter back into the envelope and tapped it on the desk impatiently. "You serve at the pleasure of the DCI," Dulles said with a scowl. "I refuse to accept your resignation. And I don't appreciate people abandoning ship just when we're going into battle."

"I don't deserve that—" Ebby started to say.

The red phone on Dulles s desk rang. He picked it up and listened for a moment before exploding, "He wants to what?" He listened again. "Tell Hunt that's out of the question," he said gruffly. "The Provisional Government will hold a press conference when we tell them to, and not a minute sooner. Until then we'll stick to the scenario we worked out... That's correct. Hunt will release bulletins in their name."

Dulles dropped the phone back on the hook and looked up at his uninvited visitor. "There are two possibilities, Ebbitt. Possibility number one: This thing is going to succeed, in which case your resignation will look awfully stupid. Possibility number two: This thing is going to fail. If it fails, Kennedy's not going to blame Eisenhower for starting JMARC up, or himself for switching the landing site to the Bay of Pigs because Trinidad seemed too noisy. Kennedy is going to blame the CIA, and that's as it should be. When things go wrong someone has to take the fall. And that someone cannot be the President or the institution of the Presidency. So I'll be washed up, which is right and proper. Dick Bissell will be finished, too. The press will howl for the Company's hide. Congress will form killer committees to investigate where we went wrong; the fact that we went wrong trying to combat Communism in this hemisphere and abroad will get lost in the shuffle. If JMARC is a debacle the Company will need people like you to pick up the pieces, to save what can be saved, to get on with the always tedious and often dangerous business of defending the country. God help the United States of America if the Central Intelligence Agency is gutted at the height of this Cold War. America needs a first line of defense, however imperfect it turns out to be. Are you following me, Ebbitt?"

"I'm hanging on your words. Director."

"Fine. Don't let go of them." He thrust the envelope back at Ebby. "Now get the hell out of my office and go back to work."

"I'd love nothing better, believe me, but it's simply not possible."

The woman's voice on the other end of the phone line said, "It used to be possible."

"You have to understand," Jack Kennedy insisted. "We just can't be together as often as we'd both like. Especially here. This place is a goldfish bowl. Hold on a second, will you?" He must have covered the phone with a hand because his words were muffled. She thought she heard him say, "Tell him I can't come to the phone just now. Tell him I'll have to think about it. Then get Bobby over here. Make sure he understands it's important." The man's voice came across loud and clear again. "You still there?"

"I'm always here, your handy doormat—"

"That's not fair and you know it."

"How's your back?"

"Quiet for the moment. Jacobson came up from New York the day before yesterday and gave me one of his feel-good shots."

"I worry about you. I worry about whether you should be taking all those amphetamine injections."

"Jacobson's a bona fide doctor. He knows what he's doing. Listen, I have to go to New York on Saturday for a fund-raiser."

"Is your wife going with you?"

"She hates these political road shows. She's decided to take the children up to Hyannisport to spend the weekend with my parents."

"Any chance of me coming to New York?"

"You took the words out of my mouth, Judy. I'll have a room booked for you in the Carlyle under your maiden name."

"What time does the fund-raiser finish up?"

"Around eleven-thirty."

"By midnight the last thing on your mind will be your backache."

"Just thinking about your coming to New York takes my mind off my backache." He cleared his throat. "Sal around?"

"He's in the living room."

"He alone?"

"Sal's never alone. He's got what the hoi polloi calls an entourage."

"Could you get him to come to the phone? Don't say who's calling in front of the others."

"I wasn't born yesterday. Hold on, huh? See you Saturday."

After a while a door could be heard slamming and the footsteps of a heavy man could be heard approaching. "So what's duh good word?"

"How are things, Sal?"

"I can't complain. How's with you, Jack?"

"I'm all right. What's the weather like in Chicago?"

"Windy, like always. If I didn't have business interests here I'd move to Vegas in uh minute. I'm goin there next weekend—duh Canary'll be in town. Frank'd be tickled pink to see you. Why don't you drop what you're doin' an' join us?"

"What with one thing or another, I don't have much time for friends these days. But I haven't forgotten who my friends are. You get the satchel, Sal?"

"Judy gave it to me soon as she got off duh train. Thanks, Jack."

"Listen, Sal, what's happening with that little matter you were involved in?"

"You mean duh business duh fat man asked me to take care of?"

Jack was confused. "What fat man?"

Sal laughed. "Duh one dat talks Sicilian. Duh one dat drinks without never gettin' drunk. I wish I knew how duh fuck he does it."

The penny dropped. "I see whom you're talking about now."

"I thought you would. So about dat little matter—it's in duh bag, Jack."

"You're sure? I've got decisions to make. A lot depends on that."

"What's dat mean, am I sure? There's only two things sure, pal, death an' a taxes." Sal let out a belly laugh. "Hey, no kiddin' aside, Jack, its buttoned up."

"For when is it?"

"For anytime now."

"I don't need to hedge my bets?"

Sal sounded insulted. "Jack, Jack, would I lead you down duh garden path on somethin' like dis?"

"There's a lot at stake."

"There's always uh lot at stake, Jack. Everywhere. All duh time."

"All right."

"Awright. So did you catch what duh fuckin' Russians did duh other day, puttin' dat cosmonaut character Gagarin into orbit?"

Jack commented wryly, "There are people here who keep me up to date on things like that, Sal."

"I dunno... you seem to be takin' dis pretty calmly. I would've thought us Americans would've creamed duh Russians when it comes to things like sendin' rockets around duh earth. Now it's us with egg on our kisser."

"You take care of that business we spoke about, Sal, it'll be Khrushchev who'll wind up with egg on his face."

"Awright. So what's dis I hear about your brother being out to screw Hoffa."

"Where'd you pick that up?"

"Uh little bird whispered in my ear. Listen up, Jack, I don't give uh shit what he does to Hoffa, long as he sticks to duh deal your father an' me worked out. Your brother can fuck with Detroit till he's blue in duh balls. Chicago is off-limits."

"Don't lose sleep over Bobby, Sal."

"I'm glad to hear I don't need to lose sleep over your kid brother. I'm relieved, Jack. No shit."

Jack laughed pleasantly. "Say hello to Frank for me when you see him."

"Sure I will. You want to talk to Judy some more?"

"No. I'm pretty busy. Take it easy, Sal."

"Yeah, I will. I always take it easy. Dat's what I do best. You take it easy, too, Jack."

"So long, Sal."

"Yeah. Sure thing. So long."

Arturo Padron pedaled his heavy Chinese "Flying Pigeon" through the seedy back streets of downtown Havana, then turned onto the road behind the Libre Hotel where rich Cubans used to live before Castro hit town. Nowadays the houses, set back from the street and looking like wrecked hulks that had washed up on a shore, were filled with squatters who simply moved on when the roofs collapsed. The wraparound porches sagged into the tangled worts and bindweeds of the cat-infested gardens. At the rear of the once-fashionable hotel, Padron, a middle-aged man who wore his thinning hair long over his oversized ears, double-chained his bicycle to a rusty iron fence, then walked through the employees' entrance and down a long flight of steps to the locker room. He opened the locker and quickly changed into the tan uniform and black shoes with "Made in China" stamped in English on the inside of the tongues. The shoes were too tight and squeaked when he walked, and he had been promised a new pair when the next shipment arrived. He tied his black bow tie as he made his way upstairs to the sprawling kitchen off the hotel's cafeteria. Pushing through the double swinging door into the kitchen, he called a greeting to the four short-order cooks who were sweating over the bank of gas stoves. One of them, an old man who had worked at the Libre when it was called the Havana Hilton, looked hard at Padron as if he were trying to convey a message. Then the old man gestured with his chin toward the door of the manager's office. Padron thrust out both of his palms, as if to ask, What are you trying to tell me? just as the door to the office opened and two policemen wearing green Interior Ministry uniforms motioned for him to come in. For an instant Padron thought of running for it. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw two more Interior Ministry police push through the double door into the kitchen behind him; both had opened holster flaps and rested their palms on the butts of revolvers. Padron forced a smirk of utter innocence onto his long mournful face and sauntered past the two policemen into the office. He heard the door close behind him. An elegantly dressed man with a neatly trimmed reddish beard stood behind the manager s desk.

"Padron, Arturo?" he asked.

Padron blotted a bead of perspiration on his forehead with the back of his wrist. "It's me, Padron, Arturo."

"You have a cousin named Jesus who owns a thirty-two foot Chris Craft cabin cruiser with twin gas engines, which he keeps tied up in the port of Miramar. For a price he has been known to run Cubans to Miami."

Padron experienced a sharp pain in the chest, a sudden shortness of breath. He had seen photographs of the man behind the desk in the newspapers. It was none other than Manuel Piñeiro, the head of the regime's secret police. "My cousin, he has a boat, señor," he said. "What he does with it is not known to me."

Piñeiro crooked a forefinger and Padron, prodded forward by one of the policemen, his shoes squeaking with each step, approached the desk. "Your cousin Jesus has admitted that he was instructed to keep the gas tank of his boat and spare jerry cans filled; that he was to remain next to his telephone every evening this week waiting for a signal. When a caller quoted a certain sentence from Corinthians—'For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound. I who shall prepare to the battle.'—he was to immediately put to sea and pick you up on the beach of Miramar, minutes from here by bicycle. He was then instructed to run you across to Miami. For this he was to be paid twelve thousand five hundred American dollars." By now the blood had literally drained from Padron's face.

"I am not a religious man," Piñeiro continued, his head tilted to the side and back, his tone reassuringly amiable, "though in my youth, to gratify my grandparents, I was obliged to attend church services. I recall another sentence from the Holy Book, this one from the Gospel According to Saint Matthew: 'Woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! It had been good for that man if he had not been born."' His tone turned hard. "Empty your pockets on the desk."

With shaky hands, Padron did as he was told. Piñeiro separated the items with the tips of his fingers: a pocketknife, some loose change, several sticks of chewing gum, a crumpled handkerchief, some toothpicks, a depleted roll of dental floss, two lumps of sugar wrapped in the cafeteria's distinctive brown paper, an unopened pack of Russian cigarettes, a book of matches, a wristwatch without a strap, a lottery ticket, two small keys fitting the locks securing the "Flying Pigeon" to the iron fence behind the hotel, a half-empty bottle of Bayer aspirins, a frayed photograph of a child in a crib and another of a woman with listless eyes attempting to find a smile for the camera, an internal identity card with a photograph of a younger and thinner Padron peeling away from the pasteboard. "I will now pose several questions, Piñeiro informed the waiter, who was gnawing on his lower lip. "One: How much were you to be paid for the assassination of Fidel Castro?"

"I know nothing of this," the waiter breathed. "I swear it on the tomb of my mother. I swear it on the head of my son."

"Two: Who gave you your orders?"

"I received no orders—"

"Three: Who else in Havana is in on the plot?"

"As God is my witness there is no plot."

Piñeiro greeted the denials with a bemused smile. Using the back of a finger, the chief of the secret police separated the bottle of aspirin from the rest of the pile. Then he unscrewed the lid and spilled the tablets onto the desk. Bending over the pills, he opened Padron's pocketknife and used the blade to sort through them. At first he was unable to detect any difference between them. He glanced up and saw the terror that had installed itself in the waiter's eyes and began again, examining the pills one by one. Suddenly Piñeiro's mouth opened and the words "So that's it!" escaped his lips. He pushed one of the pills off to the side, then a second, then a third. Then he straightened and, looking the waiter in the eye, said, "It will be good for you if you had not been born."

Padron understood that it was a sentence worse than death. Piñeiro signalled for the two policemen to advance. As they started forward, Padron's hand shot out and he snatched one of the aspirins and turning and crouching, shoved it into his mouth and with a sob bit down hard on it. The two policemen lunged for him, seizing his arms as his body went limp. They held him up for a moment, then lowered the dead weight to the floor and looked at their chief, fearful that he would blame them.

Piñeiro cleared his throat. "It saves us the trouble of executing him," he remarked.

His garish silk tie askew and stained with Scotch, his shirt unchanged in days and gray under the collar, his reading glasses almost opaque with grime and sliding down his nose, the Sorcerer leaned over the United Press ticker installed in a corner of the war room, monitoring the bulletins slipping through his fingers. "Anything coming out of Havana?" Dick Bissell called from the cockpit, the command-and-control well facing the plastic overlays filled with up-to-date tactical information. On the giant map, the five freighters carrying Brigade 2506 had inched to within spitting distance of the Cuban coast. The two American destroyers that would guide the invasion force into the Bay of Pigs that night, assuming the President didn't call off the operation, were just over the horizon. Two CIA Landing Ship Docks—filled with the smaller LCUs and LCVPs that would swim out of the LSDs and ferry the invaders to the beaches—were closing in on the rendezvous point off the coast.

The usual weekend bullshit," Torriti called back. Stooping, he retrieved the bottle of mineral water filled with vodka and poured another shot onto the coffee grounds in his plastic cup. "There's one about the joys of deep sea fishing off Havana, another about a Cuban family that's been making cigars for five generations."

Bissell resumed his obsessive pacing, prowling back and forth between the water cooler against one wall and the easel on which all the operational codes had been posted for fast reference. Other members of the war room team came and went as the morning dragged on. Topsiders appeared with last-minute glitches to be ironed out and cables to be initialed. Leo Kritzky brought over the press clippings on Cuba for the past twenty-four hours; Castro had delivered another of his marathon speeches, this one to the air raid wardens association in Havana, extolling the virtues of Socialism. Leo's secretary, Rosemary Hanks turned up with a hamper of fresh sandwiches and a supply of toothbrushes and toothpaste for staffers who were sleeping over and had forgotten theirs. Allen Dulles checked in on a secure phone from time to time to see if Jack Kennedy had come through with the final go-ahead. The big clock on the wall ticked off the seconds with a maddening clatter; the minute hand seemed to emit a series of dull detonations as it climbed the rungs toward high noon, the deadline Bissell had given the President for calling off the invasion of Cuba.

JMARC had gotten off to a rotten start the day before when post-strike reports from the initial D-minus-two raids against Castro's three principal air bases started to filter through. The damage assessment photos, rushed over from the Pentagon after a U-2 overflight, confirmed that only five of Castro's aircraft had been destroyed on the ground; several Sea Furies and T-33 jet trainers appeared to have been hit, but the photo interpreters were unable to say whether they were still operational. And they could only guess at how many planes had been parked inside hangers or nearby barns and escaped altogether. To make matters worse, Adiai Stevenson, the American ambassador to the United Nations, was hinting to Rusk that he, Stevenson, had been made to seem a horse's ass; when the Russians raised a storm at the UN over the attack on Cuba, Stevenson had held aloft a wire service photograph of the two B-26s that had landed in Miami and had sworn that pilots defecting from Castro's air force, and not American-backed anti-Castro Cubans, had been responsible for the air strike. The cover story, which Stevenson (thanks to a vague CIA briefing) really believed, had quickly fallen apart when journalists noticed the tell-tale metal nose cones on the two B-26s in Miami and concluded the planes hadn't defected from Cuba after all; Castro's B-26s were known to have plastic noses. Stevenson, livid at being "deliberately tricked" by his own government, had vented his rage on Rusk. By Sunday morning shock waves from the affair were still reverberating through the administration.

Bissell's noon deadline came and went but the DD/0 didn't seem alarmed, and for good reason: he had informed the President that the freighters would cross the line of no return at noon on Sunday, but he had built in a margin of error. The real deadline was four o'clock. Around the war room people stared at the red phone sitting on a table in the command-and-control well as the clock batted away the seconds. Ebby and Leo poured coffee from one of the Pyrex pots warming on the hot plate and drifted into Leo's cubbyhole office off the war room. "I was ready to quit over this," Ebby confided to his friend, sinking into a wooden chair in near-exhaustion. "I actually delivered a letter of resignation to the Director."

"What happened?"

"He pretty much made the case that this wasn't the moment to abandon ship."

Leo shook his head. "I don't know, Ebby—JMARC could succeed."

"It would take a miracle."

Leo lowered his voice. "The news Bissell's waiting for from Havana—it could change the ball game."

Ebby sipped his coffee. "Doesn't it worry you, Leo—the United States of America, the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, trying to assassinate the bellicose leader of a small island-country because he's thumbing his nose at his Yankee neighbor? It's a classic case of the elephant swatting a mosquito, for Christ's sake."

Leo sniffed. "At my pay grade we don't deal in moral niceties."

"It doesn't seem as if moral niceties are the subject of conversation at any pay grade," Ebby griped.

Settling onto the edge of the desk, Leo absently poked through some papers with the tips his fingers. "Say that Castro survives," he said, talking to himself. "The operation could still succeed."

"Balls! The landing might succeed if we provide air cover. But then what? Castro and his brother, Raoul, and their buddy Che Guevara aren't about to opt for early retirement in Soviet Russia. If things turn against them they'll retreat into the Sierra Maestras and go guerrilla. Tito did the same thing against the Germans in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and he held out for years. With Castro in the mountains and a CIA-supported Provisional Government in Havana, there'll be a slow simmering civil war. Jesus, it could go on for ten, twenty years."

"I hope to hell you're wrong," Leo said.

"I'm terrified I'm right," Ebby said.

Outside, in the war room, the red telephone buzzed. Conversations ended abruptly as every head turned to stare at it. The Sorcerer abandoned the UP ticker and ambled over. Ebby and Leo rushed to the doorway. Controlling himself with an effort, Bissell, his shoulders hunched, walked slowly across the room to stand over the phone. He looked at it, then reached down and picked it up.

"Bissell," he said.

He listened for a long moment. Gradually his features relaxed. "Right Mr. President," he said. "You bet," he said. "Thank you, Mr. President." Then he hung up and, grinning, turned to flash the thumbs-up sign to the staffers around the room.

"So what did he have to say?" Torriti asked.

"Why, he said, 'Go ahead.'" Bissell laughed. And then he swung into high gear. "All right, let's put the show on the road. Leo, pass the coded signal on to the Essex and to Jack McAuliffe on the lead freighter. Also get the word down to Swan Island so the propaganda machine starts humming. And set Hunt off his duff in Miami—I want those bulletins from the Provisional Government on the air as soon as the first Cubans hit the beaches. Gentlemen and ladies, we are about to breathe new life into the Monroe Doctrine."

And then everyone began talking at once. The war room churned with activity. For the first time in days the dull detonations from the minute hand stumbling across the face of the wall clock were inaudible. At the overlay of the giant map of the Caribbean, two young woman edged the five freighters closer to Cuba. Bissell, riding a second wind, huddled with several photo interpreters, going over the prints from the post-attack U-2 overflight, circling runways and hangars and fuel depots with a red pencil. Two generals from the Pentagon were called in for consultation in mid-afternoon. By late afternoon a revised target op order had been enciphered and dispatched to the CIA air base at Retalhuleu, where the brigade's B-26s would be loading up with bombs and ammunition for the crucial D-minus-one raid.

In the early evening, Bissell took a call from Rusk and the two chatted for several minutes about Adiai Stevenson. Bissell mentioned that they were gearing up for the all-important second strike. The phone line went silent. Then Rusk said, "Let me get back to you on that."

Bissell was startled. "What do you mean, get back to me?"

"I have a call in to the President at Glen Ora, where he's spending the weekend," Rusk explained. "There's been some discussion about whether the second strike is wise."

"It's already been authorized—"

"I'll call right back," Rusk insisted. Minutes later the Secretary of State came on the line again to say that the President had decided, in light of the fiasco at the UN, to cancel the second raid. There would be no more air strikes, he explained, until the brigade captured the Bay of Pigs runway and America could credibly argue that the B-26s were flying from Cuban soil. Rusk's announcement set off a fire storm inside the war room. Ebby led the charge of those who felt the CIA was betraying the brigade. "It would be criminal to go ahead with the landings under these conditions," he cried, raising his voice, slamming a fist into a wall. "They cut back the first raid from sixteen B-26s to six. Now they're cancelling the second raid. The brigade won't have a ghost of a chance if Castro can put planes over the beaches."

Tempers flared. Rank was forgotten as junior officers pounded tables to emphasize the points they were making. As the argument raged in the cockpit, staffers dropped what they were doing and gathered around to watch. In the end the agonizing went nowhere: most of those present felt, like Bissell, that the die was cast; it was too late for the ships, by now sneaking into the Bay of Pigs behind two US destroyers, to turn back.

With Leo in tow, Bissell charged over to State to talk Rusk and Kennedy into changing their minds. The Secretary listened patiently to their arguments and agreed to call the President. Rusk stated Bissell's case fairly to Kennedy: the CIA was pleading to reinstate the strike because the freighters carrying the brigade, and the brigade itself, would be sitting ducks for any of Castro's planes that had survived the first raid. Then Rusk added, "In my view, Mr. President, operations of this sort do not depend nearly so heavily on air cover as conventional amphibious operations did in World War II. I am still recommending, in view of the uproar at the United Nations over the first raid, that we cancel." Rusk listened for a moment, then covered the mouthpiece with a palm. "The President agrees with me." He held out the telephone. "Would you like to speak to him yourself?"

Bissell, dog-tired after days of napping on a cot in the bunkroom of Quarters Eye, looked at Leo, then, thoroughly disheartened, shook his head. If the President's mind is made up," he said wearily, "there's really no point, is there?"

Back at the war room, Bissell tried to put the best face on the situation. There was a good chance that the bulk of Castro's combat aircraft had been neutralized. Some T-33s may have survived, true. But the T-bird was a relatively tame training plane—the CIA wasn't even sure they were armed. There was a bottom line, Bissell added: the President wasn't dumb. He had given the go-ahead for the operation, which meant he would have to relent and allow jets from the Essex to fly air cover if Castro's planes turned up over the beaches.

"And if Kennedy doesn't relent?" Ebby demanded.

Bissell turned away and, his shoulders sagging, resumed patrolling the corridor between the water cooler and the easel. "Anything on the wire?" he called to the Sorcerer, who was slumped over the UP ticker.

Torriti kicked at the long reams of paper collecting in the cardboard box at his feet. "Nothing yet," he mumbled.

"Goddamn it, I can't hear you."

"NOTHING YET!" Torriti shouted at the top of his lungs.

Shortly before midnight Bissell took another phone call from a very edgy Secretary of State. The President wanted to know where they were at, Rusk said. Bissell checked the coded phrases on the message board against the operational codes posted on the easel. The brigade's frogmen had gone ashore to mark the way with blinking landing lights. The two LSDs had gone ballast down to flood the well deck; the three LCUs and the four LCVPs inside would have swum out and started picking up the troops on the freighters. The first wave would form up in fifteen minutes and start out for the beaches designated Red and Blue. By first light all 1,453 members of Brigade 2506 would be ashore.

Rusk mumbled something about the need for the five merchant ships to be out of sight by sunup. Then, almost as an afterthought, the Secretary of State said that Kennedy was concerned about one other detail of the invasion. The President wanted to double-check that there would be no Americans hitting the beaches with the Cubans.

Bissell provided the necessary assurance. Sending Americans ashore was the last thing he'd do, he promised.

6
BLUE BEACH, THE BAY OF PIGS, MONDAY, APRIL 17, 1961

THE MEN IN THE FIRST WAVE, THEIR FACES BLACKENED WITH SOOT from galley stoves, slung web belts filled with spare ammunition clips across their chests, then bowed their heads and crossed themselves as the brigade priest blessed them and their crusade. "In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritui Sancti, Amen," he intoned. With that, the Cubans of the Sixth Battalion began clambering down the rope ladders into the LCU bobbing in the water under the Rio Escondido. Two LCVPs, loaded down with tanks and trucks, chugged past groundswells slapping against their blunt bows. Jack, dressed in camouflage khakis and paratrooper boots, a .45 strapped to his waist, his Cossack mustache stiff with salt and quivering in the gusts from sea, was the last one down the ladder. He'd been planning the coup for weeks. To come this far with Roberto Escalona and the brigade and then (following explicit orders from Bissell) to remain on the freighter, watching the invasion through night binoculars—it was simply not possible. Not for the descendant of a bare-knuckle fighter, the undefeated McAuliffe whose name was still a legend in County Cork. There was also the little matter of showing the freedom fighters that America was confident enough in the venture to send one of its own ashore with them. The message wouldn't be lost on Roberto or the rank and file grunts of the brigade.

In the LCU, a hand gripped Jack's arm. "Hombre, what do you think you're doing?" Roberto Escalona demanded.

"I'm landing with you," Jack said.

"No," Roberto said. "Don't misunderstand me. I'm grateful for all your help, but this part belongs to us now."

"Believe me, you're going to be on your own," Jack said. "I'm planning to stay on the beach long enough to take a look around so I can report firsthand to Washington. I'm coming right back."

"Still rowing for something besides speed?" guessed Roberto.

"I suppose you could say that," confessed Jack.

In the darkness, Roberto grunted. Several of the men who knew Jack murmured greetings in Spanish; it was easy to see they weren't sorry to see him tag along. Turning, Roberto waved to the sailors. The LCUs' crewmen pushed off from the tires hanging against the rusting hull of the freighter and the stubby landing craft lurched into the choppy waters, heading for the red lights twinkling on the shoreline.

Crouching in the midst of the Cuban fighters. Jack listened to them bantering back and forth nervously in Spanish. Looking over his shoulder, he could make out Roberto standing next to the helmsman, his hand raised over his eyes to shield it from the salt spray. Roberto stabbed the air off to the right and the helmsman eased the LCU over toward the blinking red light at the end of the rock jetty. "A hundred yards to go," Roberto shouted over the splashing waves and the wind.

Suddenly, there was a terrible grinding under the vessel. Shards of coral sliced through the double hull. The man crouching next to Jack gagged and clutched at his foot as the LCU pitched forward dizzily and then stopped dead in the water. Someone snapped on a flashlight and trained it on the moaning man, sitting on the deck. Anaesthetized with shock, the soldier followed the beam of light down to the stump of his foot. The razor-sharp coral had amputated his leg above the ankle. Blood gushed from the open wound. Nearby, a paratrooper boot with raw meat protruding from it floated in the bilge. A medic whipped off his belt and tightened it around the wounded man's calf, but the blood continued to stream out. Around them, the hull was slowly filling with sea water, which swished gently back and forth as the LCU rolled with the swells. Cursing under his breath, Roberto leaped down into the hold. "Your people swore the smudge on the photos was seaweed, not a reef!" he shouted into Jack's ear.

"Jesus H. Christ, cut the goddamned motor," Jack yelled up to the helmsman. Roberto called to the men, "Quick, over the side. We're eighty yards off the beach—the water won't be deep here."

"Que haremos con?" the medic asked, clinging to the belt around the stump of leg as the soldier slumped to the deck. Sea water stained with syrupy red splotches swirled around the two men. Roberto reached down to the wounded mans neck and felt for a pulse. Then he shook his head furiously. "Muerto!" he said.

In twos and threes, the Cubans slipped over the side of the sinking vessel, their weapons raised above the heads. Jack found himself in waist high-water as he and the shadowy figures around him waded toward the shore. They were still some forty yards out when they heard the shriek of brakes from the beach. A truck filled with militiamen had roared up. As the militiamen spilled out, the truck backed and came forward again until its headlights played across the bay, illuminating the brigade fighters. The men in the water, pinned in the headlights, froze. Jack snatched a BAR from the nearest man's hands and fired off the magazine; every third round was a tracer, so it was easy to see that the truck was being riddled with bullets. Other brigade fighters began shooting. On the shore, there were flashes of fire as the militiamen shot back. Then, dragging the wounded and the dead, they began retreating toward a dense stand of woods on the other side of the gravel road that ran along the waterfront. The truck's headlights popped out, one after the other. In the darkness, Roberto shouted for the men to cease firing, and they struggled through the water and up onto the beach.

Another battalion on the right had already seized the rock jetty and was racing inland, the men shooting from the hip as they ran toward the building with the neon sign sizzling on the roof that advertised "Blancos." Off to the left, still another battalion waded ashore from a sinking LCW and, firing furiously, charged across the sand toward the rows of box-like bungalows at the edge of the beach. One brigade fighter dropped to his knees near Jack, who was crouching behind a stack of wheelbarrows. The Cuban aimed a .75 recoilless rifle at a bungalow with firefly-like sparks in the windows, and pulled the trigger. The shot burst on the roof, setting it aflame. In the saffron glow of the dancing flames, the last of Castro's militiamen could be seen disappearing across the fields.

And then the night turned deathly still; crickets could be heard chirping in the woods, a generator murmured somewhere behind the bungalows. At the head of the jetty, Roberto scooped up a fistful of sand and made a brief speech. The members of the brigade who could hear him cheered hoarsely. Then they started inland to secure the road and the town of Giron, and the three causeways over the Zapata swamp. One squad discovered an ancient Chevrolet parked behind a bungalow and, cranking up the motor, set off to capture the airstrip.

Jack took a turn around the beach area. Several wounded brigade fighters were being carried into the makeshift infirmary set up in one of the concrete bungalows. Roberto Escalona had scratched "G-2" on the door of another bungalow and was using it as his headquarters. Behind the bungalows, Jack found the bodies of three of Castro's soldiers with 339th Militia Battalion insignias on their sleeves lying face down in the sand, blood oozing from wounds. He gazed at the dead men for a while, trying to recollect in the heat of the moment what the issues were that had brought the brigade to Cuba; trying to weigh whether the issues vindicated the killers and the killed.

There were no easy answers. Suddenly the Cold War—the romp of great powers turning around great ideas—was reduced to bodies on a beach, to blood being sponged up by sand.

Making his way along the beachfront. Jack came across a brigade corporal—more a boy than a man—with a bulky radio strapped to his back. He was cowering behind a wrecked Jeep, cradling the head of a dead brigade officer in his arms. Jack gently pulled the body free and, motioning for the radioman to follow him, headed for Blanco's Bar. Inside, the jukebox was still feeding 45-rpm records into the playing slot; the grating voice of Chubby Checkers could be heard belting out "Twist again like you did last summer." Cans of Cuban beer, sets of dominoes, were scattered around the tables, evidence that the bar had been hastily abandoned. The small fogon, a stove that burned the local charcoal, lay on its side, riddled with bullets. Righting a chair, Jack collapsed into it; he hadn't realized how exhausted he was until he sat down. He motioned for the young corporal to set up his equipment.

"Debes tener un nombre, amigo, " he asked the radioman.

"Orlando, senor."

"De donde eres?"

The boy pointed in the general direction of the swamp. "Soy de aqui. De Real Campina, que esta al otro lado de Zapata."

"Welcome home, Orlando." Jack handed him a slip of paper listing two emergency frequencies monitored by the aircraft carrier Essex. The radioman, proud to be of assistance to the only Yankee on the beach, strung the antenna and tuned in the frequency. With an effort, Jack pushed himself out of the chair and stood there swaying like a drunk. He shook his head to get the cobwebs out, then stumbled across the room. "Maybe you can tell me what the fuck I'm doing here," he said.

The radioman didn't understand English. "Que dice, senor?"

Jack had to laugh. He patted the young man on his bony shoulder. "All right, pal. Whatever we're doing here, we'd better get it right." Grasping the small microphone, he called: "Whistlestop, this is Carpet Bagger, do you read me? Over."

There was a burst of background static. Gradually a voice speaking English with a lazy Southern accent filtered through it. "Roger, Carpet Bagger. This heah's Whistlestop. Ah'm readin' you loud and clear. Over."

"Whistlestop, please pass the following message on to Kermit Coffin: Phase one of operation completed. Initial objectives are in our hands. Casualties are light. At least one LCU and one LCVP with heavy equipment and spare ammunition hit a coral reef and sank offshore. Now we're waiting for the offloading of ammunition and mobile communication van from Rio Escondido, and the field hospital from the Houston."

Jack started to sign off when the radio operator on the Essex told him to stand by; a message was coming through for him. Then he read it: "Combat information center reports that Castro still has operational aircraft. Expect you all gonna be hit at dawn. Unload all troops and supplies and take your ships to sea as soon as possible."

Jack shouted into the microphone, "What about the goddamned air umbrella that's supposed to be over the beach?"

The Essex radioman, unfazed, repeated the message. "I say again, you all gonna be hit at dawn. Unload all troops and supplies and take your ships to sea as soon as possible."

"Whistlestop, how are we supposed to unload all troops and supplies? The LCUs and the LCVPs that are still afloat won't be able to get over the coral reef until high tide, which isn't due until midmorning. Over."

"Wait one, Carpet Bagger."

A full three minutes later the radio operator came back on. "Kermit Coffin says there must be some mistake—there is no coral reef, only seaweed. Over."

Jack's sentences came with deliberate gaps between the words. "Whistlestop, this is Carpet Bagger. Kindly pass the following question on to Kermit Coffin: When's the last time you heard of seaweed cutting through a hull and severing a man's leg?"

Using his thumb, Jack flicked off the microphone.

Bissell, reputed to be unflappable, blew his stack when Leo brought him the message board from the Essex. What annoyed him wasn't what Jack McAuliffe was saying but where he was saying it from. "He's gone ashore!" he cried incredulously.

"He's with the Sixth Battalion on Blue Beach, Dick," Leo said.

"Who in God's name authorized him to land?"

"It seems to have been a personal initiative—"

The DD/0 got a grip on himself. "All right. Get the Essex to pass the following order on to him. Keep the radio channel to the Essex open until the mobile communication van is offloaded from the Rio Escondido and we can establish a direct link with the beaches. As for McAuliffe, he's to get his hide back to the ship pronto, even if he has to swim out to it."

Glancing at the wall clock, Bissell turned back to the giant overlay. He didn't like what he saw. First light would be seeping over the invasion beaches, but the five freighters that had brought Brigade 2506 to Cuba were still positioned inside the narrow confines of the Bay of Pigs. By now they should have offloaded their precious cargoes and headed out to the safety of the open sea. Staring at the wall map, Bissell thought he detected the distant, dull whine of disaster—the sound seemed to come from somewhere deep inside his ear. And it wouldn't go away.

In Miami, Howard Hunt locked the Cuban Provisional Government inside a safe house and issued "Bulletin Number 1" in its name: "Before dawn today, Cuban patriots began the battle to liberate our homeland from the desperate rule of Fidel Castro."

From Swan Island in the Caribbean, the powerful CIA transmitter beamed calls for the Cuban army to revolt against Castro. "Take up strategic positions that control roads and railroads! Take prisoner or shoot those who refuse to obey your orders! All planes must remain on the ground." Between calls for insurrection, the radio—as part of JMARC's psychological warfare campaign designed to convince Castro that an insurrection was underway—began broadcasting what appeared to be coded messages to Cuban underground units: "The hunter's moon will rise before dawn. I repeat, the hunter s moon will rise before dawn. The forest is blood red with flames. I repeat, the forest is blood red with flames. The Caribbean is filled with jellyfish. I repeat, the Caribbean is filled with jellyfish."

At high tide, the LCUs and the LCVP started ferrying equipment and supplies over the coral reef to the beach. Roberto actually kissed the first of the three tanks to roll off the landing craft, and then sent them off to beef up the units blocking the causeways. Shirtless young men were tossing cartons of Spam and tins of ammunition from hand to hand up the beach to one of the bungalows that had been turned into a depot. Up the bay, in the direction of Red Beach some twenty miles to the north, a thin plume of smoke rose into the crystalline sky. At first light, a lone Sea Fury had come in at sea level and hit one of the freighters, the Houston, on the waterline amidships with a rocket. The Second Battalion had already been offloaded onto Red Beach but the Fifth Battalion and the field hospital, and tons of spare ammunition, were still on board when the Houston, ablaze and taking water fast, settled stern down into the bay. Dozens of fighters in the Fifth Battalion drowned trying to swim to shore; the ones who made it were no longer fit for combat.

At the end of the jetty on Blue Beach, a fighter manning one of the few antiaircraft guns ashore scanned the sky to the north through binoculars. Suddenly he stiffened. "Sea Fury!" he shouted. Along the beach, others took up the cry as they dove into hastily dug slit trenches. "Sea Fury! Sea Fury!"

Jack, catnapping on the floor of Blanco's Bar, heard the commotion and raced out onto the porch in time to see two of Castro's planes roar in low from the Zapata Swamp. One peeled off and, circling, came down the shoreline, raking the beach with machine gun fire. Jack dove into a hole he'd scooped out in the sand under the porch. Fighters lying on their backs in the slit trenches fired BARs at the plane, which sped past over their heads and banked to come around for a second run. The second Sea Fury, skimming the waves, headed straight for the port side of the Rio Escondido, two miles out in the bay. The plane fired eight rockets and then climbed at a steep angle and banked away to escape the .50-caliber machine guns blazing away from the side of the freighter. Seven of the Sea Fury's rockets splashed into the sea, short of the target. The eighth struck the ship under the bridge. The explosion ignited several of the drums of aviation gasoline lashed to the deck. In an instant the fire skidded forward. From his shelter in the sand, Jack could see sailors trying to fight the blaze with hand extinguishers but he knew they would be useless against a gasoline fire. Minutes later there was a small explosion. Then a giant explosion racked the freighter as the stores of ammunition below deck went up. Men in orange life vests could be seen leaping into the sea as flames shot hundreds of feet into the air. Smoke obscured the ship for several minutes. When it drifted clear, Jack saw the Rio Escondido's stern jutting straight up, the two screws slowly churning in air as the freighter slid down into the oily waters of the Bay of Pigs.

Black smoke streamed from the stacks of the two other freighters in sight as they got up steam and headed to sea.

The two Sea Furies made a last pass over the beach, shooting up Jeeps and trucks that had been offloaded, then disappeared back over the swamp. Inside the bar, Jack had his Cuban corporal raise the Essex on the radio. Whistlestop, Whistlestop, this is Carpet Bagger. Two bogies just attacked the beach and the ships. The Rio Escondido was hit and has sunk. I repeat, the Rio Escondido was sunk before it could offload its aviation fuel or the communication van, or the spare ammunition. The other freighters, the ones carrying ammunition, have hauled ass and are putting to sea." Jack smiled at a thought. "Do me a favor, Whistlestop, pass word on to Kermit Coffin that I can't go back on board the Rio Escondido because it's underwater."

The laconic voice from the Essex filtered back over the wavelength. "Roger, Carpet Bagger. In the absence of the communication van we'll need to keep this channel open. The only reports we're getting from Blue Beach are coming from you." There was a buzz of static. Then the Essex, with just a hint of breathlessness, said, "Combat information center has a sighting from one of our Skyhawks. An enemy battalion estimated at nine hundred men, I repeat, nine hundred men was spotted approaching the middle causeway that leads to Giron and the airstrip. Our pilot counted sixty, I repeat, sixty vehicles, including a dozen or so Stalin Three tanks."

Jack said, "Whistlestop, when can we expected the air cover you promised?"

"Carpet Bagger, we are reporting three brigade B-26s seventy-five miles out and approaching. Good luck to you."

Jack said, "We'll need more than luck," and cut the microphone. He stepped onto the porch again and gazed into the shimmering waves of heat rising off the Zapata on the horizon. He could hear the dull boom of cannon as Castro's column closed in on the unit blocking the middle causeway. In the haze, he could make out swarms of birds circling high over the battlefield.

The young corporal came up behind him and pointed at the birds. "Buitres," he whispered.

Jack caught his breath. "Vultures," he repeated.

In Washington, Millie Owen-Brack gave a good imitation of someone at work. She was supposed to be preparing a briefing paper for Allen Dulles. The idea was for the Director to give an off-the-record interview to a columnist considered friendly to the CIA; in it Dulles would make it clear that, while America sympathized with the Cuban rebels who were trying to overthrow Castro, the Company had not organized the Bay of Pigs landings or aided the Cuban brigade in any way, shape or form during the actual invasion. Millie, her mind wandering, reworked the second paragraph for the tenth time, changing "way, shape or form" to "overtly," then crossing that out and trying "militarily." She left "militarily" and added "or logistically," and then sat back to reread it. She had difficulty focusing on the sentences and turned her head to stare out the window. The cherry blossoms had appeared on the mall the week before but there was no sense of spring in the air; in her heart, either.

The two other women who shared the office glanced up from their desks and then looked at each other; they both knew that Millie was worried sick about her husband, who was somehow involved in this Bay of Pigs business.

Late in the morning a topside secretary phoned down to ask one of the women if Millie Owen-Brack happened to be at her desk. "Why, yes, as a matter of fact she is," the woman confirmed.

Millie looked up. "Who was that?"

"Someone was asking if you were in the office."

The question struck Millie as ominous. "This is a Monday. Where else would I be, for heaven's sake?"

A few moments later the footfalls of a man walking as if he wasn't eager to get where he was going could be heard in the corridor. Millie drew a quick breath and held it. She vividly remembered the day twelve years before when Allen Dulles, then DD/0, and Frank Wisner, his deputy, had come into her tiny office to announce that her husband had been shot dead on the China-Burma border. Dulles, a smooth man in public but awkward when it came to dealing with emotions, had turned his head away and covered his eyes with a hand as he searched for comforting words. He never found them. It was Wisner who had put an arm over her shoulder and said how sorry they all were that things had turned out like this. He had assured she would have nothing to worry about materially; the Company took care of its widows.

The soft scrape of a knuckle on the door brought Millie back to the present. "Yes?" she called.

The door opened and Allen Dulles stepped into the office. He had aged a great deal in the last months, and grown visibly tired. The jubilant spring to his step, the optimistic pitch to his voice were long gone. Now he slouched noticeably as he shuffled across the room to Millie's desk. "Please don't get up," he told her. He sank slowly into a seat and sucked for a moment on a dead pipe. His gaze finally lifted and he noticed the look of absolute dread in Millie's eyes. "Oh, dear," he said. "I should have told you immediately—I don't have bad news, if that's what you're thinking."

Millie let herself breath again, though her heart was still beating wildly.

"I don't have good news either," Dulles went on. He glanced across the room at the two women. "I wonder if I could trouble you ladies..."

The women grabbed their purses and hurriedly left the room. 'Yes, well, here it is. Castro's planes sank two ships this morning. The Rio Escondido, which is the one Jack was riding, was one of them. But Jack wasn't on it—he apparently took it upon himself to go ashore with the first wave. It's just as well he did. The brigade's communication van went down with the Rio Escondido, so the only first-hand news we're getting off the beach is from an impromptu hookup Jack established with the Essex."

"When's the last time you heard from him?" Millie asked.

Dulles looked at his watch, then absently began winding it. "About three-quarters of an hour ago. That's how we learned about the Rio Escondido."

"What's the situation on the beach?"

"Not good." Dulles shut his eyes and massaged the brows over them. "Terrible, in fact. Castro's columns are closing in. The brigade never managed to offload ammunition from the freighters."

"It's not too late—"

"The ships that weren't sunk headed for the open sea—"

Millie was keenly aware of the ludicrousness of the situation: here she was, a public relations flack, discussing operational details with the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. "Surely you can organize air drops—"

"Not while Castro has planes in the air. Jack Kennedy has flatly refused..." Dulles let the sentence trail off.

"If things get really bad," Millie said, "you'll extricate Jack, won't you?"

"Of course we will," Dulles said, a trace of the old heartiness back in his voice. "We certainly don't want a CIA officer to fall into Castro's hands. Look, I know you've been through this before." The Director cleared his throat. "I wanted to bring you up to date—you were bound to hear about the sinking of the two ships and start worrying that Jack might have been on one of them."

Millie came around the desk and offered her hand to Dulles. "You were very thoughtful, Director. With all the things you have to think of—"

Dulles stood up. "Dear lady, it was the least I could do, all things considered."

"You'll keep me posted on what's happening to Jack?"

"Yes."

"Thank you, Director."

Dulles nodded. He tried to think of what else he could say. Then he pursed his lips and turned to go.

Early on Tuesday morning, Jack—running on catnaps and nervous energy —shared some dry biscuits and muddy instant coffee with Roberto Escalona in his G-2 bungalow as they took stock of the situation. Castro's heavy artillery was starting to zero in on the beaches; his tanks and mortars would soon come within range. The brigade's makeshift infirmary was overflowing with wounded; the makeshift mortuary behind it was filled with dead bodies and pieces of bodies. Ammunition was running perilously low; if the freighters didn't return to the Bay of Pigs and offload supplies, the brigade would run out of ammunition in the next twenty-four hours. And then there was the eternal problem of air cover. Unless American Navy jets off the Essex patrolled overhead, the brigade's antiquated B-26s, lumbering in from Guatemala, were no match for Castro's T-33s and Sea Furies; three of them had been shot down that morning trying to attack Castro's forces on the causeways. The brigade blocking units there were taking heavy casualties; Roberto wasn't sure how long they could hold out without air support. Once they pulled back, there would be nothing to stop Castro's heavy Stalin III tanks from rolling down to the water's edge.

Jack waited for a lull in the shelling, then jogged back across the sand to Blanco's Bar. Orlando, his radioman, raised the Essex and Jack called in the morning's situation report. At midmorning he went out onto the porch and scanned the bay with binoculars. There was still no sign of the freighters. He climbed onto the porch railing and then up to the roof. Sitting on the edge of an open skylight, his feet dangling down into the bar, he watched the contrails high overhead thicken and dissipate. Then he trained his binoculars on the horizon to the northeast, where the battle was raging for control of the middle causeway. "It was a dirty trick," he muttered, talking to himself, shaking his head dejectedly.

The dirty trick he had in mind was the one he'd pulled on Millie when he came ashore with the brigade. It was one thing not to resist the demon that drives you to live on the edge, quite another not to protect your wife from becoming, once again, a widow.

A voice boomed, "Ladies and gentlemen, the President and Mrs. Kennedy!"

Elegant in white tie and tails, Jack Kennedy strode into the East Room of the White House as the Marine band, decked out in red dress uniforms, struck up "Mr. Wonderful." Jackie, wearing green earrings and a pleated floor-length sea-green gown that bared one shoulder, clung to the President's elbow. The eighty or so guests around the room applauded. Smiling broadly, looking as if he didn't have a care in the world, Jack gathered his wife in his arms and started off the dancing.

As the gala dragged on the couple separated to work the room. "Oh, thank you," Jackie, slightly breathless, told a Congressman who complimented her on the bash. "When the Eisenhowers were here we used to get invited to the White House. It was just unbearable. There was never anything served to drink and we made up our minds, when we moved to the White House, that nobody was ever going to be as bored as we'd been."

Jack was chatting with Senator Smathers from Florida when Bobby, also in white tie, motioned to him from the door. The two brothers met half way. "The shit has hit the fan," Bobby told the President in a low voice. "The whole thing has turned sour in ways you won't believe. Bissell and his people are coming over." Bobby glanced at his wristwatch. "I've rounded up the usual suspects—everyone'll be in the Cabinet Room at midnight."

Jack nodded. Forcing a smile onto his face, he turned to chat up the wife of a syndicated columnist.

At two minutes to midnight the President, still in his tails, pushed through the doors into the Cabinet Room. Other guests from the evening gala were there already: Vice President Johnson, Secretaries Rusk and McNamara. General Lemnitzer and Admiral Burke, trailing after the President from the East Room and wearing formal dress uniforms with rows of medals glistening on their breasts, closed the doors behind them. A dozen or so aides from the White House, Defense and State had been summoned from their homes by the White House switchboard; most of them had thrown on corduroys and sweatshirts and looked as if they had been roused from a deep sleep. The CIA men—Bissell and Leo Kritzky and a handful of others—were unshaven and dressed in the same rumpled clothing they'd been sleeping in for days. They all climbed to their feet while the President made his way around to the head of the table. When Kennedy sank into a chair everyone except Bissell followed suit.

"Mr. President, gentlemen, the news is not good," the DD/0 began.

"That may be the understatement of the century," Bobby Kennedy remarked. "This administration is ninety days old and you people—"

Jack said patiently, "Let him tell us what's happening."

Bissell, barely controlling his emotions, brought everyone up to date on the situation. Castro's tanks and mortars had closed to within range of the two landing beaches. Casualties were heavy. The units blocking the causeways were running desperately low on ammunition. Roberto Escalona was rationing what was left—commanders begging for five mortar shells were lucky to get two. If the blocking units gave way, Castro's tanks would roll down to the beaches in a matter of hours. The ships carrying spare ammunition had fled the bay after the two freighters were sunk. The Navy had talked them into returning but didn't expect them to get there in time to save the situation. To complicate matters several members of the provisional government, under lock and key in a Miami hotel, were threatening to commit suicide if they weren't allowed to join their comrades in the Bay of Pigs. In Guatemala, the Company liaison officers at the Retalhuleu airstrip were complaining that the pilots and crews, flying nonstop since Monday morning, were too exhausted to respond to the brigade's appeals for air cover. A handful of American advisors, sheep-dipped from Alabama Air National guard units, were begging for permission to take the B-26s out in their place. "I trust you didn't say yes," Kennedy snapped.

"I sent them a four-word response, Mr. President: 'Out of the question.'"

Secretary McNamara and General Lemnitzer pressed Bissell for details. When the DD/0, who hadn't slept in days, hesitated, Leo, sitting next to him, scratched answers on a pad and Bissell, his memory refreshed, responded as best he could. There were roughly a hundred dead, twice that number of wounded, he said. Yes, there were brigade tanks on the beach but, due to the shortage of fuel, they had dug in and were being used as fixed artillery positions.

"That is," Bobby put in, "as long as their ammunition lasts."

"Thank you for the clarification, Mr. Attorney General," Bissell said.

"Any time," Bobby shot back.

"The bottom line, Mr. President," Bissell said, trying to ignore Bobby, "is that the operation can still be saved."

"I'd certainly like to know how," Kennedy said.

"It can be saved if you authorize jets from the Essex to fly combat missions over the beaches. It would take them forty-five minutes to clean out the causeways."

Bissell found an unlikely ally in Admiral Burke. "Let me have two jets and I'll shoot down anything Castro throws at us," declared the gruff Chief of Naval Operations.

"No," Kennedy said flatly. "I want to remind you all of what I said over and over—I will not commit American armed forces to combat to save this operation."

Bobby remarked, "The problem, as I see it, is that the CIA and Admiral Burke are still hoping to salvage the situation. The President wants to find a way to cut our losses. There's a whole world out there waiting to rub our faces in this if we let them."

Burke shook his head in disbelief. "One destroyer opening fire from the Bay could knock the hell out of Castro's tanks. It could change the course of the battle—"

Jack Kennedy's eyes narrowed. "Burke, I don't want the United States involved in this. Period."

Arleigh Burke wasn't ready to give up yet. "Hell, Mr. President, we are involved."

Secretary of State Rusk jotted some words on a pad and passed the slip of paper to Kennedy. On it he had written: "What about the hills?"

Kennedy looked across the table at Bissell, still the only person in the room on his feet. "Dick, I think the time has come for the brigade to go guerrilla, don't you?"

Everyone in the room appeared to be hanging on the answer to the President's question. Leo glanced at his chief out of the corner of an eye.

Bissell was terribly alone, a bone-weary emotional wreck of a man. Swaying slightly as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, he seemed close to tears. "Mr. President, going guerrilla is not possible—"

Kennedy appeared confused. "I always thought... you assured me..." He looked around the table for support.

General Lemnitzer leveled an accusing finger at Bissell. "You specifically said that, in a worst-case scenario, the brigade could fade into the Escambray Mountains and go guerrilla."

Bissell, barely audible now, said, "That was a worst-case option in the Trinidad plan, which we shelved at the request of the President. From the Bay of Pigs, the brigade would have to fight its way across eighty miles of swamp to get to the mountains." Bissell looked around desperately and saw the chair behind him and collapsed back into it. "Mr. President—"

"I'm listening, Dick."

"Mr. President, to put a fine point on it, our people are trapped on the beaches. Castro has massed twenty thousand troops in the area. If we can keep Castro's forces—keep his tanks—at bay, keep them pinned to the causeways, why, we could bring in the ammunition ships, couldn't we? The brigade could regroup, get a second wind." Around the table people were starting to stare at the walls or the ceiling. Bissell, too, was getting a second wind. "The Provisional Government could set up shop, Mr. President. We'd have our foothold on the island—"

"You mean toehold—" Bobby interrupted, but Bissell, oblivious to the sarcasm, rushed on.

"Once the Provisional Government is in place Castro's troops will desert in droves. It's all down here in black and white, isn't it, Leo? Where's that briefing paper we worked up?" Leo went through the motions of riffling through a pile of file folders. Bissell, impatient, began quoting from memory.

"Sabotage is frequent, for God's sake. Church attendance is at record highs and can be interpreted as opposition to the regime. Disenchantment of the peasants has spread to all the regions of Cuba. Castro's government ministries and regular army have been penetrated by opposition groups. When the time comes for the brigade to break out of the beachhead, they can be counted on to muddy the waters..." Bissell looked around the table. "Muddy the waters," he repeated weakly. Then he shut his mouth.

A leaden silence filled the Cabinet Room. The President cleared his throat. "Burke, I'll let you put six jet fighters over the beach for one hour tomorrow morning on the absolute condition that their American markings are painted out. They are not to attack ground targets—"

"What if they're fired on, Mr. President?" asked Admiral Burke. "There's no reason for them to be fired on if they stay out of range of Castro's antiaircraft batteries. Dick, you can bring in the brigade's B-26s from Guatemala during that hour. The jets off the Essex will cover them. If any of Castro's T-33s or Sea Furies turn up the jets have permission to shoot them down. Just that. Only that."

"Aye-aye, sir," Burke said.

"Thank you for that, Mr. President," Bissell mumbled. As the meeting was breaking up, a National Security aide rushed up to the President with a message board. Kennedy read it and, shaking his head in disbelief, passed the board on to Bobby. Sensing that something important had happened, several of the participants garnered around the President and his brother. Bobby said, "Jesus! Four of those Alabama National Guard pilots who were training the Cubans in Guatemala have taken matters into their own hands— they flew a sortie in two B-26s. Both bombers were shot down over Cuba."

"What happened to the pilots?" asked General Lemnitzer.

"Nobody knows," Bobby said. The President's brother turned on Bissell. "Those American pilots had better goddamned well be dead," he fumed, his voice pitched high into a hatchet man's killer octave.

By midday Wednesday what was left of the units blocking the causeways had began pulling back toward Giron. When word of this reached the beaches, panic spread. Castro's tanks, pushing down the road from the airport, were firing at line-of-sight targets. Blanco's Bar was bracketed and Jack and his tadioman decided the time had come to join Roberto Escalona, who was crouching with a handful of fighters at the water's edge. Shells were bursting around them, kicking up gusts of sand and dust that blotted out the sun but causing relatively few injuries because the beach tended to dampen explosions.

"Darkness at noon," Jack called over the din of combat. Roberto, clutching a BAR with two almost empty ammunition belts crisscrossing his chest, stared out to sea through the sooty air. An American destroyer, its hull number painted out, was patrolling a mile offshore. Jack shouted, "I can get them to come in close and take us all off." Roberto shook his head. "If it has to end, let it end here." The brigade's fate had been sealed earlier in the morning when Bissell's topside planners in Washington, dazed from lack of sleep, forgot there was a one-hour difference in time zones between Cuba and Guatemala. The six carrier-based A4Ds with their American markings painted out had turned up over the beaches an hour early for the rendezvous with the B-26s flying in from Retalhuleu. When the brigade's planes did show up, the American jets were on the way back to the Essex and Castro's T-birds had a field day shooting down two more B-26s.

At the water's edge a half-crazed Cuban fighter crouching near Jack screamed obscenities at the American destroyer, then leveled his rifle at the hull and managed to shoot off two rounds before Roberto punched the barrel down. On either side, as far as the eye could see, men were scurrying in every direction, leaping in and out of shallow craters gouged in the dunes by the bursting shells. Orlando, monitoring the radio through earphones, grabbed Jack's arm to get his attention. "Quieren hablar con usted, senor, " he cried. Jack pressed one of the earphones to an ear. A static-filled squeal made him wince. Then a voice forced its way through the static: "Carpet Bagger, this is Whiskey Sour patrolling off Blue Beach. Do you read me?"

Jack grasped the microphone and waded into the water, with Orlando right behind him. "Whiskey Sour, this is Carpet Bagger. I read you. Over."

"Carpet Bagger, I have orders for you from Kermit Coffin. You are instructed to leave the beach immediately. I repeat—"

Jack interrupted. "Whiskey Sour, no way am I leaving this beach by myself."

Roberto came up behind Jack. "Get your ass out of here," he yelled. "You can't help us anymore."

"Jesus H. Christ, I'll leave when everyone leaves." Two shells exploded, one hard on the heels of the other, scooping shallow craters on either side of the group. For a moment the sandstorm obscured everything. As it settled, a bearded fighter, blood spilling from a gaping wound where his ear had been, stumbled toward them, then fell down in the sand. Another soldier rolled the wounded man onto his back, looked over toward Roberto and shook his head. Jack became aware of a sticky wetness on his thigh. Looking down, he saw that shrapnel had grazed his leg, shredding his trousers, lacerating the skin. Roberto, cracking like porcelain, snatched the .45 from the holster on Jack's web belt and pointed at the American's head. "Castro captures you," he cried, his voice breakne tears of frustration streaking his sand-stained cheeks, "he'll tell the world we were led by American officers. For Christ's sake, Jack, don't take away our dignity. It's the last thing we have left. Okay, Jack? You hearing me, Jack? I swear to you—I'll kill you before I let you fall into their hands alive."

Jack backed away. Water swirled around his knees. "You're a shit," he yelled at Roberto.

"Gringo carajo! I'll blow your head off, you'll be just another body floating in the surf."

Jack turned and waded deeper into the water, then lost his footing and began to dogpaddle away from the beach. From time to time he glanced back. The first of Castro's Stalin III tanks, their cannons spurting flames, were lumbering through the lanes between the concrete bungalows. One of the brigade tanks dug into the sand exploded; the mangled turret slid off to one side and its cannon nosed into the sand. Troops, running low and shouting in Spanish, poured onto the dunes behind the tanks. Along the beach, men were emerging from holes and slit trenches with their hands stretched high over their heads. Jack turned back and went on paddling. He saw a raft up ahead, partially inflated and half submerged, and made for it. Squirming onto it, he lay there for a long time, his face turned toward the sun, his eyes tightly shut. Visions of riot clashed with images of Millie slithering slowly up his body, cauterizing his wounds with her burning lips.

Jack lost track of time. He raised himself on an elbow and looked back at the beach. The shooting had stopped. Lines of men, their hands clasped on their heads, were being prodded at bayonet point up the dunes. Floating not far from the raft was a broken plank—it must have come from the wooden benches in one of the sunken LCUs. Jack retrieved it and, lying flat so he couldn't be seen from the beach, began to paddle out to sea. After a while blisters formed on his hands and burst, and the makeshift paddle became slick with blood. Slivers of sunlight glancing off the bay blinded him. When he was able to see he caught a glimpse of the destroyer riding on its inverted reflection. The sun scorched the back of his neck. From time to time, despite the heat, he shivered uncontrollably, calming down only when he summoned images of Millie's long body fitted against his. He could hear her voice in his ear: Come home when you can, Jack. I couldn't bear it if..."

When he looked up again, the destroyer was near enough to make out the fresh paint on the bow where the hull number had been blotted out. In the fantail, sailors were shouting encouragement at him. He guessed that there was enough distance between the raft and the beach for him to sit up now. Punctuating each stroke with a rasping grunt, Jack made a clean catch and felt his blade lock onto a swell of sea water. A splinter of pain stabbed at the rib that had mended and broken and mended again. His head reeled. He thought he heard hoarse shrieks from the students lining the banks of the river. Coiling and uncoiling his limbs in long fluid motions, he caught sight of the finish line ahead.

And then the plank in Jack's hands became stuck in the water and it dawned on him that he wasn't rowing in a sleek-sculled eight on the Charles after all. He tugged at the plank but couldn't pull it free. He looked over the side—there was something queer about the water. It was a dirty red and washing through a mass of greenish gulfweed. And then he saw that the tip of the plank had embedded itself in the stomach of a bloated corpse that was tangled in the weed. Jack let go of the plank and gagged and turned and vomited, and vomited again in long spasms, the pain searing his throat, until he felt that nothing could be left inside him—no heart or lungs or stomach or intestines.

This sense of perfect emptiness overwhelmed him and he blacked out.

Ebby rang up Elizabet from his office in mid afternoon. "Have you been listening to the news?" he asked.

"Everyone at State's glued to the radio," she said. "UPI is talking about hundreds of casualties and more than a thousand taken prisoner."

"All hell's broken loose here," Ebby said. "I can't talk now. Leo and I think it might be a good idea for you to pick up Adelle and drive over to Millie's to hold her hand."

"How come she's home?"

"She called in sick this morning. She said there was nothing wrong physically—given what's happening she just couldn't concentrate."

Elizabet didn't dare breath. "Is there bad news?"

"There's no news," Ebby told her. "But there could be bad news."

"Oh, Elliott, it's turning out the way you said it would—it's Budapest revisited."

Adelle was waiting at the curb when Elizabet came by. The two had gotten very close over the years but they barely uttered a word on the way over to Millie's. They went around to the back and, pushing through a screen door, found Jack's
wife sitting in the kitchen. She was staring at a daytime television quiz program, waiting for it to be interrupted with the latest news bulletin. An open bottle of Scotch was within arm's reach. There was a mountain of unwashed dishes in the sink, dirty laundry heaped on the floor in front of the washing machine.

Millie jumped up and looked at her friends with dread in her eyes. "For God's sake don't beat around the bush," she pleaded. "If you know something, tell me."

"We only know what's on the news," Elizabet said.

"You swear to God you're not hiding anything?"

"We know it's a disaster," Adelle said. "Nothing more."

"Jack's on the beach," Millie said.

The three women hugged each other. "You can bet they'll move heaven and earth to get him off," Adelle assured her.

"There's been no mention of an American in the bulletins," Adelle pointed out. "Surely Castro would be boasting to the world by now if he had captured one of ours."

"Where's Anthony?" Elizabet asked.

"My mother came around and took him and Miss Aldrich over to her place the minute she heard what was happening."

Millie poured out three stiff shots of Scotch and clinked glasses. "Here's to the men in our lives," Elizabet said.

"Here's to the day they're so fed up working for the Company they get nine-to-five jobs selling used cars," Millie said.

"They wouldn't be the same men we married if they worked nine-to-five selling used cars," Adelle said.

The women settled down around the kitchen table. On the television screen, four housewives were trying to guess the price of a mahogany bedroom set; the one who came closest would win it.

"The Company really screwed up this time," Millie said. "Dick Bissell and the Director are going to be drawing unemployment."

To take her mind off the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Elizabet asked Millie how she'd Jack had met. Millie smiled at the memory as she described the brash young six-footer sporting a Cossack mustache and wearing a three-piece linen suit who had made a pass at her on the sixty-sixth floor of the Chrysler Building.

"I thought you met in Vienna during the Budapest business," Adelle said.

"He propositioned me in New York," Millie said. "I said yes in Vienna five years later."

"Never hurts to keep 'em waiting," Adelle said with a laugh.

They talked for a while about Elizabet's daughter, Nellie, and about Ebby's boy by his first marriage, Manny, who had turned fourteen and was at the top of his class in Groton.

Adelle described how her twin girls had giggled when they caught sight of a pregnant woman in a store the week before. When Adelle started telling them about the birds and the bees, Vanessa had interrupted. "Oh, mommy, we know all about thingamabobs turning hard and getting shoved into thingamagigs and the whatsit swimming up to fertilize the egg and stuff like that." "Where on earth did you learn about thingamabobs and thingamagigs?" Adelle had inquired with a straight face. The two girls had explained how their school chum, Mary Jo, had swiped a Swedish sex education book filled with photographic illustrations of naked people actually "doing it" from an older stepsister, and men spent the weekend poring over the pages with a magnifying glass.

"Oh, they do grow up fast these days," Elizabet said.

"Don't they, though," Adelle agreed.

And then the phone rang. Elizabet and Adelle exchanged looks. Millie lifted the receiver. The blood drained from her lips when she heard Dulles's voice.

"Yes, speaking," she said..."I see," she said..."You're absolutely sure? There's no chance you're wrong?"

On the television screen a woman was laughing deliriously because she had won the bedroom set. Adelle went over and snapped off the set. The pinpricks of light disappeared as if they had been sucked down a drain.

Millie said into the phone, "No, I'll be fine. Director. I have two friends here with me... Thank you. Director. I am proud of Jack. Very. Yes. Goodbye."

Millie turned to her friends. Tears welled in her eyes. She was too choked up to speak. Adelle, sobbing, came around the table and hugged her tightly.

"It's not what you think," Millie finally managed to say. "Jack's safe and sound. They got him off the beach. A destroyer picked him up from a raft—" Tears were streaming down her cheeks now. "His paratrooper boots turned white from the salt water. His hands were covered with blisters. He has shrapnel wounds—the Director swears they're scratches, nothing more." She began laughing through her tears. "He's alive. Jacks alive!"

Lights blazed late in the West Wing of the White House Wednesday night. A very tired secretary dozed at a desk immediately outside the President's office. Even the four Secret Service agents posted in the corridor were swallowing yawns. Inside, silver trays with untouched finger sandwiches filled a sideboard. Committee chairmen trudged in and huddled with a shaken President and departed, wondering aloud how such a smart man could have gotten sucked into such a cockamamie scheme in the first place. Shortly after eleven Leo came by with the most recent situation report. Jack Kennedy and his brother Bobby were off in a corner, talking with McGeorge Bundy, the National Security Advisor. Waiting inside the door, Leo caught snatches of conversation. "Dulles is a legendary figure," the President was saying. "It's hard to operate with legendary figures—he'll have to fall on his sword."

"Bissell will have to go, too," Bobby said.

"I made a mistake putting Bobby in Justice," Kennedy told Bundy. "He's wasted there. Bobby should be over at CIA."

"That's about as logical as closing the barn door after the horse has headed for the hills," Bobby observed.

Bundy agreed with Bobby but for another reason. "To get a handle on a bureaucracy you need to know what makes it tick. The CIA has its own culture—"

"It's a complete mystery to me," Bobby admitted.

"You could figure it out," Kennedy insisted.

"By the end of your second term I ought to be able to," Bobby quipped.

The President spotted Leo at the door and motioned for him to come in. "What's the latest from Waterloo, Kritzky?"

Leo handed him a briefing paper. Kennedy scanned it, then read bits aloud to Bobby and Bundy, who had come up behind him. "A hundred fourteen dead, eleven hundred thirteen captured, several dozen missing." He looked up at Leo. "Any chance of some of these missing being rescued?"

Leo recognized the PT-109 commander from World War II brooding over the safety of his men. "Some of our Cubans made it into the swamps," he replied. "The destroyers have been picking them off in ones and twos. A bunch escaped in a sailboat and were rescued at sea."

As Kennedy sighed aloud Leo heard himself say, "It could have been worse, Mr. President."

"How?" Bobby challenged; he wasn't going to let the CIA off the hook anytime soon.

Leo screwed up his courage. "It might have succeeded."

Kennedy accepted this with a dispirited shake of his head. "A new President comes to the job assuming that intelligence people have secret skills outside the reach of mere mortals. I won't make the same mistake twice."

"The problem now is Khrushchev," Bobby said. "He's going to read you as a weak leader, someone who doesn't have the nerve to finish what he starts."

"He's going to assume you can be bullied," Bundy agreed.

Kennedy turned away. Leo, waiting at the door to see if the President wanted anything else from the CIA that night, heard him say, "Well, there's one place to prove to Khrushchev that we can't be pushed around, that we're ready to commit forces and take the heat, and that's Vietnam."

"Vietnam," Bobby said carefully, "could be the answer to our prayers."

The President plunged his hands deep into the pockets of his suit jacket and strolled through the French doors into the garden. There was the distant murmur of traffic and, curiously, the first unmistakable scent of spring in the air. Kennedy tramped off into the darkness, lost in thought as he tried to come to terms with the first political disaster of his life.

7