WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MAY 5, 1961

BOBBY KENNEDY, HIS SHIRTSLEEVES ROLLED UP, A LAMINATED SECURITY pass flapping on the outside of his breast pocket, was picking Leo's brain in the war room on the ground floor of Quarters Eye. The giant maps of Cuba and the overlays with tactical information had been removed. Enlarged U-2 reconnaissance photos of the beaches on the Bay of Pigs taken after the debacle were tacked to the walls in their place. They showed shattered tanks and trucks and Jeeps half-buried in drifts of sand, the wreckage of several LCUs awash in the surf off shore and an enormous Cuban flag streaming from the neon sign atop Blanco's Bar. Bobby had spent most of the last ten days at the CIA, trying to read into the culture. Jack Kennedy had abandoned the idea of having his brother run the Company, but he had decided it would be prudent if an emissary from the Kennedy clan took a closer look at its inner workings.

"My own feeling," Leo was saying, "is that we're in a Catch-22 situation. If we reach out for more opinions, what we gain in expertise we lose on security. When too many people know about an operation you can be certain it will leak."

"If you'd brought more people in on the Bay of Pigs, could the disaster have been avoided?" Kennedy wanted to know.

Leo shook his head. "Look, can I speak frankly?"

Kennedy nodded. "If you don't we're both in trouble."

Leo scratched behind an ear. "The big problem wasn't a lack of expertise—we had plenty of that even though we limited access drastically. There was dissent expressed, and vigorously, in this room. The big problem was that the President, having inherited an Eisenhower operation that he was then reluctant to cancel, was half-hearted. Dick Bissell, on the other hand was one-and-a-half hearted. The nature of the beast was that there would have to be compromises if the two visions were to be compatible. Compromises killed the operation, Mr. Attorney General. Moving the landings from Trinidad was a compromise. Using those old surplus B-26s was a compromise. Cutting back on the first air strike was a compromise. Cancelling the second air strike was a tragic compromise. I think I understand why the President was tailoring the operation; as the commander-in-chief, he's obliged to take a global view of the Cold War. If he committed American planes or ships in Cuba, Khrushchev might move against Berlin. Our problem here was that, at some point, someone should have bitten the bullet and said we've made one compromise too many. The risk-benefit scale has tipped in favor of the risks. The whole thing ought to be cancelled."

Bobby fixed his ice blue gaze on Leo; he thought he had tapped into the Company culture at last. "What stopped you?"

Leo considered the question. "There are two mentalities cohabiting under one roof here. There are those who think we've been put on earth to steal the other side's secrets and then analyze the secrets we steal. Implicit in this mindset is the belief that you can discover the enemy's intentions by analyzing his capabilities. Why would Hitler mass barges on the English Channel if he didn't intend to invade England? Why would the Chinese mass troops on the Yalu if they didn't plan to attack the Americans in North Korea? That sort of thing. Then there are others who want this organization to impact events, as opposed to predict them—rig elections, sap morale, promote rebellions, bribe officials in high places to throw monkey wrenches into the works, eventually eliminate political figures who frustrate us. The people holding this second view ran the show during the Bay of Pigs. Once the cards were dealt, once they drew a halfway interesting hand, they weren't about to fold."

"And which side do you belong to?"

Leo smiled. He had heard scuttlebutt that Bobby, during his ten-day short course, had become intrigued with clandestine operations; with the gadgets and the dead drops and the safe houses. "I have a foot in each camp," he finally told the Attorney General.

"Playing it safe?"

"Playing it smart. Why fight the Cold War with one hand tied behind your back?"

Bobbys eyebrows arched. "You've given me food for thought, Kritzty." He looked at the wall clock, then got to his feet and strolled across the hall to j0in several staffers who were watching a television set with the sound turned down low. Earlier in the day. Commander Alan Shepard had blasted off from Cape Canaveral in a Mercury capsule to become the first American in space; assuming that Shepard was recovered alive, the United crates—the Kennedy administration—could take credit for catching up with the Russians in the space race. On the TV screen Walter Cronkite was reporting that Shepard had reached the apogee of the flight, a hundred and sixteen miles up. A wire ticker next to the television set was spitting out a long roll of paper. Bobby absently let it slip through his fingers, then, intrigued, leaned over the machine to read the text. The plain language message had been routed, using a secure intra-Company channel, from the communications center in another building on the Reflecting Pool, where the original cable had been deciphered.

TOP SECRET

WARNING NOTICE: SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION Intelligence sources and methods involved

FROM: Mexico City Station

To: Kermit Coffin

SUBJECT: Rumors from Castro-land

1. Mexico City station has gotten wind of rumors circulating in left-wing circles in Latin America that Castro might be willing to trade prisoners captured at Bay of Pigs for $50 million, repeat, $50 million, worth of food and medicine.

2. Cuban cultural attache here overheard on tapped phone line telling Cuban wife of left-wing publisher that deal could be negotiated with private humanitarian groups if this arrangement more palatable to Kennedy administration.

Excited by this nugget of intelligence, Bobby ripped the communique off the ticker and started toward the door.

Harvey Torriti, just back from one of his two-martini coffee breaks and in a foul mood, noticed the Attorney General heading for the exit with the top secret message in his hand. He planted his body in the doorway. "Hey, where you going with that?" he demanded.

Bobby, his eyes smoldering, stared at the obese man blocking the exit. "Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?"

The Sorcerer's jowls sagged into a sneer. "I'm talking to you, sport. Newspapers say you're the second most powerful man in the District of Columbia, which may or may not be true. Whichever, you're not getting out of here carrying paperwork crawling with Company indicators and operational codes. No fucking way, pal."

"I don't like your tone, Torriti—"

The Sorcerer duck-swaggered closer to Bobby, grabbed his wrist with one hand and pulled the message free with the other. Around the war room everybody froze in their tracks, mesmerized by the dispute. Leo came rushing across the floor. "Harvey, you're overreacting—the Attorney General knows the rules—"

"You and your brother fucked up," Torriti snapped at Bobby. "The Bay of Pigs was your fault. The Cuban freedom fighters are rotting in Castro's prisons because of you."

Bobby's face had turned livid. "You're out," he snarled. He turned on Leo. "I want him out of this building, out of this city, out of the country."

"Fuck you," the Sorcerer shot back. He waved five fat fingers in Bobby's direction as if he were trying to flag down a taxi. "Fuck him," he told the staffers in the war room. He belched into his fist. Then, with his flanks scraping the sides of the jambs, he pushed through the doorway and lumbered off down the corridor.

"You ought to have seen it," Jack whispered to Millie. "It was like Moses catching a glimpse of the Promised Land he would never live in. Everyone understands Dulles's head has to be lopped off. All the same a lot of us felt bad for him."

Scabs had formed over the shrapnel wounds on Jack's thigh. Millie ran her fingers lightly over them in the darkness of the bedroom, then fitted herself against his lanky body. "I haven't slept through the night once since you're back," she whispered in his ear. "I keep waking up and checking to make sure you're actually here, and not a figment of my imagination."

Jack held her tightly. "I wasn't a figment of your imagination tonight, was I?"

She ran the tip of her tongue along the inside of his ear. "I love it when you're inside me, Jack. I wish you'd stay there forever."

"I want it to last forever. Orgasms are the enemy. They remind me of the writing that flashes onto the screen when the movie's over."

"We can always start again."

"You can always start again. Mere mortals like me need to rest up for a few hours."

"There are things I can do to bring you to a boil sooner."

"Like what?"

Millie could feel him getting hard. "Like talking about the things I can do to bring you to a boil."

They laughed softly into each other's necks. Over the intercom Jack had strung between bedrooms they could hear Anthony tossing in his sleep. Millie said, "You started to describe Dulles."

"He put on a good show. He was the perfect gentleman. You'd never have known that he was about to be replaced by some rich Catholic shipbuilder friend of JFK's. He took Kennedy around the new digs, pointing things out with the stem of his pipe—"

"What's it like out at Langley?"

"Very modern, very elaborate. After all these years on Cockroach Alley we'll be able to spread our wings. Every division's going to have its own suite. Soviet Russia's on the fourth and fifth floors. Your office will be one flight down from the topsiders on the seventh floor." Jack snickered. "They like to keep the public relations folks close by."

"We're their security blanket," Millie said.

"Yeah. Although I don't know why. All you ever say on the record is "No comment."

"It's the way we say it, Jack."

"Langley's going to be easier to work in," he went on. "The DCI suite has several waiting rooms so that visitors won't run in to each other. You can send documents from one office to another through pneumatic tubes. They've set up a parallel phone system so we'll all have numbers with a State or Defense exchange—calls to these numbers will come in on an outside line, bypassing the regular Company switchboard; they'll be answered by operators pretending to be secretaries in other government offices." Jack mimicked a secretary. "I'm terribly sorry but Mr. McAuliffe is away from his desk. But I'd be glad to take a message?"

Millie listened to Jack's breathing for awhile; it occurred to her that this was the most reassuring sound she had ever heard in her life. "That was a great homecoming barbecue this afternoon," she said. "It was really sweet of Adelle to go to all that trouble."

'Leo and I go back a long way," Jack said drowsily. "Leo and Ebby and you—this Bay of Pigs business really brought you closer together, didn't it?"

'We see eye to eye on a lot of things. Some people are starting to call us the 'Three Musketeers' because we hang out together so much. We work together. We break for lunch together. We party together weekends."

Jack was silent for a moment. "I like Ebby an awful lot—he's the best the Company has, the cream of our generation. He can wade into the thick of the action, like he did in Budapest, or he can hang back and think things out for himself. He's not afraid to speak his mind. He was the perfect choice to take over the Soviet Russia Division. Something tells me he's going to go a long way..."

"What did Adelle's father mean when he told you and Leo that he'd heard it from the horses mouth? And what did he hear?"

"Phil Swett gets invited to the White House pretty regularly. He said that all the Kennedy brothers could talk about at a lunch last week was Vietnam. Adelle picked up the same thing in the Vice President's office. Lyndon Johnson has her working up a position paper on Vietnam."

"What's going on in Vietnam, Jack?"

"So far, not much. There's a Communist insurgency but it's back burner stuff. After what happened in Cuba, Kennedy apparently feels he needs to convince Khrushchev he can be tough. Tough and unpredictable at the same time. And Vietnam is going to be the showcase. The Company is beefing up its station there. JFK's going to send over a few hundred Green Berets to help train the anti-Communist forces."

"He'd better be careful not to get sucked in. I don't think the American people will support a war in Asia."

"Vietnam's too far away." Jack yawned into a pillow. "Nobody will notice."

The two newcomers and the two who had been living at the mansion for half a year were squatting in a circle on the parquet floor, playing jacks. None of the four wore a stitch of clothing. "I am up to five-zees," announced the bony girl whose long golden tresses plunged halfway down her naked back. She tossed the small ball into the air, deftly scooped up the six-pointed pieces and snatched the ball out of the air an instant before it bounced.

"You throw the ball so very high," one of the new girls complained, its no wonder you manage to win all the time."

"There is no regulation about how high one can throw it," the golden-haired girl maintained.

"There is," insisted another.

"Is not."

"Is."

"Do come over. Uncle, and decide which of us is correct," called the girl with the golden hair.

"Too busy right now, girlies," Starik muttered from across the room.

"Oh, pooh," fumed the new girl. "If you don't set things straight she'll only go on winning."

At the worktable, Starik sipped scalding tea through a sugar cube wedged between his teeth as he reread the text of the latest code from SASHA. One of his newcomers, a scrawny thing who walked with her toes turned out like a ballet dancer's, came across the room and draped herself over Starik's shoulders. "What an awfully pretty book you have there, Uncle," she murmured into his ear.

"It is called a world atlas," he instructed her; he prided himself on the fact that his nieces, when they left him, were more educated than the day they arrived.

"And what in the world is an atlas?" inquired the girl, slipping a thin hand over his shoulder and down under the front of his rough peasant shirt.

"The atlas is the world. Look here—on every page there are maps of all the different countries."

"Are there enough countries in the world to fill a book, then?"

"More than enough, dearie."

"And what country is on the page open before you. Uncle?"

"Why, it is called Vietnam."

The girl giggled into his ear. "I have never heard anyone speak of a country with the name of Vietnam."

"Rest assured, you will," Starik said.

The Sorcerer's tour as Chief of Station, Rome, began on a mortifying note when he dozed off during his first round-table with the American ambassador. The embassy's political officer, a myopic John Hopkins Ph.D. with the unfortunate habit of sniffling whenever he came to the end of a sentence, was droning on about the latest nuance in the speeches of the Italian Communist Party chief, Palmiro Togliatti; according to the political attache, Togliatti had started down the slippery slope of independence from Big Brother in the Kremlin, and this breach between the Italian and Soviet Communists ought to be encouraged and exploited. The political officer was midway through the presentation when the Sorcerer's head nodded onto his chest and he slumped to one side in the seat. His checkered sports jacket flapped open, the pearl-handled revolver slipped out of the shoulder holster and clattered to the floor.

"Are we keeping you up?" the ambassador inquired as the Sorcerer jerked awake.

"I'm resting my eyes but not my brain," Torriti shot back, leaning over to retrieve the hand gun. "I was hanging on his every word."

"How much more convincing you would be if you could manage to hang on his every word with your eyes open," the ambassador remarked dryly.

"Why Rome?" the ambassador cabled back to Foggy Bottom in Washington when, a few days later, Torriti turned up drunk at an embassy reception for the Italian foreign minister. "There are dozens of embassies around the world where he could be hidden away from Bobby Kennedy."

The Sorcerer, for his part, had been dragged into exile kicking and complaining. "Torriti, the patriot, is deported to Italy while the Cosa Nostra pricks, Rosselli and Giancana, get to live in America," he had muttered into the microphone at the discreet farewell party the outgoing DD/0, Dick Bissell, organized for him in the executive dining room on the eve of his departure for Rome. There had been a ripple of laughter from the handful of people who knew what Torriti was talking about. Angleton, thinner and darker and more brooding than anyone remembered, had emerged from the polar-darkness of his counterintelligence shop to give a going-away present to the man everyone knew he detested. It was a leather holster he had personally handcrafted for Torriti s'.38 Detective Special.

"Jesus, James, I don't know what to say," sputtered the Sorcerer, for once at a loss for words.

"It's not Jesus James," Angleton, scowling, corrected him. "It's James Jesus." Torriti had peered at James Jesus Angleton to see if the counterintelligence chief had stepped out of character to make a joke. It was obvious from the cantankerous expression on his face that this was not the case. "Sorry, sorry," the Sorcerer had said, nodding obsequiously as he fitted his ankle gun into the holster. "James Jesus. Right."

In Rome, the Sorcerer made a stab at actually running the Station for several months but the situation gradually deteriorated. A colonel in the carabinieri took him on a tour of the Yugoslav frontier only to discover Torriti snoring away in the back seat of the Fiat. There were all-night binges that were hushed up, a fling with an Italian actress that found its way into the gossip columns of several Roman newspapers, a very public clash with the ambassador that wound up on the desk of the Secretary of State. There were two minor traffic accidents, one involving an embassy car, the second involving an automobile that a used car dealer swore had been stolen and Torriti claimed to have bought, though he was unable to put his hand on the receipt for the cash payment he claimed to have made. The matter was hushed up when some unvouchered Company funds changed hands. By the time July rolled around, the Sorcerer had taken to flying off for sentimental weekend visits to Berlin. Accompanied by one or two old hands who had served under him when he was the head of Berlin Base, he'd make the rounds of the bars where his name was still a legend, then wander through the shadowy side streets near Checkpoint Charlie to get a whiff of the action, as he put it. On one memorable occasion he drank whiskey at a pub in the British Sector and had to be forcibly restrained from strolling into the Soviet zone for a chaser. At two in the morning one Sunday during the second week of August, he trudged with his old Mossad pal, Ezra Ben Ezra, to the roof of an apartment building to watch as Soviet tanks wheeled into position and East German troops strung barbed wire blocking the frontier between the two Germanies. Behind the tanks and troops came an armada of bulldozers, their headlights tunneling through the dust and darkness as they cleared a broad no-man's land that would later be mined. "This rates a nine on my Richter scale," the Rabbi told his old friend. "My sources tell me this is Khrushchev's answer to the Bay of Pigs—they are going to build a Great Wall of China across Germany, sealing off the Communist zone from the free world." The Sorcerer pulled a hip flask from a pocket and offered the Rabbi a swig. Ben Ezra waved away the alcohol. "There is nothing here to celebrate," he said mournfully. "It will be next to impossible to get Jews out now."

Returning to Rome that night, Torriti found a bottle of cheap whiskey and two kitchen tumblers set out on his desk and Jack McAuliffe stretched out on the couch waiting for him. A table lamp in a corner etched shadows onto the cafe-au-lait walls as the two sat drinking and reminiscing into the early hours of Monday morning. The Sorcerer, his eyes puffy, pulled out his pearl-handled revolver, spun the cylinder and set the weapon on his knees, with the barrel pointing directly at Jack's stomach. "I wasn't born yesterday, sport," he grumbled. "You weren't sent all this way to chew the fat. What aren't you saying to me?"

"What I'm not saying, Harvey, is you're an embarrassment to the Company."

Who says so?"

"The American ambassador to Rome says so. The new DD/0, Dick Helms, agrees with him. The new DCI, John McCone, also."

"Fuck them all."

What I'm not saying, Harvey, is you've been around a long time. You've pulled your weight and then some."

"What you're not saying is I ought to call it a day, right?"

"All things considered, that would probably be the best thing to do, Harvey"

"I'm glad it was you they sent, Jack." The Sorcerer, suddenly sober, straightened in the chair. "Do they want me to hang in here until the new Chief of Station comes out?"

"I'm the new Chief of Station, Harvey."

Torriti nodded listlessly. "At your pleasure, sport."

The Sorcerer organized his own farewell bash in the ballroom of the Rome Hilton. For background music there were recordings of arias sung by Luciano Pavarotti, an Italian tenor who had made a scintillating debut earlier in the year. Liquor flowed. Speeches were delivered. The phrase "end of an era" came back like a refrain. Around midnight Jack finally managed to get a call through to Millie in Washington; she and Anthony would be flying over the following week, their furniture would be coming out on an MSTS freighter at the end of the month, she said. Had Jack found an apartment yet? Jack promised he'd start looking first thing Monday.

Returning to the ballroom, Jack discovered that the Hilton's night manager had turned off the air conditioning. The handful of people remaining drifted toward the exits. Two secretaries were fending off a very soused Torriti, who was trying to talk them into transporting the party, or what was left of it, to "a more reputable hotel than the Hilton." At two in the morning Jack and his old boss from Berlin Base stumbled out onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel. A stifling August heat wave struck them in the face. Jack gasped. "We need air conditioning."

"We need booze," Torriti agreed. Hanging on to each other's arms, the two stumbled down the street to the Excelsior on Via Veneto and managed to bribe the bartender into giving them one for the road.

Munching an olive, Torriti squinted at Jack. "So you loved her, didn't you, sport?"

"Who?"

"The German broad. The dancer. The one that went by the code name :RAINBOW. The one that filled her mouth with water and shot herself."

"You mean Lili. Yeah, Harvey. I did love her."

"I figured." Torriti threw back some more whiskey. "She wasn't one of my barium meals, Jack."

"That's what you said at the time. I never thought otherwise."

"There was a war on but there are lines I don't cross."

"I know that, Harvey."

"You believe me, don't you, kid?"

"Sure I do."

"Cause if you didn't, if you thought she'd been one of my goddamn barium meals, it would hurt real bad, you see what I mean?"

"I never blamed you."

The Sorcerer punched Jack in the shoulder. "That means a lot to me, sport." He signaled for a refill.

"Last one, please," implored the bartender as he refilled their glasses. "I have this second job, it starts at eight-thirty, which leaves me five and a half hours to sleep."

Torriti clinked glasses with Jack. "My barium meals paid off, sport. It was yours truly who smoked out Philby when fucking Jesus James you-know-who was buying him lunch at La Nicoise."

"The Company owes you, Harvey."

Torriti leaned so far toward Jack that he would have fallen off the barstool if he hadn't grabbed the brass rail. "There's another Russian mole in the Company," he murmured, the liquor breath stirring the air around his companions face. "The famous SASHA. And I know who it is."

"You know the identity of SASHA?"

"Fucking A. I'll let you in on a little secret, kid. SASHA is none other than Jesus James fucking Angleton himself." When Jack started to smile Torriti turned ornery. "I've given this a lot of thought, pal. Okay, the evidence is circumstantial, I'm the first to admit it. Look at it this way: If the KGB actually has a mole inside the Company he couldn't do more damage than Angleton."

"I'm not sure I follow you—"

"Angleton's been turning the CIA inside out for the last ten years looking for moles, right? Tell me something, sport—has he ever found one? The answer is negative. But he's crippled the Soviet Russia division with his suspicions. He's got everyone looking over everyone else's shoulder. I know guys who're afraid to bring in a defector for fear Angleton will think they're vouching for a KGB plant because they're a KGB plant. I made a head count once—Jesus James's ruined the careers of something like a hundred officers. He sits on the promotion board—"

"I didn't know that."

"Well, I know that. He's blackballed dozens of promotions, he's forced good people into early retirement. One Soviet Russia division officer on Angleton's shit list went and passed a lie defector, at which point he was reassigned to Paris as Chief of Station. You know what Angleton did?"

"What did he do, Harvey?"

"Fucking Jesus James flew to Paris and personally warned the French counterintelligence people that the CIA station chief was a Soviet mole. Th fucking frogs immediately cut off all contact with the station. Holy shit. Angleton's going around telling anyone in Congress who'll listen that the Sino-Soviet split is KGB disinformation designed to lull the West into letting down its guard. Ditto for Tito in Yugoslavia."

The bartender finished rinsing glasses. "Gentlemen, have a heart. I need I to close now. "

The Sorcerer slid off the seat and hiked his baggy trousers high up on his vast waist. "Remember where you heard it first, sport," he said. "Jesus James fucking Angleton is SASHA."

"I wont forget, Harvey."

"Fucker thought he'd buy me off with a holster but I'm one jump ahead of him. Shit, I may go around in vicious circles but I go around one jump ahead of everyone."

Outside the Excelsior, Torriti looked up and down the deserted avenue, trying to figure out which way to go and what to do with the rest of his life. With Jack trailing behind, he staggered off in the direction of the American embassy, a block away. As he drew abreast of the gate, the young Marine on duty in the glass booth recognized him.

"Morning to you, Mr. Torriti, sir."

"No fucking way," the Sorcerer called over his shoulder to Jack as he waddled past the Marine down the walkway toward the main entrance. "RAINBOW wasn't one of my barium meals." He reached the wall and unzipped his fly and flexed his knees and began to urinate against the side of the embassy. "I'd remember if she was, sport. Something like that'd lodge in your skull like a goddamn tumor."

Jack caught up with the Sorcerer. "I can see how it would, Harvey." He conjured up a vision of Roberto and Orlando and the other Cubans jammed into one of Castro's dark dungeons. Blinking hard to stifle the image, he opened his fly and began to relieve himself against the embassy, too.

Torriti didn't appear to notice the puddle of urine forming around his scuffed shoes. "You're still the Sorcerers Apprentice, right, sport?"

"I am, Harvey. The Sorcerers Apprentice. And proud to be."

PART FOUR

SLEEPING DOGS

She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out.

Snapshot: a black-and-white photograph, taken in the dead of night with ASA 2,000 film using available light from wrought iron lampposts, shows two figures passing each other in the middle of a deserted bridge. They appear to have stopped for a moment to exchange words. The older of the two, a haggard man with thick eyeglasses that have turned fuliginous in the overhead light, is threading long bony fingers through his thinning hair. The gesture conveys anxiety. The other man, younger and taller than the first and wearing a shapeless raincoat, seems to be smiling at a private joke. The photograph was snapped by a journalist from Der Spiegel who had staked out the bridge after being tipped off by the Gehlen Organization in Pullach. Before Der Spiegel could go to press with the photo, the CIA got wind of its existence and arranged for the negative and prints to be seized by a German state prosecutor. The negative and all existing copies of the photograph were turned over to the chief of Berlin Base, who shredded everything but the single copy that was filed away in the station's archives. Stamped diagonally across the photograph are the words "Top Secret" and "Archives Only.

1

CHERYOMUSKI, MOSCOW DISTRICT, WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 1974

ON TELEVISION, WORKERS FROM THE RED STAR CHEMICAL FERTILIZER Plant Number Four in Nizhnevartovsk on the Ob River could be seen streaming into Red Square carrying a giant papier-mache head of Leonid Brezhnev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. As Brezhnev's head, bobbing above a sea of people, came abreast of the reviewing stand atop Lenin's Tomb, a slip of a girl wearing gold lame tights and a silver tank top detached herself from the marchers to skip up the stairs at the side of the tomb and present the First Secretary, his face thick with makeup for the television cameras, with a bouquet of red and pink carnations. "Oh, she is awfully cute, don't you think?" exclaimed one of the girls glued to the TV screen, a twelve-year-old Chechen with guileless eyes. "If Uncle were watching he would certainly pick up the telephone and ask her name."

Uncle was watching—he'd been invited by the First Secretary to join the head of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti and several senior Directorate chiefs in his private suite in the Kremlin, where they could observe the May Day parade on a giant television screen while sipping Champagne and snacking on zakuski. In Uncle's apartment in the Apatov Mansion near Cheryomuski, the nieces—they were reduced to five now; the sixth, a Uighur from the Xinjiang Uigur region of Central Asia, had been sent home when it was, discovered, during bath hour, that she had started menstruating—grew bored with the parade, which still had four hours to go, and decided to play hide-and-seek. Crouching behind Uncle's bathrobes in a closet in the bedroom, the Cuban girl, Revolucion, discovered a toy revolver loaded with toy bullets in a shoebox. "Girls, girls," she yelled, emerging from her hiding place, "come see what I've found."

The weather had turned unseasonably warm but nobody had thought to turn off the mansion's central heating. Uncle's bedroom was like a sauna The five girls stripped to their cotton underpants and undershirts and settled in a circle on Uncle's great bed, and Revolucion taught them a new game she had heard about in Havana. First she removed the make-believe bullets until only one was left in the revolver. Looking up, she recited from memory a passage from Uncle's favorite book. '"I'll be judge, I'll be jury' said cunning old Fury. 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."' Then she spun the cylinder and, closing her eyes, inserted the tip of the long barrel between her thin lips. Holding the revolver with both hands she pushed against the trigger with her thumb. There was an audible click as the hammer came down on an empty chamber. Smiling innocently, she passed the handgun to the Kazakh niece on her right. When the girl seemed uncertain about what exactly she was expected to do, Revolucion guided her—she spun the cylinder and inserted the barrel in the girl's mouth and showed her how to trip the trigger with her thumb. Once again there was a loud click.

The Chechen, who was next in the circle, shook her head. "Oh, dear, I really don't wish to play this game," she announced.

"But you must," Revolucion insisted. "Once a game's begun there can be no turning back. It's like Alice and her friends, don't you see? Everybody shall win and all shall have prizes."

"I don't know," the Chechen said uncertainly.

"Play, play," pleaded the others in chorus. The Chechen girl picked up the gun reluctantly. She spun the cylinder and, pouting to better suck on the barrel, inserted the tip ever so slightly into her mouth.

"Do go ahead and play, for it's only a game," Revolucion said impatiently. "Play, play," the others taunted when she still hesitated. Screwing up her eyes, the Chechen sighed and tripped the trigger with a jerk of her thumb.

There was a deafening report as the back of her skull exploded, spattering the girls and the wall behind the bed with blood and flecks of bone and brain.

Uncle found the body of the Chechen when he returned from Moscow that evening. He was distressed for the longest time, and calmed down only after men in white coveralls enshrouded the dead girl in the blood-drenched sheets and took her away. The nieces, beside themselves with fright, were all made to bathe while Uncle himself sponged the wall behind the bed clean of blood and brain tissue. Revolucion was given a scolding about the perils of playing with firearms and sent off without supper, and was not permitted to participate in the hugging and fondling that always followed the nightly reading from the worn pages of Uncle's now blood-speckled bedside book.

The next afternoon a new child appeared at the doorway of Uncle's suite at Apatov Mansion. Her name turned out to be Axinya. She came from the city of Nizhnevartovska on the Ob River, and was wearing gold lame tights and a silver tank top.

Moving like phantoms through the pre-dawn stillness, the seven members of the hit team, dressed in identical black trousers and turtleneck sweaters and sneakers, assaulted the house in Oak Park near Chicago. Three of the attackers cut the telephone lines and the electricity cables, then came over the high brick wall with shards of glass cemented into the top, dropped lightly down onto the grass and broke into the gatehouse. Using aerosol cans filled with an experimental Soviet nerve gas, they subdued the three bodyguards sleeping on Army cots before they could raise an alarm. Two other attackers cut the glass out of a basement window and, slipping through the frame, landed in what had once been the coal bin before the house was switched over to oil. Making their way to the small service apartment at the back of the basement, they bound and gagged the Korean couple in their beds. The leader of the hit team and another attacker scrambled up a trellis to a second-floor terrace, jimmied open French doors with a short crowbar that had been ground down to a thin wedge at the end, then padded through a room filled with round tables and wicker chairs to the hallway. The bodyguard on night duty had nodded off in an easy chair. He was neutralized with nerve gas and lowered soundlessly to the parquet floor. Gripping their Czech 7.65 pistols fitted with silencers, the two invaders pushed through a door into a large bedroom that reeked from the cigar butts heaped in a glass ashtray on a night table. Startled out of a sound sleep, a short, balding man wearing striped pajamas sat upright in bed to find himself pinned in the beams of two flashlights.

"What duh fuck—"

A young woman with long dyed hair and heavy breasts slid naked from the sheets and cowered in a corner, shielding her body with the hem of the window curtain. One of the invaders nodded toward the bathroom door. The woman, only too glad to escape, darted across the room and locked herself in the bathroom.

From the bed the man croaked, "Who duh fuck sent you?"

The hit team leader produced lengths of nylon cord and began tying up the man's wrists and ankles to the four bedposts. The second attacker kept flashlight and pistol trained on the man's face.

"Holy shit, you're makin' uh big fuckin' mistake. You know who I am? Fuck, dis can't be happenin' to me." The last length of nylon was slipped over his left ankle and pulled tight against a bedpost. The man in pajamas, spread-eagled on the bed, began to panic.

"Wait, wait, listen up, whatever, whoever's payin' you pays you, I'll pay you double. I swear to Christ. Double! Triple, even. Sure, triple." He twisted his head toward the door. "Charlie, where duh fuck are you?" He turned back to his captors. "Why not triple? Do not laugh uh gift horse in duh mouth. You need to be smart, dis is uh opportunity to make big bucks. Jesus Christ, don't just stand there lookin' at me like dat, say something."

The hit team leader removed a pillow from the bed. "Hubiese sido mejor para ustedes de no haber nacido nunca, " he murmured.

"Oh, Jesus, I don't know Spanish. Why duh fuck are you talkin' Spanish?"

"I'm talking Cuban," the leader told the man spread-eagled on the bed. "I am telling you: It will be good for you if you had not been born."

"Holy Mother of God, I'm ain't goin' to croak. I won't do it. I refuse." The hit team leader slowly lowered the pillow over the victim's face. Wrenching his head from side to side, pulling on the bindings until the nylon cord bit into his wrists, the short balding man spit out half-stifled phrases, "...please don't... beggin' you... love of God... please, oh, please... mercy on... I'm on my fuckin' knees... I'm pleadin' with you..."

The other attacker pressed the tip of the silencer attached to his Czech pistol deep into the pillow and shot seven bullets through it into the man's face.

The self-propelled garbage scow that normally serviced ships anchored off North Miami Beach cut across Dumfoundling Bay after midnight. The sea was flat, the offshore breeze barely able to stir the worn company pennant flying from a halyard on the mast. Astern of the scow headlights flickered playfully along the low Florida coastline. Overhead, a gibbous moon burned through the haze, churning up flecks of silver in the vessel's wake. In the well of the scow, a tall, silver-haired man with a mournful face stood ankle-deep in garbage, his legs spread for balance. Four men wearing black trousers, turtleneck sweaters and rubber boots kept Czech pistols trained on him. The silver-haired man took off his blazer and, folding it inside out, set it down on the garbage. Then he undid his tie and removed a pair of silver cufflinks and set them on the blazer. Gripping the side of the scow, he kicked off one alligator loafer and then the other, then pulled off his socks and the garters that kept them up on his calves. He undid the silver buckle on his belt and the buttons on his fly, dropped his trousers to his ankles and gingerly stepped out of them, trying to avoid placing his bare feet in the more revolting garbage. He unbuttoned his shirt and added it to the pile of clothing. He removed the watch on his wrist and the diamond ring on his pinkie and tossed them overboard. Then he looked up at the leader of the hit team, who was watching from the open pilot house.

The leader gestured with a finger toward the man's white skivvy shorts. Without a word the silver-haired man slipped them off and folded them onto the pile. He straightened and stood there, stark naked and hugging his hairy chest because of the chill.

"Awright, just tell me who wants me whacked," the naked man called up to the pilot house.

"Hubiese sido mejor para ustedes de no haber nacido nunca, " the hit team leader shouted back.

The naked man, who spoke Spanish, shook his head in disgust. "Whoever, you tell him for me to go fuck himself," he said.

The other men moved in to attach his wrists and ankles with telephone line, which they tightened with pliers until the wire cut into the skin, drawing blood. The naked man didn't utter a word as he was lifted into an empty oil drum and forced down until he was seated in it with his knees jammed up against his chin. The top of the barrel was screwed on and locked in place with several blows from a sledgehammer. The four men in turtleneck sweaters wrestled the barrel up onto the shelf that ran from stem to stern above the garbage well. A length of heavy anchor chain was wrapped around the barrel and secured with thick wire. The team leader nodded. The four men rolled the barrel to the edge of the scow. Just before it was pushed overboard a hollow voice could be heard crying out, "The fucker should go fuck himself."

The barrel, with the anchor chain around it, hit the water and floated for a moment before it began to sink with excruciating slowness into the sea.

2

WASHINGTON, DC, SUNDAY, MAY 12, 1974

THE ANNUAL SOVIET DIVISION (THE ANACHRONISTIC APPELLATION "Russia" finally had been dropped from the nomenclature) BYOB barbecue on the back lawn of Leo Kritzky's newly purchased Georgetown house had been called on account of rain and the party had moved indoors, sprawling across the kitchen and dining room into the living room, finally spilling down into the basement rumpus room when a handful of the younger officers showed up with their wives or girlfriends. Leo, the current division chief, and his wife, Adelle, meandered through the rooms distributing hot dogs to the troops. Ebby, in his second year as DD/0, was pushing through knots of people to hand out fresh bottles of Beaujolais when he noticed his son, Manny, arguing in a corner with Elizabet's daughter, Nellie.

The two hadn't seen each other in nineteen months. Fresh out of Harvard Law, Nellie, now a bewitching twenty-three-year-old with a willowy figure and her mother's dark impatient eyes dancing under a mop of dirty-blonde hair, had gone to work for an insurance firm in Hong Kong and only just come back for job interviews in Washington. Manny, a reserved, slightly stooped young man with a solemn mien, had been recruited into the Company soon after he was graduated from Yale with honors in Central Asian studies; he was fluent in Russian, could converse with an Afghan in Pashto and haggle in pidgin Tajik in a souk.

"Vietnam is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," Manny, now twenty-eight and a junior officer in Leo's Soviet Division, was saying.

"You're forgetting about the goddamn dominoes," Nellie shot back. She popped a cigarette into her mouth and, knowing Manny didn't smoke, grabbed the elbow of a passing young man. "Do you have fire?" He was only too happy to produce a lighter. She rested a hand lightly on his wrist and pulled the flame to the tip of the cigarette. "So, thanks," she said, dismissing him and turning back to Manny. "If Vietnam falls, believe me, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand won't be far behind. Hellfire, all of Southeast Asia will go Communist, leaving Japan out on a limb, leaving American interests in Asia in a limbo. It doesn't take much political savvy to understand that we need to draw the line somewhere."

"You sound like Joe Alsop," Manny remarked. "You miss the same point he misses—the war in Vietnam is a political problem that requires a political solution, not a military solution."

Nellie decided to tack toward the port she hoped to dock in. "I may sound like Joe Alsop but I don't look like Joe Alsop," she observed sweetly.

Manny flashed a tight grin; somehow Nellie always managed to get under his skin. "Nellie, what happened between us..." Manny looked around nervously, then lowered his voice. "What I'm trying to say is that we're practically brother and sister."

Nellie tucked her arm under Manny's elbow and pushed her breast lightly into his arm. "So like the Bible tells us, incest is best, Manny."

"Be serious, for once."

"Don't be misled by the smile—I'm always serious. Look, if God had been dead set against incest he would have started things off with two couples in two gardens. Which leads me to suspect he wasn't convinced incest was all that bad. So why don't we give it the old college try? Our one-night stand lasted one month. If we shoot for a one-month stand, who knows? It might last a year."

Squirming uncomfortably, Manny tried to pass the idea off as a joke. "It's out of the question, Nellie. I'm allergic to cigarettes. I don't see myself dating someone who smokes."

Nellie tightened her grip on his elbow. "If you loved me even a teensy bit you'd smoke, too. What do you say we take in the new Mel Brooks flick tonight. Young Frankenstein sounds like it ought to be required viewing for CIA spooks."

"I can't—I have the night watch from eight to eight."

"Want a rain check?"

"I don't understand you, Nellie. You walk into a room, men—hell, women, too—stop in mid-sentence to follow you with their eyes. Someone lights your cigarette, next thing you know he's head over heels in love with you. Why me?"

Nellie contemplated Manny for a moment. "Believe me, I ask myself the same question. Maybe it's because of the one-night stand that stretched into a month. There was something... different about it."

Manny raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement. "You scare the shit out of me, Nellie."

"If its any consolation I scare the shit out of me, too. So what about that rain check?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Tuesday?"

"Tuesday."

In the narrow pantry next to the kitchen Jack's gangly fourteen-year-old son, Anthony, finally managed to buttonhole his godfather, Leo Kritzky. "Are you following the Judiciary Committee's hearings?" the boy asked.

"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to," Leo said.

"You think they'll actually impeach Nixon?"

"It's beginning to look like a possibility. Especially if the Supreme Court rules against the President on the tapes."

"Explain me something, Leo." Anthony shook a shock of flaming-red hair out of his eyes. "Why would Nixon be dumb enough to record all his conversations in the Oval Office, including the ones that show he was involved in the Watergate business?"

Leo shrugged a shoulder. "Has to do with his personality, I suppose. Nixon feels the Eastern establishment hates him. He tends to pull up the drawbridges and hunker down in the White House, agonizing about his enemies, real or imagined. The tapes may have been his way of agonizing for posterity."

"Have you actually met Nixon, Leo?"

"Several times. I was called in to brief him on specific Soviet Division areas of interest."

"Like what?"

Leo had to smile; he was extremely fond of his godson and had a sneaking admiration for his lively curiosity even when the questions were off-base. "You ought to know better than to ask me something like that, Anthony."

"I'm not a Russian spy, Chrissakes. You can trust me?"

"I don't think you're a Russian spy. But I'm still not going to tell you things that you don't need to know. That's how we operate in the Company."

"I've pretty much decided to join the Company when I finish college," the boy said. "With both my parents working there, I ought to breeze in."

"First finish high school, buddy. Then get your warm body int0 a good college. Then graduate. After which we'll see about your breezing into the Company."

Jack McAuliffe pushed through the kitchen door looking for more booze. He waved to Anthony in the pantry, grabbed two bottles of Beaujolais by their throats and headed back toward the rumpus room. Jack, who was Ebby's Chief of Operations, still sported his flamboyant Cossack mustache, but his dark hair had begun to thin out on the crown of his head and his once-lanky body had thickened noticeably around the middle. To the younger generation of Company officers he was something of a legend: the man who had defied orders and gone ashore at the Bay of Pigs— and escaped only when the Brigade commander threatened to shoot him if he remained.

"Where were we?" Jack asked as he spilled wine into outstretched tumblers.

"We were on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs," a newcomer to the Soviet Division reminded him.

"That's not anyplace you'd want to go for R and R," Jack quipped. The young officers scraping up chairs around him in the rumpus room laughed appreciatively.

"Would the invasion have succeeded if Kennedy hadn't cut back on the first air strike and called off the second?" an intense young woman inquired.

"Probably not," Jack said thoughtfully. "But Khrushchev might have thought twice about installing missiles in Cuba if he hadn't been convinced Kennedy was chicken-shit."

"Are you saying the Cuban missile crisis was Kennedy's fault?" another officer wanted to know.

Jack swivelled on his stool. "It was Khrushchev's fault for trying to upset the balance of power in the hemisphere by installing missiles in Cuba. It was Kennedy's fault for letting Khrushchev think he might be able to get away with it."

Ebby wandered down to join the impromptu bull session. One of the mid-level officers, a crateologist who specialized in analyzing packages from their shape, size, weight and markings, asked the DD/0 about the CIA's role in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Ebby, sitting on the edge of the pingpong table, explained how he had been sent into Budapest to talk the anti-communist Hungarians out of an uprising, at least until the groundwork for the revolution could be laid. Jack described the day when he and Millie had spotted Ebby coming across the Austrian border with a group of refugees. "Frank Wisner was the DD/0 at the time," he said. "He had tears in his eyes when he realized Ebby had made it out alive."

"What ever happened to Wisner?" someone asked. Jack and Ebby avoided each other's eye. "Hungary broke him," Ebby finally said. "He became moody. The moodiness turned into dark depressions. Eventually things got serious enough for him to check into a private psychiatric hospital near Baltimore, where he was diagnosed for psychotic mania—which is roughly a manic-depressive with dreams of grandeur. The doctors even thought his grand schemes—the idea of rolling back Communism in Eastern Europe—might have been early symptoms of the mania. The Wiz was given shock therapy, which brought an end to a given depression but couldn't prevent a new one. By the time he retired—"

"That was back in 1962," Jack said.

"—he wouldn't eat in the same restaurant twice for fear it had been staked out by the KGB. Then, nine years ago—"

Jack finished the story for Ebby. "In 1965 the Wiz was living on his farm in Maryland. The family had hidden his firearms... one day he found a shotgun"—Jack inhaled through his nostrils—"and he went and killed himself."

"It was the Wiz who recruited me," Ebby told the young officers. "It was the Wiz who gave me a boot in the backside when I lost sight of the goal posts. He was a passionate man with a great intellect and boundless energy. I'm proud to have known him—proud to have fought the Cold War alongside him."

"He's one of America's unsung heroes," Jack agreed. In the early evening the rain let up and the Soviet Division officers and their ladies wandered off to movie theaters. Manny headed back to Langley for the night watch in the Operations Center. Leo and Jack and Ebby broke out some whiskey for a last drink in Leo's den on the second floor of the house. Downstairs, their wives could be heard tidying up. Leo glanced at his two friends. "Who's going to be the first to raise the subject?" he asked.

Ebby said, "You mean Giancana, I suppose."

"Harvey Torriti phoned me up from Santa Fe when he saw the story in the paper," Jack said.

"What did he think?" Ebby asked.

"It sure looks like a mob hit—prying up the manhole to cut the alarm system, the clockwork precision of the break-in, subduing everyone in the house with an unidentified nerve gas, Giancana tied to the bed with a pillow covering his face and seven bullet holes in the pillow."

"I can hear the but coming," Leo said.

"There was a but," Jack said. "It's Rosselli's disappearance. The Sorcerer said it was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence—the two Cosa Nostra dons who were trying to knock off Castro for us getting whacked at the same time."

"He's assuming Rosselli's dead," Ebby noted.

Jack snickered. "Jesus H. Christ, guys like Rosselli don't drop from sight like that. He left a woman's apartment at midnight. Miami police found his car abandoned in a parking lot near the docks in North Miami Beach. The doors were wide open, the key was in the ignition, a Saturday Night Special was in the glove compartment. The Sorcerer said the word on the street was Rosselli'd bought it, too."

"Could be Castro," Ebby remarked.

"Fidel knew the Company was trying to nail his hide to the wall," Leo said. "He knew who our middlemen were."

Ebby said, "If Castro is behind Giancana's murder and Rosselli's disappearance, it raises ominous possibilities—"

One of the two telephones on Leo's desk purred. Leo picked up the receiver. "Kritzky." He reached over and hit the button marked "Scramble," then listened for a moment. "Add it to the President's Book but flag it to say that HUMINT sources are involved so he won't think it came from a cipher breakout." He listened again. "We're flying out of Dulles tonight. Unless World War III starts I'll be out of the loop for two weeks... Thanks, I plan to." Leo rang off. "Vienna Station's got a Russian journalist claiming that India's going to test a ten kiloton atomic device before the month is out."

"That'll put nuclear proliferation on the front burner," Ebby guessed. "We'll get the usual flurry of 'drop whatever you're doing' queries from Kissinger's shop in the White House basement."

"Let's get back to your ominous possibilities," Jack said quietly.

'Remember what Castro is supposed to have said after the Bay of Pigs?" Ebby asked. "Something along the lines of United States leaders should bear in mind that if they were sending terrorists to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves would not be safe."

"I can feel the sand shift under my feet every time we get onto this subject," Leo admitted.

"It's a mystery we'll never get to the bottom of," Jack said.

"Maybe it's better that way," Ebby said. "There's something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie."

Adelle once repeated something Lyndon Johnson told her days after Kennedy was shot in Dallas," Leo said. He stirred the ice cubes in his drink with the blade of a letter opener. "'Kennedy was trying to kill Castro but Castro got him first.'"

"If Johnson had a shred of hard evidence, it would have come out when the Warren Commission investigated the assassination," Ebby said. "I think he was going on gut feelings."

"Warren Commission was a joke," Jack said. "Remember when Harvey Torriti testified at a closed session? He never breathed a word about the Company's Cosa Nostra connections and the various attempts to knock off Castro. He never told them that Oswald had been spotted visiting the Soviet embassy in Mexico City before he killed Kennedy; or that Oswald saw a KGB 13th Department wetwork specialist named Valery Kostikov, who had connections to people close to Castro." Jack had to laugh. "I once asked Harvey how come he never told Warren's people about that stuff. You know what he said? He said he didn't tell them because they didn't ask."

Ebby shook his head uncomfortably. "Assuming Castro got to Giancana and Rosselli, the question is: Did he get to John Kennedy, too?"

"Maybe Fidel'll write his memoirs some day," Leo said. "Maybe he'll tell us the answer then."

Ebby looked at Leo. "Where are you and Adelle going?"

"Changing the subject," Jack accused Ebby.

"We're off to the Loire Valley," Leo said. "We're biking from one chateau to another. You get to eat these fantastic French meals, then you pedal all day to work them off."

"When's the last time you took a holiday?" Ebby asked.

"We spent ten days hiking through Nova Scotia the September before last," Leo said. "What's that? Twenty months ago."

"You've earned a break," Ebby said.

"Tessa and Vanessa going with you?" Jack asked.

"The twins' idea of a vacation is holding the fort while the parents are away," Leo said.

Ebby climbed to his feet and stretched. "I guess we'd better assign a team to the Giancana-Rosselli thing," he told Jack. "Just in case Castro left some fingerprints lying around."

"The absence of fingerprints is a fingerprint," Leo noted.

"You're supposed to be on vacation," Jack said.

Manny settled into the catbird seat in the pit of the spacious Operations Center, kicked off his loafers and hiked his stockinged feet up on a desk crammed with sterile telephones. The night watch, which came his way once every twenty-one days, was not his idea of a sexy way to spend an evening. He would have preferred to take in Young Frankenstein with Nellie. Catching up on operational reports made the first hour or two pass quickly enough but then tedium inevitably set in; to get through the night the dozen or so hands on deck would resort to reading very tattered copies of Cold War spy novels that were stacked in a bookcase near the water cooler.

Tonight looked as if it would be no exception to the rule. First, Manny leafed through the blue-bordered National Intelligence Daily, hot off the basement press and due to be circulated (to a very restricted audience) the following morning. Behind him, technicians from the Office of Security, dressed in pristine white overalls, were inspecting the devices that vibrated the glass panes in the windows to prevent the KGB from eavesdropping on conversations with laser beams. Television sets lined up on a shelf were tuned to the major networks to monitor breaking news stories. Junior officers from various directorates sat around an enormous oval table keeping track of overnight cables pouring in from stations around the world, sorting them according to security classification and dropping the more urgent ones into the duty officer's in-box. Manny glanced at the wall clock—he still had ten and a half hours to go on the twelve-hour shift—and, swallowing a yawn, attacked the pile in the in-box to see if anybody on the seventh floor of Langley needed to be rousted out of bed.

The first batch of cables all looked as if they could wait until people showed up for work the following morning. There was a report from Cairo Station about a shake-up in the Muhabarat, the Egyptian intelligence service, with President Anwar el-Sadat bringing in people known for their personal loyalty to him. Beirut Station had weighed in with still another warning that Lebanon was moving toward the brink of civil war between Islamic fundamentalists and Christian Arabs; Yasir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, firmly implanted in the country's sprawling Palestinian refugee camps, was stockpiling arms and boasting of turning northern Lebanon into a launching pad for raids into Israel. Saigon Station was ringing the gong (as Company argot had it): the situation in Vietnam was unraveling faster than anyone had expected; CIA was working with the Navy to develop plans to evacuate 1,500 American civilians by helicopter if regular Army units from the North broke through South Vietnamese lines and made a dash for the Capitol. Paris Station was predicting that the Gaullist Valery Giscard D'Estaing would defeat the Socialist Francois Mitterand in the run-off round of the election in a week's time. Lisbon Station was concerned that Communists in the leftist military junta that seized power in a coup d'etat the previous month might leak NATO secrets to Moscow.

At ten P.M. the green light over the door to the Operations Center flickered. The armed guard on duty looked through the one-way window, then called out, "Coffee's on." The dozen duty officers and secretaries, delighted to be diverted for even a few minutes, filed through the partly open door to the corridor and returned carrying doughnuts and cups of steaming coffee. Manny slipped into his shoes and lined up behind the cart. He drew a mugful of coffee and helped himself to a jelly doughnut, then made his way back to the pit. Across the room the young woman at the telephone switchboard pulled off her earphones and announced, "Mr. Ebbitt, sir, I have a call on an open line from a lady asking to speak to the person in charge. She says it's a matter of life or death."

"Put it through on my outside line," Manny said. He picked up the green phone. "Yes?"

The caller's edgy voice came through the earpiece. "There has to be someone in charge at night. I need to talk to him, and fast."

"Could you kindly state your name and your business—" Manny began but the woman cut him off. "For crying out loud, don't pussyfoot around with me. A man's life is hanging on this call. We don't have much time—he has to be back at his embassy by eleven. Pass me over to someone who can make things happen."

Manny sat up in his chair and hit the "record" button on the tape recorder plugged into the phone. "You're speaking to the night duty officer, ma'am."

On the other end of the line the woman took a deep breath. "Okay, here's the deal. My name's Agatha Ept. That's E-P-T, as in inept but without the in. I work for the government Patent Office. A week ago Friday I met this Russian diplomat at a reception at the Smithsonian—they were giving a sneak preview of a show honoring a hundred years of American inventions. The Russian said he was a political attache. He obviously knew a lot about inventions and we got to talking. He asked me if we could meet again and I thought, where's the harm? So we met for lunch last Sunday at one of the restaurants in the Kennedy Center." The woman covered the mouthpiece with her hand and spoke to someone in the room. Manny heard her say, "I'm coming to that part." She came back on the line. "Where was I?

Manny liked the sound of her voice—she was in some sort of bind but she was cool enough. He even caught a hint of humor in her tone, almost as if she were enjoying the situation; enjoying the adventure of phoning up the CIA. "You were having lunch in the Kennedy Center," he said.

"Right. So my Russian acquaintance— "You want to give me his name?"

"Do you want to?"

"He specifically asked me not to do that over the phone. So we talked about this and that and then we each went our merry ways. Then tonight, out of the blue, it was around eight-thirty, I got a buzz on the intercom. Lo and behold, there he was! He'd found my address, you see, though I don't really know how since my phone is unlisted. He was in the lobby downstairs. He begged me to let him come up. He said it was a matter of life or death which, given his situation, I suppose isn't an exaggeration. I let him in and up he came. Well, the long and the short of it is he wants political asylum. He said Russians didn't get to meet many Americans. He said I was the only person he could turn to. He asked me to get in touch with the CIA on his behalf—he wants to stay in America, in return for which he's ready to give information."

"What sort of information?"

Ept could be heard repeating the question to the Russian. "He wants to know what sort of information you can give him."

Manny could hear a man with a thick accent whispering urgently behind her. The woman said, "He says he has a lot of secrets to offer. Okay, what do I do now?"

Manny said, "What you do now is you give me your phone number and your address. Then you sit tight. You brew up a pot of coffee, you make small talk until I get there. Okay?"

"It has to be okay. I mean, it's not as if I have a wide range of options to choose from, is it?"

Manny scratched her name and address on a pad, then read it back to her to confirm them. Agatha wanted to know his name. He told her she could call him Manny. She laughed and said she would have preferred his real name but would settle for Manny. She asked him what his birth sign was and when he told her he was a Capricorn, she breathed an audible sigh of relief. The Russian in her apartment was a Virgo, she said. She herself was a Taurus with Capricorn rising, which meant the three of them were earth signs and would get along real fine. Manny was in luck, she added: Jupiter just happened to be in Taurus and was about to form a sextile with Venus in Virgo, which meant that any project they undertook together in the next ten days was bound to work out. Manny told her, "I like your style, Agatha. Hang in there."

He cut the connection and bellowed out, "Marv, I want two cars and six men from the Office of Security, armed and wearing civilian clothes, waiting in the garage in ten minutes. Waldo, get me a read-out on a female American name of Ept, I'm spelling that E-P-T, first name, Agatha, she works for the US Patent Office." He reached for the red phone and the clipboard filled with unlisted numbers that even the phone company couldn't locate and dialed one of them. After four rings, the DD/O's Chief of Operations, Jack McAuliffe, came on the line. "Mr. McAuliffe, this is Manny Ebbitt, the night duty officer in the Operations Center—"

"What's with the Mr. McAuliffe, Manny?"

"I'm calling on official business, Jack, so I thought—"

"You thought wrong. What's up?"

"Looks as if we've got a walk-in." He explained about the call from the American woman who said she worked for the patent office; about the Russian attache asking for political asylum in exchange for unspecified information. Waldo came across the room on the run and shoved a paper under Manny's eyes. "I'm getting a confirmation on the American woman, Jack. Ept, Agatha, forty-two, divorced, an associate researcher at the US Patent Office for the past nine years. Normally I'd check with my division chief but Leo's on a plane heading for Europe. You probably know that. So I decided to check in with you."

Jack, who had seen his first defector in a Berlin safe house over a movie theater a lifetime ago and had personally handled half a dozen since, was all business. "All right. I'll authorize you to talk to the Russian. Make sure he's not some journalist playing footsie with the Company. If he's really Russian, if he's really a diplomat, if he really has access to secrets, string him along. See if you can get an idea of what he has to offer. See what he wants in return. Don't commit yourself. Don't commit the Company. Bear in mind that if he is the genuine article, the optimum solution, from our point of view, is to talk him into remaining as an agent in place inside the Soviet embassy, at least until his tour of duty expires. Bear in mind, too, that even if he looks like the genuine article he could still be a dispatched agent sent to feed us malarkey. If you're satisfied, instruct him to phone the Ept woman at midweek. Since all Russian diplomats work for the KGB, directly or indirectly, he could claim he's having an affair with this woman from the patent office, or trying to, in order to get hold of American patents. We could eventually supply him with some. The Russians who look over everyone's shoulder at the embassy ought to swallow that."

Marv came back into the Operations Center and gestured with two fingers to indicate that the cars were waiting in the basement. "Okay. I'm on my way," Manny said.

"You're taking security with you?"

"Two cars. Six people."

"Spread them around to make sure you're not walking into a nest of vipers. Take one man inside with you just in case. Tape the conversation with the Russian if he lets you. Call me as soon as you come out. I'll alert your father and counterintelligence. Angleton will want to be brought in on this. We'll meet in the DD/O's office first thing tomorrow to see if we want to pursue the matter."

Manny waved for Waldo to take over the catbird seat, grabbed his sports jacket off the back of a chair and a small battery-powered tape recorder from a shelf and headed for the door.

For once, the long night watch had turned out to be more intriguing than one of those Cold War spy novels.

Agatha Ept lived in a no-frills six-story apartment house constructed, according to the date over the door, in 1946, a time when returning GIs were flooding into the Washington area after the war. Located in the heart of a lower-middle-class neighborhood outside the Beltway a stone's throw from Rockville, with ugly fire escapes clinging like limpets to its brick sides, the building was saved from falling into the category of a flophouse by a conspicuous neatness. There were trimmed hedges on either side of a heavy glass outer door leading to a straightforward well-lit vestibule, leading to a heavy glass inner door that could only be opened if you had a key or someone in the building buzzed you through. Five of Manny's shadows from the Office of Security, checking with each other on small walkie-talkies, had quietly spread out around the building, covering the front and back entrances, the underground garage and the poorly lit bushy areas under the two fire escapes. The sixth shadow hovered behind Manny as he pushed the chrome button next to the name "Ept, A."

Almost instantly a woman's voice burst over the intercom. "Who's there?" she demanded.

"It's the person you spoke to earlier this evening," Manny replied.

"Marty?"

Manny realized he was dealing with a smart cookie. "Not Marty. Manny."

'What's your birth sign, Manny?"

The shadow from Security tapped a forefinger against his forehead to suggest that the woman was off her rocker. Manny said, "I'm a nonpracticing Capricorn."

"You don't know what you're missing out on. I'm on the fifth floor, second door to your right when you get off the elevator."

The lock in the glass door buzzed. Manny and his shadow pushed through into the building. Agatha, standing at the door of her apartment when they emerged from the elevator, turned out to be a tall, reedy woman with bright eyes and delicate features. When she flashed a nervous smile she looked as if she had more than her share of teeth. "Which one of you is the nonpracticing Capricorn? And who the hell is the one who isn't?" she wanted to know.

"I'm Manny, he's my security blanket," Manny explained. "He can't come in," Agatha declared categorically. "My Russian said he'll talk to you and no one else."

"Let me take a quick look around," the security man said. "If everything looks kosher I'll wait out here."

"Do I have a choice?" Agatha asked Manny. He screwed up his face. "All right. Just a quick look."

Agatha let the two men in and locked the door behind them with the safety chain. The security man ignored the Russian, who was watching from the kitchenette, and proceeded to throw open doors and run his hand under the tops of tables and along the arms of chairs. He disappeared into the bedroom, then came out and nodded at Manny. "I'll be in the hallway if you need me," he said.

Manny walked over to the political attache and offered his hand. "My name is—" he started to say in Russian.

The Russian gripped it firmly and answered in Russian. "It's you, the Manny from the telephone conversation. I am Sergei Semyonovich Kukushkin."

Manny set the portable recorder down on a coffee table and started to open the leather flap. "What are you doing with the machine?" the Russian demanded.

"I'd like to record the conversation."

The Russian shook his head emphatically; his long, vaguely blond hair. already disheveled, flew off in all directions. "Nyet, nyet. If you please, I am not wanting that."

Manny looked at Agatha. "Would you mind?" he asked, nodding toward the bedroom door.

"I'd mind if I thought someone would notice." She smiled encouragingly at the Russian and disappeared into the bedroom.

Kukushkin snatched a glass filled with an orange liquid from the kitchenette counter. "Juice of carrot," he said, holding it up. "You want some?"

Manny shook his head. "I was hoping it might be whiskey."

The Russian said unhappily, "The lady is vegetarian."

Manny motioned him toward a couch and settled into a chair facing him. He decided to see how well Kukushkin spoke English. "Where do the KGB watchdogs at the Soviet embassy think you are right now?"

Kukushkin looked confused. "What means watchdog."

"Your security people? Your SK?"

"Ahhh. Watchdogs. I sign out going to movie theater."

"What film are you supposed to be seeing?"

" Young Frankenstein."

"What time does it finish?"

"Ten-forty. Bus takes me back to embassy by eleven, eleven-fifteen."

Manny looked at his wristwatch. "That gives us forty minutes if we drop you at a bus stop near the theater. Do you know the plot of Young Frankenstein?"

"I know enough—I read criticism of film in newspaper."

Manny studied the Russian. He was forty-five, give or take a few years, of medium height, handsome in a rough way with the heavy shoulders and thick body of a wrestler. His gaze was straightforward and unwavering. The only outward sign of uneasiness was his habit of flicking the nail of his middle finger back and forth against his thumbnail.

Manny had the queasy feeling that he was dealing with a professional. He switched back to Russian. "Agatha said you were a political attache..."

Kukushkin produced a sour grin. "Political attache is my diplomatic cover. My real name is Klimov. Sergei Klimov. I have temporary rank of captain in KGB." The Russian's fingernails clicked like a metronome. "To speak openly, I was expecting the meeting to be with someone more senior. You are too young. If I need brain surgery I would not want a young surgeon." He added in English, "Same reasonment is holding true for spies."

"I'm senior enough to deal with this, I promise you. You want to give me a brief rundown on your background?"

Kukushkin nodded reluctantly. "My pedagogic background is study of capitalist political model. Before assignment in Washington I was attached to Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate, which is responsible for running KGB officers and agents operating abroad under deep cover. During that assignment many many cables passed through my hands. Arrived Washington fourteen months ago. Principal job in Washington is analyzing relationship between your White House and the two branches of your Congress. Seven months remain on normal tour, though sometimes it is stretching to two and a half, three years if SK agree."

"You want to come over to our side?" Manny said carefully.

"I want political asylum in America." The Russian looked as if he were about to throw up. "For me," Kukushkin added. "For my wife. For mv seven-years daughter."

"Why?"

"I do not understand your why."

"What made you decide to come over?"

"Look, I understand motive is important so you can make judgment if I am genuine or false defector, but we are not having much time for this tonight. I will say you that one of ironies of Cold War is that KGB operatives, especially those who have been posted to the West, have a better understanding of the capitalist world's strengths and weaknesses than average Russian. I am living proof of this. I am disillusioned with corruption, with inefficiency of our Soviet Socialist model. I believe in Mother Russia, not Soviet Russia." Kukushkin leaned forward and spoke with stifled passion. "I will say you honestly there exists another reason. My wife is heart sick—she was taking medicine before many years. She is treated by Russian doctor at embassy. I want to have her American doctor and American medicine."

"How long have you been disillusioned?"

One of Kukushkin's large hands floated off his lap, palms up. "Disillusion is something not growing like mushroom over one night. Many, many years it grows until your brain and your heart are poisoned."

"Were you disillusioned when you arrived in Washington fourteen months ago? Was your wife in need of medical help when you came here?"

The Russian nodded warily; he wasn't sure where this line of questioning was leading.

Manny pushed himself to the edge of the chair. "Why didn't you come over fourteen months ago?"

Kukushkin's gaze wavered from Manny's for the first time. "Ne vozmozhno!" he said, lowering his voice and uttering the words with great intensity.

Manny persisted. "Why was it impossible?"

His nails clicking into the silence, the Russian considered the question for a moment. "KGB rezident in Washington, Borisov, is schoolmate front Lomonosov University—for two years we roomed together. Rezident is very open with me, telling me many things when we drink whiskey in his office late at night. From him I know that KGB has what you call a mole inside your CIA with code name SASHA. This SASHA, he is having very important position—" one of Kukushkin's thick hands measured off rungs on a ladder— "somewhere high up in your organization. Impossible to come over when SASHA in Washington—he would be one of first in CIA to find out, he would alarm our SK people. The Russian trying to come over, his family"— he slashed a forefinger across his throat—"kaput."

Assuming Kukushkin was the real McCoy, Manny knew that he had gotten his hands on a gold nugget. "Are you saying that SASHA is not in Washington?"

The Russian nodded grimly. "Borisov is telling me that both SASHA and his cutout are out of the city."

Manny asked quietly, "Can you identify SASHA?"

Kukushkin's fingernails fell silent. "I do not think even rezident knows his identity, only that he exists. But you already know that SASHA is not in Washington. I am able provide other particulars... I am able to say you another time when he is not in Washington. I am able to say you the first initial of his family name, along with one other important biographical detail. In return for political asylum for me, for my family, I am ready to help you narrow list of suspects."

"You two know each other?" the DCI, Bill Colby, asked as the Company's legendary chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, carefully folded his brittle body into a chair at the head of the table.

"We've never met," Angleton murmured.

Jack McAuliffe did the honors. "This is Manny Ebbitt—one of the rising stars in the Soviet Division."

"It's a honor to meet you, Mr. Angleton," Manny volunteered.

Angleton peered down the table at Manny, fixing his brooding Mexican eyes on him. "So you're Elliott's boy," he said.

From his place alongside Colby, Ebby remarked testily, "Yes, he is."

"Everyone has a cross to bear," Jack quipped, hoping to lighten the atmosphere. Nobody smiled.

Suppressing a chain-smokers hacking cough, Angleton bent his head and lit a cigarette from the stump of another that had burned down to his dehydrated lips. "I'd like to get started," he said impatiently. "I'm supposed t0 be briefing the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board at eleven."

Manny was more than a little intimidated to be in the presence of the institutional legend who went by the in-house code name of Mother. For more than twenty years Angleton had kept his lonely vigil, turning over stones and looking for worms of treason; he traced every operational failure to the presence of a Soviet mole inside the Company, every operational success to Starik's diabolical efforts to advance the mole's career. In Manny's Soviet Division, people spoke about Mother in hushed tones. Someone would brag of having caught a glimpse of him in a corridor, a drawn, hunched specter prowling Langley with his hands clasped behind his back and a faraway gleam in his eyes. Scuttlebutt had it that Angleton was past his prime, living on borrowed time, incapable after a four-martini lunch of working his way through the mountain of cables and files heaped on his desk. At regular topsider staff meetings on the seventh floor of what Company hands now called the "Campus," Angleton was said to rant about his latest theory. One week he would claim that the Sino-Soviet split and the seeming independence of Dubcek in Czechoslovakia or Ceaucescu in Rumania or Tito in Yugoslavia were the dirty work of KGB disinformation specialists trying to lure the West into thinking the Soviet monolith was breaking up. Another time he would ramble on about how his nemesis, Philby, who fled to Moscow in the early 1960s after finally having been exposed as a Soviet spy, had recast the posture and character of the Soviet intelligence service. Under Philby's stewardship, Angleton would claim, it had become more subtle; more stiletto than blunderbuss. Angleton went so far as to see Philby's handiwork when KGB operatives traded in their easy-to-spot baggy trousers and wide cuffs for tailored suits. Inside the Company, there were caustic complaints that Angleton's paranoid hunt for moles had paralyzed Soviet ops; that he'd hurt the Company more than any Soviet mole could. Angleton still had his defenders, though their ranks seemed to thin out with each passing year. Every intelligence organization needed a resident paranoid, they would argue; Angleton was the Company's. And the fact that he hadn't uncovered a single Soviet mole inside the CIA didn't mean there wasn't one.

Colby sat back and crossed his legs and regarded Manny over his eyeglasses. "Why don't you begin," he said.

"Yes, sir. I received the phone call from the woman named Ept, Agatha at approximately nine thirty-two—"

"Nine thirty would be approximately," Angleton remarked. "Nine thirty-two is precisely."

Manny looked up from his notes, the faintest of smiles pasted on his lips. "I take your point, sir. The Ept woman claimed to work for the US Patent Office, a fact I was able to verify—"

"You were able to verify that someone named Ept, Agatha, was on the Patent Office payroll," Angleton interjected. "You did not verify, nor, as far as I know, have you verified, that the woman claiming to be Ept, Agatha, was in fact the same Ept, Agatha employed by the US Patent Office."

Ebby kept his mouth shut. Colby glanced at Angleton. "You're nitpicking, Jim. Why don't we let him finish."

"Nitpicking is what I do for a living, Bill," Angleton said.

It was clear there was no love lost between the two men, and for good reason. Soon after he became DCI in 1973 Colby had terminated one of Angleton's pet operations, code named HT/LINGUAL, which had his counterintelligence people reading all first-class mail to and from the Soviet Union that passed through New York; Colby had argued that the CIA's charter prohibited operations inside the continental United States. Adding injury to insult, the Director had whittled away at Angleton's empire, reducing his staff from three hundred to eighty. Now, the Director eyed his counterintelligence chief. "Do me a favor, Jim," he told him. "Nitpick on your own time and in your own shop." Colby turned back to Manny and nodded.

"A Russian political attache that Ept had met at a Smithsonian reception weeks before had turned up at her door."

Angleton closed his eyes and puffed on the cigarette. "Ept has an unlisted phone. How did the Russian know where she lived?"

Jack caught Ebby's eye and signalled with a palm for him to simmer down.

Manny looked directly at Angleton. "Ept told me on the phone that she had met the Russian for lunch at the Kennedy Center a week ago Sunday. When I asked him directly how he managed to turn up at her door, given that her phone was unlisted, he claimed that he knew her address because he had followed her home after the lunch."

Ebby said coldly, "That explains that."

Manny wondered if all topside meetings were this nerve racking. "Jack here—Mr. McAuliffe—gave me verbal authorization to proceed with the initial meeting. I interviewed the Russian, whom I assigned the random cryptonym Æ-slant-PINNACLE, in the living room of Ept's apartment near Rockville. Ept was not present during the meeting. The Russian specifically asked me not to record the conversation."

Angleton looked up. "SOP for dispatched agents. The people who sent him over don't want me nitpicking before you swallow the bait."

"For Christ's sake, Jim, Manny went by the book," Ebby blurted out. "A genuine defector is putting his life on the line. He's bound to be skittish. It's SOP to go along with his wishes as long as security isn't compromised."

"Thank you for this illuminating instruction on how to handle defectors," Angleton said in a flat voice.

Colby said grimly, "Manny, I'd take it as a favor if you would go on with your presentation."

"Yes, sir. Æ/PINNACLE identified himself as a Soviet political attache named Kukushkin, Sergei Semyonovich, on assignment in Washington to monitor the relationship between the White House and Congress. He quicklv got around to telling me that he was really a temporary captain in the KGB named Klimov, Sergei"—Manny turned to another page of his notes— "who, in addition to his political attache duties, works on general assignment for the rezidentura. I consulted the 201 in Central Registry early this morning. We have a file on a Klimov, Sergei, born 1927, which would make him forty-seven, which matches Kukushkin's appearance. According to our 201, Klimov, Sergei, successfully completed a four-year course at Lomonosov University in Moscow; he passed the Marxist-Leninism boilerplate course with a three out of possible five and graduated with honors in comparative political models. His wrote his senior thesis on the American republican model and the system of checks and balances between the various branches of government. At the end of the four-year course, graduates routinely appear before selection committee composed of representatives from various departments and ministries—Foreign Affairs, Trade, the Trade Unions, TASS, KGB, GRU, what have you. Klimov must have been selected by the KGB, because the next time we see him he's working for the First Chief Directorate, analyzing American signal intercepts that deal with the political situation, as well as political articles in the American press and magazines. At some point during this tour he married the daughter of an Artillery colonel-general who was area commander of intercontinental ballistic missiles bases in Kazakhstan. Curiously, there is no mention in our 201 of the birth of a daughter, though if she is seven, as Æ/PINNACLE told me, she would have been born around this time. Klimov was next posted to Directorate S—which, as you know, runs Soviet illegals abroad—after which we lose track of him. The man claiming to be Klimov told me he had worked for Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate. If we decide to go back at him we can prepare questions to confirm this—ask him to pick out from lists the names of classmates at Lomonosov University, as well as colleagues and superiors who worked with him in Directorate S."

Angleton sat there slowly shaking his head.

Colby asked, "What's wrong now, Jim?"

"If your Kukushkin is a genuine defector, which is extremely unlikely, he will know the answers to these questions. If he is a dispatched agent he will also know the answers. The fact that he knows the answers tells us nothing."

Jack teased his Cossack mustache with a forefinger. "Jim's right, of course," he observed. He turned to Manny. "What reason did Kukushkin/Klimov give for wanting to cross over?"

"There is the usual disillusionment with the Communist system—" Manny began.

Angleton snorted. "Sounds like someone sent over from central casting."

"There's more," Manny insisted. "He claimed that his wife suffers from a heart ailment—that she's had it for years. He wants to have her treated by American doctors. This is a detail that can be verified. She won't be able to fake a heart disorder."

Colby said, "The ultimate test will be the information he gives us."

Angleton was still shaking his head. "A dispatched agent will always give us a certain amount of true information in order to convince us he is not a dispatched agent."

"Let's move on to the get." Colby suggested.

Manny looked at the notes he had scribbled as soon as they had dropped the Russian a block from a downtown bus stop the night before. "I only had enough time with him to scratch the surface," he reminded everyone. "But Æ/PINNACLE gave me to understand that once we'd put in the plumbing for the defection, he'd come over with a briefcase filled with secrets. Here I take Mr. Angleton's point—some or all of these serials could be true even if the defector turns out to be a dispatched agent. All right. I'll start at the base camp and work my way up to the summit." Manny wished his division chief, Leo Kritzky, were sitting in on the session to lend him moral support; Angleton's bloodshot eyes, staring across the table through curlicues of cigarette smoke, were beginning to unnerve him.

"For openers he's offering the order of battle at the Soviet embassy in Washington—we can expect to get from him names, ranks, serial numbers. Plus particulars of local KGB tradecraft—locations of dead drops, for instance, along with the variety of signals, including classified ads in newspapers, indicating that the dead drops have been filled or emptied."

Angleton shrugged his bony shoulders in derision. "Chickenfeed," he said crabbily

"Æ/PINNACLE claimed that Moscow Centre has recently created a Special Disinformation Directorate, designated Department D, to coordinate a global disinformation campaign. He said it was staffed by fifty officers who were area or country specialists with field experience. He said he knew of the existence of the Disinformation Directorate, which is supposed to be closely held and highly secret, only because he himself had been recruited into its ranks due to his expertise on the American political mode? But Æ/PINNACLE was determined to remain abroad. Since he would've have had to return to Moscow if he was transferred to the Disinformation Directorate, he asked his wife's father to use his considerable influence to have the assignment cancelled."

Manny had finally come up with something that impressed Angleton. The chief of counterintelligence straightened in his chair. "Does your Russian have specifics on the Directorate's product? Did he mention the Sino-Soviet split? Did he talk about Dubcek or Ceaucescu or Tito?"

"We won't know whether Æ/PINNACLE has heard of specific projects associated with Department D until we arrange for additional debriefings," Manny said.

"What else is he offering, Manny?" Jack asked.

"He claims to have information on the current British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, but when I pressed him he became very vague—all he would say was that serials concerning Wilson had passed through the hands of a KGB officer who shared an office with him in Moscow."

"He's playing hard-to-get," Colby commented.

"He's negotiating his retirement package," Ebby said. "If he gives us everything at once he'll lose his leverage."

Manny looked again at his notes. "I'm halfway to the summit. Æ/PINNACLE claims that approximately a year ago he picked up office scuttlebutt that the rezidentura was running a walk-in from the National Security Agency with a habit—the walk-in apparently had a weakness for women and gambling and needed money badly. To avoid unnecessary risks, all of the face-to-face debriefings with the NSA walk-in were organized while he was vacationing abroad. The contacts in Washington were through dead drops. The KGB lieutenant colonel who ran the defector was awarded the Order of the Red Banner in a private embassy ceremony last December. Æ/PINNACLE took this as an indication of how important the NSA defector was. In mid-January—on January sixteenth, to be exact, which was a Wednesday—the KGB resident asked Kukushkin to stand in for this same lieutenant colonel, who had come down with the flu. He was instructed to service a dead drop , in the men's room of the Jefferson Hotel in downtown Washington. Because he was filling in for the lieutenant colonel who had won the Red Banner, Kukushkin concluded that the message he was delivering was intended for the mole inside NSA. The rezident gave Kukushkin an enciphered note rolled up inside the top of a fountain pen and, defying regulations, laughly told him what was in it. Once we know the contents of this note, so Kukushkin claims, we will be able to identify the traitor in the NSA. As the operation was tightly compartmented inside the Soviet rezidentura, AP/PINNACLE never heard anything more about it."

Colby whistled through his teeth. The National Security Agency, which, among other things, eavesdropped on Soviet communications and broke Russian codes, was so secret that few Americans were aware of its existence; an in-house joke held that the initials NSA stood for "No Such Agency." If the KGB actually had an agent inside the NSA it would mean that America's most closely held Cold War secrets were hemorrhaging. If Kukushkin's defection could lead to the unearthing of the NSA mole, it would be a major blow to the KGB.

Angleton sniffed at the air as if he had detected a foul odor. "Timeo Danaos et donna ferentis—I am wary of Greeks bearing gifts."

"I hate to think what you're saving for your last-but-not-least if your next-to-last is a Soviet mole inside the NSA," Jack commented.

"Time to take us up to the summit," Colby told Manny.

Manny caught his father's eye across the table. Ebby nodded once to encourage him; Manny could tell from his expression that the briefing was going well, that his father was pleased at the way he had handled himself. "The summit, Mr. Colby," Manny said. He flipped to the last page of his hand-written notes. "The last item on my list—" Manny stole a look at Angleton, who was preoccupied lighting another cigarette from the old one—"has to do with SASHA."

Angleton's drowsy eyes flicked open.

"Æ/PINNACLE claims that Moscow Centre—not the Washington rezidentura—directly runs an agent in place inside the Company code named SASHA. The mastermind behind this operation is someone known only by the nickname Starik, which means 'old man' in Russian. Word of mouth inside the rezidentura is that this Starik is supposed to be the same person who ran Philby. There is no direct contact between the rezidentura and SASHA—everything passes by a cutout who is living under deep cover in America."

"Pie in the sky," Angleton groused, but it was evident that Manny's story had hit a nerve.

'Kukushkin claims that the KGB rezident, the chief of the embassy's insular section named Kliment Yevgenevich Borisov, is an old chum from Lomonosov University. The two often drink together late at night in the rezident's office. Kukushkin says he decided to defect at this moment in time when he learned, during a casual conversation with the rezident, that both SASHA and his cutout were out of town. He claims that no defection is possible while SASHA is in Washington because he would be one of the first to get wind of it and alert the SK people at the Soviet embassy. Kukushkin says we must move rapidly because the window of opportunity, which is to say the period of time that SASHA will be absent from Washington, is very narrow—two weeks, to be precise. Once we have brought him and his wife and daughter to safety, Æ/PINNACLE is prepared to give us the first initial of SASHA's family name, along with an important biographical detail and another specific period when SASHA was away from Washington. With that information, so he says, we ought to be able to identify him."

Angleton swatted the cigarette smoke away from his eyes. It was an article of faith with him that all Soviet walk-ins worldwide were dispatched agents, since the Soviet mole inside the Company would have warned Moscow Centre the moment he got wind of a defection, and a genuine defector would be eliminated before he could organize the defection. Now he had finally heard a single plausible detail that intrigued him: it was possible for a walk-in to be genuine if SASHA were somehow absent from Washington and therefore couldn't immediately learn about the defection. Angleton's smoker's rasp drifted across the table. "Did your Russian provide details on the cutout?"

"I pressed him, Mr. Angleton. He said only that the cutout who serviced SASHA was away on home leave; the summons back to Russia had been passed on to the cutout by a woman who freelances for the rezidentura and serves as a circuit breaker between the rezidentura and the cutout. Æ/PINNACLE is not sure whether the cutout went away because SASHA was away, or vice versa. As for the biographical details and the date of SASHA's previous absence from the Washington area, all he would say was he came across that information when he was attached to Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow Centre; SASHA's previous absence from Washington corresponded with a trip abroad by the handler known as Starik."

The men around the table were silent for some minutes, digesting Manny's report. Lost in thought, Ebby nodded to himself several times; he had been convinced there was a Soviet mole inside the Company since he was betrayed into the hands of the Hungarian secret police in 1956. Colby climbed to his feet and began circling the table. "Did you set up a second meeting with your Russian friend?" he asked.

Manny said, "No. I assumed I would need authorization to do that.

Ebby said, "How is he going to contact you?"

"I took my cue from something Mr. McAuliffe said when he authorized the initial contact—I told Æ/PINNACLE to telephone Agatha Ept on Thursday evening. I suggested that he tell his SK people that, following a chance meeting at the Smithsonian, he was trying to become her lover in the hope of gaining access to American patents. If she invites him over for dinner, then he'll know we are willing to continue the dialogue. If she gives him the cold shoulder it will mean we don't want to pursue the matter."

Angleton scraped back his chair but remained sitting in it. "Obviously, counterintelligence needs to take over from here," he announced.

Jack bristled. "It's obvious to you but not to me. The Soviet Division has the competence to deal with this."

Settling back into his seat, Colby pulled at an earlobe. "Let the battle for turf begin."

Angleton reached for an ashtray and corkscrewed his cigarette into it. "There's an outside chance that this could be a genuine defection," he said carefully. "But it's equally likely that the KGB—that Starik himself—is dangling some bait in front of our noses."

"Let's take the worst case," Colby said. "Kukushkin is bait. He's offering us some odds and ends about a Disinformation Directorate and God knows what about the British Prime Minister, and some juicy morsels—a mole inside NSA, SASHA inside the CIA. You've always said that a false defector would have to bring over true information to establish his bona fides, to make us swallow the false information. If we play our cards carefully we ought to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff."

"Almost impossible to do," Angleton replied, "without assigning an experienced counterintelligence team. There's a lot at stake here. If Æ/PINNACLE is genuine, we'll need to wade through a maze of serials. If he's a dispatched agent, it means the KGB is going to a great deal of trouble and we'll need to find out why." Angleton, suddenly short of breath, wheezed for a moment. Then he addressed Ebby directly. "Your boy did a good job, I'm not suggesting otherwise, Elliott. He didn't put a foot wrong as far as I can see. But he's too young, too inexperienced, to run with this. Debriefing a defector is an art in itself—it's not only a matter of asking the right questions but of not asking them too soon; questions bring answers and answers bring closure to the process of thinking, and that's not something you want to rush."

Jack said to Colby, "Manny wouldn't be alone, Bill. He'll have the considerable resources of the Soviet Division behind him."

Ebby turned to the DCI. "I'll remove myself from the decision, for obvious reasons."

Jack said, "Well, I won't. If Leo Kritzky were here he'd be saying the same thing as me. The Soviet Division, under the aegis of the DD/0, ought to be handling this. Counterintelligence has a long history of turning away defectors, some of whom—many of whom—could well be genuine."

"If Counterintelligence discourages defections," Angleton retorted hotly, "it's to protect the Company from dispatched agents—"

"All right," Colby said. "Jim, we both know that a familiar face is worth its weight in gold to a would-be defector. And you yourself said that Manny here didn't put a foot wrong." He turned to Ebby. "I want the DD/0 to form a task force to handle this defection. Keep it down to a happy few, which is to say the people in this room and their principal aides and secretaries. All paper is to be stamped NODIS. I don't want the fact that we're dealing with a walk-in to become known outside this small circle. I want the task force's recommendation in my hand within thirteen days, which not incidentally is the time frame that has SASHA away from Washington. Manny, you'll be the point man—you'll meet with Æ/PINNACLE and gain his confidence and bring home the bacon. Jim, you'll represent counterintelligence on the task force. If you have operational qualms that you can't iron out with the DD/0 or his deputy, you can bring them directly to me. Once we've milked the Russian you can file a dissenting opinion with me if you don't reach the same conclusions as the DD/0." Colby shot out a cuff and looked at his watch. "Jim, if you don't shake a leg, you're going to stand up the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board."

"Its all right. Really. Nooooo problem."

"I can tell from your voice it's a problem."

"Hey, it's not as if I can't scare up a date for Young Frankenstein. Afterwards we can meander back to my place, crack a bottle of California red, turn down the lights, put on some Paul Anka. You know from personal experience how one thing has a way of leading to another. Next thing you know we could be into what Erica Jong calls the Zipless Fuck."

"I'm really sorry, Nellie. Something important's come up—"

"With you guys something importants always coming up. That's what my mother says. Elizabet says you have to be stark raving to fall for someone who works for the CIA because you start out a Company widow and it's all downhill from there."

Manny slipped another coin into the slot. "Are you saying you've fallen for someone who works for the Company?"

"I've fallen for the opposite of the Zipless Fuck, which, so far, I've unfortunately for me only experienced with you."

"You put a lot of emphasis on the physical side of a relationship—"

"Yeah, I do, don't I? Pay attention, Manny, because I'm going to fill you in on my theory about lasting relationships. My theory is you need to start someplace and the bedroom is as good a venue as any. So do you or don't you want to hear the good news?"

"You got the job!"

"I did, I did. Oh, Manny, I'm really delirious. I waved my Harvard diploma under their noses and they cracked. The firm's small but it's one of the hottest items in DC. Two ex-senators and a former Cabinet Secretary. And I'm the first woman they've ever hired who wasn't there to take dictation. It'll be a scream—all those three-piece suics and me in my miniskirt!"

"That's fantastic, Nellie. I knew you'd wow them—"

"You want to hear how much they're paying me a month?"

"I don't think so."

Nellie had a sudden thought. "Hey, you don't have a hang-up about dating girls who make more than you, I hope."

"No. My only hang-up is about incest."

Nellie's laughter pealed down the phone line. "I'll admit I'm relieved. A hang-up over money could have been a serious hurdle. So when do you get to see me again?"

"Maybe this weekend. Maybe."

"What's with the maybe?"

"I told you, something important's on a front burner."

"Okay. I suppose there's nothing for me to do but masturbate until then."

"Nellie, you're impossible—"

"You've got it ass-backwards, Manny. What I am is possible."

The Æ/PINNACLE task force set up shop in an empty office down the hall "om the DD/0. The housekeepers swept the room for bugs, then brought 'n a safe with a Btirmah lock, a shredding machine, a burn bag and assorted office furniture. Jack McAuliffe was put in charge, reporting directly to Ebby, the DD/0, who in turn reported directly to the DCI, Bill Colby. Angleton himself (his interest piqued by the would-be defector's mention of SASHA) sat in on the informal meetings, which were held every second day.

With Jack looking over his shoulder, Manny set about putting in the plumbing for the defection that might or might not take place. Agatha Ept, thrilled to let a little excitement into her dreary nine-to-five existence, announced that she was game; sure, she'd be willing to go through the motions of having an illicit affair with a married Russian diplomat if it was in the interests of national security. The superintendent of Ept's apartment building, a retired chief petty officer who had painted the basement spaces battleship gray, went out of his way to be helpful. As a matter of fact, he said, there would be a vacant apartment down the hall from 5D at the end of the month; the homosexual couple living in 5F had signed a lease on a floorthrough in Annadale. Manny knocked on the door of 5F and flashed a laminated card identifying him as a State Department security officer. When he offered to foot the bill for the move if the tenants vacated immediately, the couple jumped at the opportunity. The first night after 5F was free a crew from the Office of Security moved in electronic equipment, along with two army cots and a percolator. Working out of the vacated apartment, they wired every room in Ept's apartment, and rigged the phone and the doorbell so that both rang simultaneously in 5D and 5F. Then they set up a tape recorder and a backup machine, and settled in for the duration.

Back in Langley, Manny took a shot at getting the head of the US Patent Office to give them some recent patent applications that a junior patent officer such as Ept might have access to. He ran into a brick wall and had to pass the matter up the chain of command. Eventually the DD/0 put in a call to Yale classmate who worked as a legislative aide on the Senate Armed Services Committee and explained the problem. Three quarters of an hour later, the head of the Patent Office called to tell Ebby he would be sending over three raw reports on pending patents for relatively unimportant industrial gadgets. Now that he understood what was a stake, he would be delighted to supply more of the same if and when they were needed.

Angleton, meanwhile, produced a six-page, single-spaced typewritten list of questions (with the answers in parentheses) that he wanted Manny to throw at Æ/PINNACLE; the list was designed to determine if the defector Kukushkin was, in fact, the Sergei Klimov on the Central Registry 201 and not someone pretending to be him. The questions ranged from "What was the name and nickname of the person who taught 'Bourgeois Democracy—a Contradiction in Terms' at Lomonosov University? to" "What was the nickname of the fat woman who served tea in the First Chief Directorate's third-floor canteen at Moscow Centre?" Angleton instructed Manny on the seven layers of meaning that could be coaxed out of any given set of facts. Take his list of questions: a genuine defector would not he able to answer all the questions correctly. But then, a dispatched agent who had been coached by a KGB maestro would be careful not to answer the questions correctly. Manny asked: Assuming that Kukushkin answers some of the questions incorrectly, how will we know if he is genuine or a dispatched agent?

From behind a cloudbank of cigarette smoke, Angleton's rasped:

"Welcome to the wilderness of mirrors."

It was Angleton, nursing a persistent migraine that had reduced his eyes to brooding slits, who worked out Manny's modus operandi for the second meeting with Æ/PINNACLE. The first priority would be to establish the defector's bona fides, hence the six-page list of questions. The peculiar situation that the defector found himself in—he and his family had to come over before SASHA returned to Washington—gave the Company, in Angleton's considered opinion, some very strong leverage. Assuming Kukushkin-Klimov passed muster, Manny's second priority would be to talk him into immediately delivering the several serials that would lead them to SASHA. Æ/PINNACLE needed to be informed that, in the best of all possible worlds, a defection would take time to organize. The Russian would be encouraged to deliver the SASHA serials for his own safety, and that of his family; if SASHA remained operational, so Manny was instructed to argue, he would certainly learn of the defection when he returned to Washington and promptly betray Kukushkin to the SK people at the embassy. Angleton pointed out that if the Company could identify and apprehend SASHA on his return to Washington, there was a good possibility that Manny would then be able to talk Æ/PINNACLE into spying in place until the end of his tour of duty at the embassy. This could be achieved through judicious use of carrots (a sizable lump-sum payment when he finally came over, a new identity for himself and his family, first-class medical help for his wife, a high-paying consultancy contract from the Company) and sticks (hinting that he would not be granted political asylum except on Company terms, and thus his wife would not have access to American medical help).

As the meeting was ending Manny raised the possibility that Æ/ PINNACLE might be wired for sound. Angleton's lips twisted into scowl. If Æ/PINNACLE is a genuine defector, he won't be wired," he told Manny. If he's a dispatched agent, he won't be wired so as not to give himself away."

On Thursday evening a very weary Manny was drinking lukewarm coffee in 5F with two men from the Office of Security when the phone rang. One of the men flicked on the tape recorder and tripped a button on a loud speaker. Agatha Ept could be heard picking up the phone in her apartment.

"Hello?" she said, her voice rising to transform the word into a question.

"Hello to you."

Manny nodded at the second security man, who picked up a phone hooked to a permanently open line and said quietly, "He's called—see if you can trace it."

"Oh, it's you," Agatha said with a suggestion of breathlessness; Manny hoped she wouldn't ham it up too much. He wondered if the SK people at the embassy were recording the conversation on their end. "I guess I oughtn't to admit it but I was hoping you'd call," she added.

Æ/PINNACLE seemed relieved. "I am hoping you are hoping such a thing."

Agatha was playing her role—eager, yet fearful of appearing too eager— to the hilt. "I was wondering... I mean, if you're free... What I'm driving at is, well, what the hell, would you like to come for supper tomorrow."

The Russian cleared his throat. "So: I am free tomorrow—I will come happily, of course."

"Do you remember where I live?"

Æ/PINNACLE laughed excitedly; he, too, was playing his role well— but what was his role? "It is not something I am forgetting easily," he said.

"Where are you calling from?" Agatha asked.

"A public phone near the... near where I work."

"They traced the call—he's calling from the Soviet embassy," the security man on the open line told Manny.

"Well, that's settled," Agatha said. "About six-thirty would be fine. I get back from the Patent Office at five-thirty"—she had worked the Patent Office into the conversation as Manny had asked—"which will give me time to make myself presentable."

"You are very presentable," Æ/PINNACLE said.

Agatha caught her breath. "Tomorrow, then?"

"Yes. Tomorrow. Goodbye to you, presentable lady."

"Goodbye, Sergei."

A moment later the phone rang in 5E. Manny snatched it off the hook. "He's coming," Agatha announced excitedly.

"I know. I heard the conversation."

"How'd I do?"

"You were great. You ought to think of getting into the acting business.

Agatha laughed nervously. "To tell the truth I had my heart in my mouth—I was so frightened."

"The thing now, Agatha, is to go about your life as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening. We'll be monitoring your apartment all day to make sure nobody from their side breaks in to plant microphones. If you have any unusual contacts—if anybody calls you whom you don't know—you phone the number I gave you and report it immediately."

"You'll be here when he shows up?"

"I'll be outside your door when he gets off the elevator.

Despite Angleton's assurances that Æ/PINNACLE would not be wired, Manny decided it wouldn't hurt to check. As the Russian emerged from the elevator Manny signalled with a forefinger to his lips for him to remain silent, then held up an index card with the words, written in Russian: "Are you wired for sound?"

"Not wired for sound, Manny," Kukushkin replied in English. He raised his arms and spread his legs. "You may search me if you wish. My rezident very happy when I tell him of this contact. He always ready to boast to Moscow Centre about new sources of information."

Manny gestured for him to lower his arms and follow him. He produced a key, opened the door to 5D and locked it when they were both inside Ept's apartment.

Agatha came across the room. "Hello," she said, shyly offering a hand, which the Russian vigorously shook.

"Hello to you, presentable lady," he said with a smirk.

"Not that it matters," she said, "but today happens to be a propitious time for intercourse between Capricorns and Virgos. Both parties will tend to be wary at first but once they break the ice great things will follow. I'd explain why but judging from the way you're both looking at me it would take more time than you want to invest. So unless I hear dissenting opinion... no one? Then I'll leave you gentlemen to yourselves now." Turning on a heel she disappeared into the bedroom.

Manny motioned Kukushkin to sit on the couch and settled down on a chair facing him. The Russian loosened his tie and grunted something that Manny recognized as a curse in Tajik. "You speak Tajik?" Manny asked in surprise.

"I do not speak it—I curse in it," Kukushkin said. "My grandfather on my father's side was a Tajik. How is it you recognize Tajik?"

I studied Central Asian languages in college." He pulled a thick wad of typed pages from his breast pocket. "Question and answer time, Sergei," he announced.

"I am knowing the rules of this terrible game we are playing. You wanting to make certain I am who I say."

"Something like that." Manny eyed the Russian. "When you phoned Agatha yesterday you told her you were calling from a public phone. Were you?" Kukushkin looked around. "Where are microphones?"

Manny said, "All over the place."

Kukushkin nodded grimly. "I am phoning from embassy, not public phone. The rezident, Kliment Borisov, is listening on extension. SK is recording conversation. Borisov is telling me to tell I using public phone since I am supposed to be starting love affair outside of marriage and not wanting wife, not wanting people at embassy, to know." The Russian crossed his legs, then uncrossed them and planted his large feet flat on the floor. "Are you having patent documents I can take back."

Manny put on a surgeon's glove and pulled the photocopies of the three raw patent reports from a manila envelope. He handed them to Kukushkin, who glanced quickly at the pages. "Her fingerprints are being on them?" he asked.

"You think of everything," Manny said, removing the glove. "I had her read through the reports and put them into the envelope."

The Russian folded the papers away in his inside breast pocket. "It is you who are thinking of everything, Manny."

"Time to put the show on the road," Manny said. He looked at the first question typed in Cyrillic on the top sheet. "What was the name and nickname of the person who taught "Bourgeois Democracy—a Contradiction in Terms' at Lomonosov University?"

Kukushkin closed his eyes. "You are having very good biography records at your CIA. Teacher of 'Bourgeois Democracy' is Jew named Lifshitz. He is losing an eye escorting British convoys from Murmansk during Great Patriotic War and wearing black patch over it, so students are calling him Moshe Dayan behind his back."

Reading off the questions in Russian, Manny worked his way down the list. Speaking in English, Kukushkin answered those that he could. There were a handful that he couldn't answer—the man's name had slipped his mind, he said—and several that he answered incorrectly, but he got most or them right. Agatha brought them cups of steaming tea at one point and sat with them while they drank it. Kukushkin asked her where she worked in the Patent Office and what kind of documents passed through her hands. Manny understood that he was gathering details for the report he would be obliged to write for the SK people. When they returned to Manny's list of questions, Kukushkin corrected one of the inaccurate answers he had given and remembered the nickname of the fat woman who had served tea in the third floor canteen in Moscow Centre: because of the mustache on her upper lip and her habit of wearing men's shirts, everyone had taken to calling her "Dzhentlman Djim." Manny was halfway through the last of Angleton's six pages when the telephone on the sideboard rang. Both the Russian and Manny stared at it. Agatha appeared in the bedroom doorway; behind her the television set was tuned to Candid Camera. "It could be my mother," she said hopefully.

"Answer it," Manny said.

"What do I say if it's not?"

"You don't say anything. You're starting an illicit affair with a married man. That's not the kind of thing you'd tell someone over the phone while he was here."

Agatha gingerly brought the telephone to her ear. "Hello?" Then: "What number are you calling?"

She looked at Manny and mouthed the words search me. "Well, you have the right number but there's no one here by that name... You're welcome, I'm sure." She hung up. "He wanted to speak to someone named Maureen Belton." She batted her eyes nervously and retreated to the bedroom.

Manny went over to the sideboard and picked up the phone. "Were you able to trace it?" He listened for a moment, then replaced the receiver and came back to his seat. "Too quick to trace. It was a man—he spoke with an accent."

"The SK is having her phone number. Maybe they checking to see if there is a woman here."

"That may be it," Manny agreed.

"So how am I doing with your questions and my answers?" Kukushkin asked when Manny reached the end of the six pages. You did just fine," Manny said.

" So we may talk now of how I can come over?"

Manny shook his head. "If only it was that easy, Sergei. Successful defections aren't organized in one night. Your answers must be analyzed by our counterintelligence staff—"

"By your Mr. Angleton," Kukushkin said.

"You know of Mr. Angleton?"

'Everybody at our embassy knows of your Mr. Angleton."

"If counterintelligence gives us the go-ahead, then we need to set up a safe house in the countryside and staff it, and then organize the actual coming over—we will need a time when you and your wife and your darghter leave the Russian compound together on a pretext. You must be able fill that briefcase with the secrets you promised us and spirit it out of the embassy. We must be able to bring you over and hide you away before the SK people know you are missing."

Kukushkin face darkened. "How long?"

"If all goes well it could be done in five to six weeks."

The Russian exploded out of his chair. "SASHA is back in Washington before five weeks!" He strode over to the window, parted the curtain and studied the dark street below. "In five weeks, Manny, I am a dead man."

"Calm down, Sergei. There is a way out of this."

"There is no way out of a coffin."

Manny joined Kukushkin at the window. "There will not be a coffin Sergei, if you give me the SASHA serials now—give us the first initial of SASHA's family name, give us the biographical detail, tell us when SASHA was absent from Washington."

Kukushkin turned away and prowled back and forth behind the couch, a caged panther looking for a way out of the trap he had fallen into. "So: how are you feeling when you play this blackmail game with me?"

Manny avoided Sergei's eye. "Lousy. I feel lousy, is how I feel. But we all have our jobs to do..."

The Russian grunted. "Being in your shoes I am doing the same. You and me, we are being in a lousy business."

"I didn't invent SASHA, Sergei," Manny said from the window. "I didn't create the situation where he returns to Washington in a little more than a week."

"How can I be sure you are not throwing me away like old rag after I deliver SASHA serials?"

"I give you my word, Sergei—"

"Your Mr. Angleton is not bound by your word."

"You have other things we want—most especially, we want to discover the identity of your mole inside the NSA."

The Russian settled onto the couch again, defeated by the logic of the situation. "What about medical help for my wife?"

"We can have her examined by specialists within days. If she needs treatment we can provide it."

"How examined within days?"

"The Russians at the embassy all get their teeth fixed in America—they use that Bulgarian dentist near the Dupont Circle subway stop who speaks Russian and doesn't charge a lot. If your wife suddenly had a toothache she would make an appointment. If she were going to have a root canal, she would need three or four appointments over a period of three or four weeks. We could organize to have a heart specialist in another office in the same building."

"And the Bulgarian dentist?"

"He would cooperate. He could pretend to do actual work on her and nobody would be the wiser."

"How are you being sure he cooperating?"

Manny only smiled.

Æ/PINNACLE thought about it. Manny came across the room and sat on the back of the couch. "Trust me, Sergei—give me the SASHA serials. If we can identify SASHA your troubles are over. We'll bring you and your wife and your daughter across under conditions that are as near to risk-free as we can make them. Then we'll make you an offer that will knock your eyes out. You won't regret it."

3

WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MAY 24, 1974

TIME WAS RUNNING OUT ON THE SOVIET POLITICAL ATTACHE Kukushkin. His two-week window of opportunity had forty-eight hours left on the clock; if his information was correct, SASHA would return to Washington on Sunday and be back at his desk the following morning. Despite the task force's efforts to limit distribution of its product, SASHA would be bound to pick up rumors of a high-level defection in the works, after which he could be expected to alert the SK people at the Soviet embassy.

At the start, Angleton had been wary of Æ/PINNACLE. But his natural tendency to assume the worst case, when it came to defectors, started to crack the day Manny mentioned the serial concerning Moscow Centre's newly created Department D, the Disinformation Directorate in charge of coordinating the KGB's global disinformation campaign. Angleton had long ago inferred the existence of such a directorate from the fact that the world in general, and the American media in particular, had swallowed whole the rumors of a Sino-Soviet split, as well as the stories of Dubcek and Ceausescu and Tito seeking to distance themselves from Moscow. Angleton, who prided himself on being able to distinguish between KGB disinformation and real political events in the real world, knew intuitively that these were planted stories designed to lull the West into cutting military and intelligence budgets.

The SASHA serials that Manny brought back from his second rendezvous with Æ/PINNACLE made Angleton's head swim with possibilities. For the better part of two years he had been closing in on SASHA, gradually narrowing the list of suspects using a complex process of elimination that involved analyzing operations that had gone bad, as well as operations that had been successful. He felt that it was only a matter of months before he would be able to figure out, with near-certainty, the identity of SASHA. During those months, of course, SASHA could still do a great deal of damage.
Which was why the Æ/PINNACLE serials, used in conjunction with Angleton's own painstaking work, were so crucial. Back in his own shop, Angleton assigned a team of counterintelligence experts to each serial.

_SASHA, according to Æ/PINNACLE, would be away from Washington until Sunday, May 26, which probably meant that he would be back at Langley on Monday, the twenty-seventh.

—he was a Russian-speaker.

—his last name began with the letter K.

—when Kukushkin worked in Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow Centre, he reported directly to Starik. In September of 1972, Kukushkin was asked to provide Starik with logistical support—highway and city maps, bus and train schedules, locations of car rental agencies—for one of his rare trips abroad, this one to the province of Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. In a casual conversation that took place when Kukushkin personally delivered the file to Starik's private apartment, located in a villa known as the Apatov Mansion near a village called Cheryomuski, Starik intimated that he was going abroad to meet someone. Only later, when Kukushkin became aware of the existence of a high-level KGB penetration of the CIA, code named SASHA, did he put two and two together; only SASHA would have been important enough to lure Starik overseas.

Even with these serials, identifying SASHA would be tantamount to stumbling across the proverbial needle in the haystack. The Company had something in the neighborhood of 22,000 regular employees and another 4,000 contract employees. The Clandestine Service alone had roughly 5,000 staffers worldwide; 4,000 of them worked in Washington and another thousand were spread across stations around the globe.

While counterintelligence went about the tedious business of searching the Central Registry—they had to sort through thousands of files by hand— Manny organized the medical visit for Kukushkin's wife, a short, heavy woman whose close-cropped hair was beginning to turn white... with worry, Manny supposed. Her name was Elena Antonova. On cue, she complained of a toothache and asked the Russian nurse at the embassy to suggest a dentist. The nurse gave her the phone number of the Russian-speaking Bulgarian dentist near Dupont Circle whom everyone at the embassy used.

Miraculously, someone had canceled and there was an opening on the following day. The dentist, actually a Company contract employee, had given Mrs. Kukushkin a formal written diagnosis without even examining her; she was suffering from an abscess at the root of the lower first bicuspid which would require between three and four appointments for root canal work, at a cost of $45 per visit.

Manny was loitering in the corridor when Elena Antonova emerged from the dentist's office, an appointment card in her hand. He gestured for her to follow him up two flights to an office with the words "Proffit & Proffit Attorneys at Law" stenciled on the glass door. Inside, Manny introduced Kukushkin's wife to a heart specialist, a Company contract employee with a top secret security clearance. The doctor, who went by the name M. Milton when he moonlighted for the CIA's Office of Medical Services, was fluent in Russian. He led her into an inner office (equipment had been rushed in the night before) for an examination that lasted three quarters of an hour. Then, with Manny present, the doctor delivered his prognosis: in all likelihood, Elena Antonova was suffering from angina pectoris (he would make a definitive diagnosis when her blood tests came back from the laboratory), the result of a high cholesterol count that was causing a narrowing of the arteries carrying blood to her heart. Dr. Milton proposed to treat the problem with a combination of beta-blocking agents to decrease the work of the heart and slow the pulse rate, and vasodilators designed to increase coronary circulation. If the condition persisted, Mrs. Kukushkin might eventually require coronary bypass surgery but that decision could be made at a later date.

Manny accompanied Mrs. Kukushkin to the elevator and, speaking Russian in an undertone, promised her that on her next visit to the dentist, the doctor will have prepared the necessary medicine disguised as ordinary over-the-counter pills that women used to alleviate menstrual cramps.

"Bohhoe spasibo," she whispered. She tried to smile. "I will tell you—I am terrified. If they find out about this it will be terrible for us: for Sergei, for me, for our daughter, Ludmilla.

"We will do everything under the sun to prevent them from finding out," Manny promised her.

At Langley, Angleton emerged from a sick bed—he had come down with Asian flu and was running a fever—to attend the regular afternoon task force meeting down the hall from the DD/O's office. Wrapped in an overcoat and a scarf, he settled sluggishly into his habitual seat at the head of the table. The skin on his wrists and face was almost translucent, his shirtfront was drenched in sweat; beads of perspiration trickled down the side of his nose. For the first time in memory he didn't immediately light a cigarette. "My people have gone
over the serials with a fine-tooth comb," he announced, his voice low and trained. "And we've added a serial of our own that has been on a back burner for years. My tentative conclusion is that Æ/PINNACLE could be the rarest of orchids, a genuine defector bearing real secrets."

Colby looked across the table at his DD/0, Elliott Ebbitt. It was easy to see that both men were stunned.

"Are you telling us that you've identified SASHA?" Jack asked.

Angleton only said, "You're not going to like it."

"You want to walk us through it," Colby said impatiently. He doodled with the point of a number two pencil on a yellow legal pad, creating an endless series of linked circles.

Aneleton's lanky body could be seen trembling under the overcoat. "Working from Æ/PINNACLE's four serials," he began, "my people have narrowed the list of suspects dramatically. I'll start with the first three serials. There are one hundred and forty-four Russian speaking Company employees whose last name begins with K and are expected to be away from Washington until Sunday. Of these hundred and forty-four, twenty-three were also out of Washington at some point during the period Kukushkin claims SASHA was away, which was in September of 1972."

Colby designed a very elaborate "twenty-three" on his pad, replete with curlicues. From his place at the far end of the table, Manny watched Angleton slouch back into his seat, almost like an animal gathering itself for a kill.

"Which brings me to the serial that I've kept on a back burner now for thirteen years." Angleton's mask of a face twisted into an anguished smile; his dark eyes seemed to be laughing at some long-forgotten joke. "Thirteen years! You need the patience of a saint to breed orchids. It can take twelve months for the seedpod to develop, another year or two for the seed to grow as big as your thumb. The flowering, if there is a flowering, could take another five years, even eight or ten. Counterintelligence is like that—you nurture seeds in small jars for years, you keep the temperature moist and hot, you hope the seeds will flower one day but there's no guarantee. And all the while you hear the voices whispering behind your back. Mother's obsessed, they say. He's paranoid, they say. Mother is a conclusion searching for confirmatory evidence." Angleton shivered again and chewed on his lower lip. "Believe me, I heard every word. And every word hurt."

Colby tried to gently nudge Angleton back on track. "The fifth serial, Jim."

"The... fifth... serial," Angleton said, dolling out the words as if he had decided to toy with his audience. "In 1961 the FBI stumbled across an old Communist named Max Cohen who had gone underground twenty years earlier. You recall the incident, don't you. Bill? Cohen, using the alias Kahn set up a wine and beverage store in Washington. Kahn provided the perfect front for the Soviet cutout who lived above the store and delivered liquor to hundreds of clients in the Washington area. The cutout went by the name of Dodgson, which, curiously, happened to have been the real name of Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland; it makes you wonder if the KGB spymaster who ran Philby, who runs SASHA, isn't, like Dodgson, creating worlds within worlds within worlds for us to get lost in." Angleton shut his eyes and appeared to meditate for a moment before going on. "When the FBI searched Kahn's store they discovered ciphers and microfilms, a microdot reader, wads of cash bound in rubber bands and a shortwave radio, all of it hidden under the floorboards in Dodgson's closet. Dodgson himself somehow slipped through the FBI's fingers when they arrested Kahn and a female employee. But I never forgot him. Not for a moment. All these years. Nurturing the seeds, keeping the temperature moist and hot, hoping against hope that the seeds would burst into flower." His voice trailed off and a glazed look came into his eyes.

Colby tugged on the rein again. "The fifth serial?"

"The fifth serial... I checked Kahn's invoices for the previous ten years and discovered that, at one point in the early fifties, Dodgson had been delivering liquor to"—Angleton spit out the words—"my former colleague Adrian Philby; I myself was at Adrian's house one evening when Dodgson brought over two bottles of Lagavulin Malt Whisky. At the time, of course, it seemed perfectly natural and I thought nothing of it. Only now do I understand how close I was to..." The sentence trailed off. Angleton shook his head in frustration. "With Philby gone," he plunged on, "it seemed logical to suppose that this same Dodgson would act as the cutout for Philby's replacement; for SASHA." Angleton reached into a jacket pocket and extracted a pack of cigarettes, which he set on the table. The sight of the cigarettes seemed to revive him. "Checking through Kahn's clients who had been on the receiving end of deliveries during the previous ten years, I was able to identify the names of one hundred and sixty-seven full-time Company employees and sixty-four contract employees."

Jack jumped ahead. "You matched the Kahn client list against the twenty-three names you teased out of the Kukushkin serials."

"It seemed too good to be true," Angleton admitted. "And it was. None of the names on Kahn's delivery list matched any of the twenty-three names derived from Kukushkin's four serials."

"It sounds as if you reached another dead end after all," Colby said.

Angleton extracted a cigarette from the pack and turned it in his fingers.

"Oh, I may have looked like a dead end to the ordinary eye. But not to mine. I knew the identity of SASHA was buried there—somewhere in the overlap of he two lists." He clamped the cigarette between his chapped lips without lighting it. "Last weekend," he continued, his voice a throaty growl, the unlit cigarette twitching on his lower lip, "I overheard my wife on the phone making hotel reservations for us in New Haven—Cicely and I were going up to attend a Robert Lowell reading at Yale. As a security precaution—we don't want the opposition keeping track of my movements, do we? —I always have my wife make reservations or purchases using her maiden name. And all of a sudden it hit me—my God, how did I miss it?—SASHA could have had a wife. To put as much distance between himself and Dodgson, he could have had his wife order the liquor from Kahn's using her maiden name. With this in mind I sent my people back to the drawing boards. We checked the maiden names of the wives of the twenty-three people we teased out of Kukushkin's serials, and then went back to Kahn's clients—to the people the cutout Dodgson had delivered liquor to between the hasty departure of Philby and Kahn's arrest ten years later."

By now everyone in the room was hunched forward, their eyes fixed on Angleton s lips almost as if they expected to see the name emerging from his mouth before they could hear it.

"And?" Colby whispered.

"The only maiden name that turned up on both lists was... Swett," Angleton said.

Both Jack and Ebby recognized the name instantly. "Adelle Swett is Philip Swett's daughter," Jack said.

"And Leo Kritzky's wife," Angleton murmured.

"You're way off base, Jim—" Ebby started to say.

"Are you suggesting that Leo Kritzky is SASHA?" Jack demanded incredulously.

Manny said, "This has got to be a blind alley—"

Jack's palm came down hard on the table. "I've known Leo since Yale. We crewed together. We roomed together. He's the godfather of my boy. I'd stake my life on him—"

Angleton produced a lighter and brought the flame to the tip of the cigarette. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke stream from his nostrils. "You don't want to do that, Jack. You'd lose it."

Colby scratched at the stubble on his cheek, deep in thought. "How can y0u be sure that the Swett who ordered liquor at Kahn's wasn't Adelle's father, Philip Swett?"

"Or anyone else named Swett," Jack snapped.

The fix of nicotine had soothed Angleton; the shivering had let up a hint of color had seeped back into his skin. Even his voice was stronger. "Question of addresses," he explained. "In the early fifties Dodeson delivered the Swett order to an apartment on Bradley Lane behind the Clic Chase Club, which is where Kritzky lived when he married Adelle. Starting in 1954 the Swett order was delivered to the small house on Jefferson in Georgetown, which Philip Swett purchased for his daughter when his granddaughters were born."

"I'm at a loss for words," Colby admitted. "I'm staggered. If ... true... good God, if Leo Kritzky has been spying for the Soviets all these years, do you realize what it means? He was in on Wisner's roll-back strategy in the early fifties—he would have known about all of the Wiz's Soviet-targeted ops. Kritzky knew about your mission to Budapest, Eb. He was Bissell's ADD/O/A during the Bay of Pigs business—he knew the time and place of the landings, he knew the Brigade's order of battle, he knew which ships were loaded with munitions and fuel. The possibility that the man who's running the Soviet Division might be a KGB mole..."

"It happened before," Angleton reminded Colby. "Don't forget that Philby ran MI6's anti-Soviet counterintelligence show after the war."

Colby thought of something else. "His wife, Swett's daughter Adelle, was a White House legislative aide during the Johnson Presidency. Imagine the inside stuff he could have gotten from her! It makes me sick to my stomach."

"I'm not buying into this," Ebby announced. "Leo's a loyal American—"

Angleton, puffing away on his cigarette, seemed to grow calmer as the others became agitated. "It all fits like the pieces of an elaborate puzzle," he said. "Leo Kritzky is a Russian speaker whose last name begins with K. In September of 1972 he vacationed in Nova Scotia for two weeks. On a number of occasions the cutout Dodgson—who had delivered liquor to Philby address on Nebraska Avenue—also delivered liquor to a client named Swett, who turns out to be Kritzky s wife." Angleton concentrated on Colby. "The evidence is overwhelming. Bill. Kritzky's due back from a two-week bicycle trip in France on Sunday afternoon—"

"Jesus," Manny exclaimed from his end of the table. He was horrified at the conclusion Angleton had drawn from the Æ/PINNACLE serials. "What are you going to do, arrest him?"

"That seems like the obvious place to start," Angleton remarked.

"The evidence is circumstantial," Jack insisted. "The case is full of holes. It won't hold water when we take a closer look at it."

Colby doodled another circle into the chain on his yellow pad. "We'd have to be horses' asses not to take a closer look at it," he decided. "Let's not forget that Æ/PINNACLE is out there on a limb—if Kritzky is SASHA, we can't afford to let him back into Langley." He turned to Angleton. "The ball's in your court, Jim. Run with it."

Jack blurted out, "Damnation, Bill, you're giving him a blank check."

Angleton gathered up his papers. "This isn't a garden party, gentlemen."

Colby said, "A blank check, within limits."

Jack said, "Whose limits?"

Manny rang again. When nobody answered, he tried the door of Nellie's top-floor loft. It was unlocked. He stuck his head inside. "Anybody home?" he called. "Nellie, you there?" He went in, kicked the door closed and looked around. The long, narrow living room was aglow with flickering candlelight. Sheets of typing paper, each with a bare footprint traced on it, were set out on the floorboards. With a laugh, Manny followed the footprints and wound up in front of a not-quite-closed door at the end of the corridor. On the floor in front of it was an open bottle of Dom Perignon in a silver bucket filled with crushed ice, and two glasses. He eased the door open with an elbow. Candles set into two candelabras bathed the misty room in sulfurous hues. Stretched languorously in a bathtub filled with steaming water was Nellie; only her head and a single toe broke the surface. Overhead, a three-quarters moon could be seen through the condensation on the skylight. "You're ten minutes late," she announced in a throaty whisper. "The ice was starting to melt. Me, too."

"For Christ's sake, Nellie—"

"I'm not naked as a jaybird for Christ's sake, I'm doing this for your sake." She grinned lewdly at him. "So why don't you slip into something more comfortable, like your birthday suit, and we'll guzzle Champagne in the tub while you try to fend off my advances."

Manny filled the two glasses with Champagne and handed one to her as he settled onto the edge of the tub. He looked down at her body. Her brown nipples and blonde pubic hair were visible under the crystal-clear water.

Nellie sipped her Champagne. "So what do you think are my physical flaws?" she inquired. "Be brutal. Don't be afraid to hurt my feelings."

Manny toyed with the stem of his glass. "Your nose is too big, for atarters. Your nipples are too prominent, your thighs are too thin, too girl-like as opposed to woman-like, your shoulders are too bony, your pubic hair is too sparse—"

"I pluck it, dodo, so it won't show when I climb into my yellow-polka-dot bikini."

"Your pubis looks like a teenage girl's—there's no meat on your pelvic bone. Your feet are too gangly, your eyes are set too far apart, your belly button is too conspicuous..." His voice grew thicker. "Your skin in the moonlight is gorgeous, your body takes my breath away..."

"Come on in," she murmured, "I'll give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation "

Manny gulped down some of his drink. "You don't leave a guy much room to maneuver."

"You don't have to look so grim about it. Elizabet says working for the Company can be dangerous for your mental health. I talked to her on the phone tonight—Mom said your father came back from the office looking like death warmed over; looking pretty much the way you look now, come to think of it. You guys have problems?"

"We always have problems," Manny said vaguely.

"Want to share them?"

"Can't."

"Try."

He shook his head.

"Give me a hint. Is the earth going to collide with an asteroid? Are the Russians going to launch a preemptive first strike? Is Congress going to reduce your budget by a billion or two?"

"Psychologically speaking, all of the above and then some. Someone I know—someone I like and respect—is in trouble..." He let the sentence trail off.

"Is it going to spoil our night together?"

"There isn't going to be a night together, Nellie. That's what I came to tell you. I thought you'd understand if I told you in person... Do you understand?

Nellie polished off her Champagne and thrust it out for a refill. She gulped that down, too, then splashed out of the tub. Wrapping herself in an enormous white towel, she stomped from the bathroom. Carrying the bottle, Manny followed her wet footprints. "So how do you expect a girl to understand when you don't say anything?" she fumed, flinging herself onto a couch, her legs spread wide, the towel parting to reveal a bony hip and a white thigh.

Manny said, "Look, I need to be somewhere in three quarters or an hour. It's an all-hands-on-deck situation. I'd stay and talk some more—"

"—if you could, but you can't."

Manny set the bottle down at her feet. He bent over to kiss her but she leaned away.

"I was just getting used to the idea that you had a crush on me," he said.

"I don't have a crush on you, Manny. I love you."

"Right now you look as if you hate me."

She turned back to him. "I hate the part of you I don't love."

"I'll call as soon as I can."

"Do that. Just don't think I'll be satisfied with the crumbs you throw my way. I want a whole loaf, Manny. That or nothing."

The Air France Airbus touched down at Dulles International minutes after four in the afternoon. Leo and Adelle, stiff from the long flight, queued at the passport control counter, then tugged two bags off the conveyor belt and made their way down the "Nothing to Declare" passageway toward the exit. They could see Vanessa waving to them from behind the glass partition.

"Oh, Daddy, Mom, welcome back," she cried, kissing her mother and then flinging herself into her father s arms. "How was the trip?"

"Great, except for the time your father didn't turn up at the chateau until eleven at night."

"I took a wrong turn and wound up in a village with a name I couldn't pronounce," Leo explained sheepishly. "And I didn't know the name of the chateau we were supposed to be going to."

"So what happened?"

"We actually called the police," Adelle said. "They found him drinking Calvados at a bistro twenty-two kilometers away. Was he red in the face when they brought him and his bicycle back in one of their fourgons."

"You guys are something else," Vanessa said admiringly. "When I tell my friends my parents are bike riding through France, they flip out."

Leo noticed a young man in a belted Burberry regarding him from the street door. The man approached. "Sir, are you Mr. Kritzky?" he asked.

Leo was suddenly wary. "Who are you?"

"Sir, I have a letter for Mr. Kritzky from his office."

"Why don't you mail it?"

The young man never cracked a smile. "I was told to deliver it by hand, sir."

Leo said, "All right, I'm Kritzky."

"Sir, could I see your passport."

Leo fished the passport out of his pocket. The young man looked at the photograph and then at Leo's face, and returned the passport. He handed Leo a sealed envelope.

"What's all this, Daddy?" Vanessa asked.

"Don't know yet." He tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter with a flick of the wrist. His eye went immediately to the signature: "Bill" was scrawled in blue ink over the words William Colby, DCI.

"Dear Leo" the letter began.

"Sorry to hit you over the head with business as you step off the plane, but something important has come up that needs your immediate attention. Would you come straight out to the campus—I'll fill you in when you get here."

"Sir," the young man said. "I have transportation waiting."

Leo studied the young man. "You know what's in the letter?"

"Sir, I only know what I'm told. What I'm told is to have a car and driver waiting to take you to the person who wrote the letter."

Adelle asked, "What's happening, Leo?"

"Bill Colby's asked me to come over to Langley," he said in a low voice. "Vanessa, you take your mother home. I'll make it back on my own steam. If I'm going to be delayed I'll call."

"Sir, if you'll follow me..."

Leo kissed his daughter on each cheek and smiled at Adelle, then fell into step alongside the young man in the raincoat. "Which Division do you work for?" he asked.

"The Office of Security, sir."

The young man pushed a door open for Leo and followed him through it. A gray four-door Ford sedan was waiting at the curb. The driver held the back door open for Leo, who ducked and settled onto the back seat. To his astonishment a burly man squeezed in next to him, pushing him over to the middle of the seat. To his left, the door opened and another man with the bruised face of a prizefighter climbed in the other side.

"What's go—"

The two men grabbed Leo's arms. One of them deftly clamped handcuffs onto each wrist and snapped them closed. Outside the car, the young men in the Burberry could be seen talking into a walkie-talkie. Up front, the driver slid behind the wheel and, easing the car into gear, pulled out into traffic. "Lean forward, with your head between your knees," the burly guard instructed Leo. When he didn't immediately do as he was told the prize- fighter delivered a short, sharp punch to his stomach, knocking the wind out of his lungs. Leo doubled over and threw up on his shoes.

"Oh, shit," the burly man groaned as he pressed down on the back of Leo's neck to keep him hunched over. The Ford was obviously caught in traffic. Leo could hear horns blowing around them. His back began to ache from his cramped position but the hand pushing down on his neck didn't ease up. Forty minutes or so later he felt the car turning off a thoroughfare and then slipping down a ramp. A garage door cranked open and must have closed behind them because they were suddenly enveloped in darkness. The burly man removed his hand from the back of Leo's neck. He straightened and saw that they were in a dimly lit underground garage. Cars were scattered around in the parking spaces. The Ford drew up in front of a service elevator. The burly man got out and hauled Leo out after him. The prizefighter came up behind them. The elevator door opened and the three men entered the car. The prizefighter hit a button. The motor hummed. Moments later the doors opened and Leo was pulled down a dark hallway and pushed into a room painted in a creamy white and lit by an overhead battery of surgical lights. Two middle-aged women dressed in long white medical smocks were waiting for him. The prizefighter produced a key and removed the handcuffs. As Leo massaged his wrists, the two men took up positions on either side of him.

"Do precisely as you are told," one of the women ordered. "When we tell you to, you will remove your clothing item by item, and very slowly. All right. Begin with your left shoe."

"What are you looking for?" Leo managed to ask. The burly man slapped him sharply across the face. "Nobody said nothing about you talking, huh? The shoe, Mr. Kritzky."

His cheek stinging and tears brimming in his eyes, Leo stooped and removed his left shoe and handed it to the man who had struck him, who passed it on to one of the women. She inspected it meticulously, turning it in her hands as if she had never seen this particular model before. Working with pliers she pried off the heel, then with a razor blade cut open the leather to inspect the inside of the sole and the underside of the tongue. Finding nothing, she cast Leo's left shoe aside and pointed to his right shoe. Item by item, the two women worked their way through every stitch of clothing on Leo until he was standing stark-naked under the surgical-lights. One of the women fitted on a pair of surgeons latex gloves. "Spread your legs," she ordered. When Leo was slow to comply the prizefighter kicked his legs apart. The woman knelt on the floor in front of him and began feeling around between his toes and under his feet. She worked her way up the inside of his crotch to his testicles and his penis, probing all the folds and creases of his groin. Leo chewed on his lip in humiliation as she inspected his arm pits and threaded her fingers through his hair. "Open wide," she ordered. She thrust a tongue depressor into his mouth and, tilting his head toward the surgical lights, inspected his teeth. "All rightie, lets take a gander at your anus, Mr. Kritzky."

"No," Leo said. The word emerged as a sob. "I demand to see—"

"Your asshole, asshole," the prizefighter said. He punched Leo hard in the stomach and folded him over with a deft judo lock on one arm. The woman stabbed a gloved finger into a jar of Vaseline and, kneeling behind him, probed his anus.

When he was permitted to straighten up, Leo gasped, "Water." The burly man looked at the woman wearing the surgical gloves. When she shrugged, he went out and came back with a paper cup filled with water. Leo drained it, then, panting, asked, "Am I still in America?"

The prizefighter actually laughed. "This is like the Vatican, pal—its extraterritorial. Habeas corpus don't exist."

One of the women dropped a pair of white pajamas and two scuffs onto the floor at Leo's feet. "You want to go and put them on," she said in a bored voice.

Leo pulled on the pajama bottoms; there was no elastic band and he had to hold them up. One by one, he slipped his arms into the top. His hands were trembling so much he had trouble buttoning the buttons with his free hand. Finally the prizefighter did it for him. Then, clutching the waist of the pajamas and shuffling along in the backless slippers, Leo followed the burly man through a door and down a long dark corridor to another door at the far end. The man rapped his knuckles on it twice, then produced a key, unlocked the door and stepped back. Breathing in nervous gasps, Leo made his way past him.

The room in which he now found himself was large and windowless. All the walls, and the inside of the door, were padded with foam rubber. Three naked electric bulbs dangled at the ends of electric cords from a very high ceiling. A brown army blanket was folded neatly on the floor next to the door. A lidless toilet was fixed to one wall and a tin cup sat on the floor next to it. In the middle of the room stood two chairs and a small table with a tape recorder on it; the table and both chairs were bolted to the floor. James Jesus Angleton sat in one of the chairs, his head bent over the loose-leaf book open before him. A cigarette dangled from his lips; an ashtray on the table overflowed with butts. Without looking up, he waved Leo toward the seat opposite him and hit the "record" button on the tape machine.

"You're Yale, class of fifty, if I'm not mistaken," Angleton remarked.

Leo sank onto the seat, mentally exhausted. "Yale. Fifty. Yes."

"What college?"

"I was in Timothy Dwight for two years, then I lived off campus."

"I was Silliman, but that was before your time," Angleton said. He turned to another page in the loose-leaf book to check something, then flipped back to the original page. "How about if we begin with your father."

Leo leaned forward. "Jim, it's me, Leo. Leo Kritzky. These goons abducted me from the airport. They roughed me up. I was strip-searched. What's going on?"

"Start with your father."

"Jim, for God's sake..." Leo glanced at the whirring reels of the tape recorder, then, shuddering, took a deep breath. "My father's name was Abraham. Abraham Kritzky. He was born in Vilnus, in the Jewish Pale, on the twenty-eighth of November 1896. He emigrated to America during the 1910 pogroms. He got a job in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory sewing bands inside hats—he was there when the famous fire broke out in 1911, killing almost a hundred and fifty seamstresses. My father got out with his sewing machine strapped to his back when firemen hacked open a locked fire door leading to an alleyway."

"Did the experience make him bitter?"

"Of course it made him bitter."

"Did it turn him against capitalism?"

"What are you looking for, Jim? I went over all this when I was recruited. There are no secrets hidden here. My father was a Socialist. He worshipped Eugene Debs. He joined Debs's Socialist Party when it was formed in 1918. He picketed when Debs was jailed, I think it was around 1920. He read the Jewish Daily Forward. His bible was the 'Bintel Brief' letters-to-editor column, where people poured out their troubles; he used to read the letters aloud to us in Yiddish. My father was a bleeding heart, which wasn't a federal offense until the House Un-American Activities Committee came along."

"You were born on the twenty-ninth of October 1929—"

Leo laughed bitterly. "The day the stock market crashed. Are you going t0 read something into that?"

'Your father had a small business by then." Angleton turned to another page in his loose-leaf book. "He manufactured and repaired hats at an address on Grand Street in Manhattan. The crash wiped him out."

"The banks called in his loans—he'd bought the brownstone on Q Street. We lived upstairs. His business was on the ground floor. He lost everything."

"And then what happened?"

"Can I have some water?"

Angleton nodded toward the tin cup on the floor next to the toilet. "There's water in the bowl."

Leo shook his head in dismay. "You're out of your goddamn mind, Jim. You're crazy if you think I'm going to drink out of a toilet."

"When you're thirsty enough, you will. What happened after the stock market crash?"

When Leo didn't respond, Angleton said, "Let's understand each other. You're going to stay in this room until you've answered all my questions, and many times. We're going to go over and over your life before and after you joined the Company. If it takes weeks, if it takes months, it's no skin off my nose. I'm not in any particular hurry. You want to go on now or do you prefer that I come back tomorrow?"

Leo whispered, "Son of a bitch."

Angleton started to close the loose-leaf book.

"Okay. Okay. I'll answer your damn questions. What happened after the stock market crash was that my father killed himself."

"How?"

"You know how."

"Tell me anyway.

"He jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. They found his body washing around under the docks under Brooklyn Heights the next morning."

"What was the date?"

"March 1936."

Angleton said, "Seven March, to be exact. Between the stock market crash and his suicide, did your father become a Communist, or was he one already when he came over from Russia?"

Leo laughed under his breath. "My father was a Jew who believed, like the Prophet Amos—writing eight centuries before Jesus Christ—that you were a thief if you had more than you needed, because what you owned was stolen from those who didn't have enough. Luckily for Amos there was no Joe McCarthy around in those days." Leo looked away In his mind's eye he could see his father reading from a worn Torah, and he quoted the passage from memory. '"For they know not to do right, saith the Lord, who store up violence and robbery in their palaces.' That's Amos 3:10, if I remember correctly, Jim."

"You seem fixated on Joe McCarthy."

"He was a shit."

"Did you agree with Amos and with your father? Did you think that what you own is stolen from those who don't have enough?"

"In an ideal world such a sentiment might have a shred of validity. But I long ago moved on into the imperfect world."

"Did capitalism kill your father?"

"My father killed himself. Capitalism, as it was practiced in America in the twenties and thirties, created conditions that caused a great many people to kill themselves, including the capitalists who threw themselves out of Wall Street windows in 1929."

Angleton lit a fresh cigarette. There was a fragment of a smile clinging limply to one corner of his mouth and volcanic ash in the pupils of his eyes. Leo remembered that Angleton was a devoted angler; the word was that he would spend endless hours working the Brule in the upper watershed of northern Wisconsin, casting with a flick of his wrist a nymph fly he had tied with his own fingers and letting it drift back downstream, waiting with infinite patience to snare the mythical brown trout that was rumored to hide in the currents of the river. It hit Leo that the counterintelligence chief was working another river now; casting hand-made flies in front of Leo in the hope that he would snap at the hook, fudge a truth, lie about a detail, after which he would carefully reel in the line.

Flipping through the pages of his loose-leaf, Angleton ticked off an item here, underlined a phrase there, scratched out a word and wrote a new one above it. He wanted to know how Leo felt about Soviet Russia during the Second World War. He was only a kid then, Leo said; he didn't remember thinking about Soviet Russia one way or the other. "You joined Ethical Culture after the war," Angleton noted. He'd never actually joined Ethical Culture, Leo replied; he'd gone to evening meetings in Brooklyn, mostly to play chess. "What kind of people did you meet there?" Leo had to laugh. He'd met chess players, he said. "You met a girl there, didn't you?" Angleton asked. "Named"—he moistened a finger and skipped ahead several pages— named Stella." Yes, Leo agreed. He remembered Stella. She had the infuriating habit of taking a move back after she took her hand off the piece; eventually he'd been the only one who would play with her. Angleton asked, "Do you recall her family name?" Leo thought a moment. No, he said, he didn't. The fragment of a smile turned up again on Angleton's face. "Could it have been Bledsoe?" he wanted to know. That rings a bell, Leo agreed. Bledsoe sounds familiar.

Angleton's voice was reduced to a purr now as he worked the rod, letting the fly skid across the surface of the water. "There was a Bledsoe, Stella, named by Whittaker Chambers as a fellow traveler whom he'd met at Communist Party meetings after the war." When Leo didn't say anything, Angleton looked up from his notes. "Was Stella Bledsoe a Communist?"

Leo snickered. "She was a social worker, and a lot of social workers were Socialists so she might have been, too. If she was a Communist when I first met her in the forties I never knew it."

Sucking away on his cigarette, Angleton said, "She espoused the party line—unilateral nuclear disarmament, abandoning Berlin to the Russians—which makes her a Communist, wouldn't you agree?"

"Does it matter if I agree?"

"It doesn't, Leo. But it would make things easier."

"For whom?"

"For yourself. For me. For the Company."

Pushing himself to his feet, clutching the waistband on the pajama bottoms, Leo shuffled over to the toilet and stared down at the water in the bowl. He swallowed hard to relieve his parched throat and returned to the chair. "Where are we here?" he asked, waving toward the padded walls. He thought he knew; there was a former Naval Hospital on 23rd Street, a group of yellow buildings across from the State Department, which the CIA used for secret research. Because the place was so secure the Company occasionally debriefed defectors there.

Angleton looked up at Leo. "As far as you're concerned we could be on another planet," he said. There was no malice in his voice, only cold information.

"My wife will start asking questions when I don't turn up at home."

Angleton glanced at his wristwatch. "By now," he said, "the Director will have phoned up Adelle and apologized profusely for packing you off to Asia on such short notice. 'Something has come up,' he will have told her. 'You'll understand if he didn't provide details.' Your wife will have taken the news bravely; will have surely inquired when she might expect you to return home. The Director would have been vague. 'It could take time,' he would have said. 'He has no clothing,' your wife will have remarked. 'Can you pack a bag and I'll send a car around to pick it up,' the Director will have said. 'Will he call me?' Adelle might have asked. 'I've instructed him to maintain radio silence,' the Director would have answered. 'But rest assured I'll personally call you when I have more to tell you.' 'Will he be in any kind or danger?' Adelle would want to know. 'None whatsoever,' the Director would tell her. 'You have my personal word for that.'"

Leo felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him again. "I never really understood until now what a bastard you are," he murmured.

Unperturbed, Angleton turned back to the first page in the loose-leaf book and stared at the single word printed on it. Leo concentrated on the capital letters, trying to read them upside down. The letters swam into focus. The word was: SASHA.

Angleton closed the loose-leaf book and stopped the tape recorder. He put them and the ash tray into a brown paper shopping bag and, without a word, went to the door. He rapped twice against it with his free hand. The prizefighter opened the door and let him out and closed it again. Leo found himself regretting that Angleton had gone. At least he was someone to talk to. He spread the blanket and doubled it and tried to doze. The three naked bulbs were brighter than before—Leo realized that they worked on a rheostat and had been turned up to deprive him of sleep. Lying there on the blanket, curled up in a fetal position, he lost track of time. At one point the door opened and someone slid a tin plate inside, then the door slammed closed again. Clutching his waistband, Leo shuffled over to the door and stuffed bits of cold cooked cabbage into his mouth with his fingertips. Tears came to his eyes when he realized that the cabbage had been salted. For a long time he stood staring at the toilet. Finally he went over to it and dipped the tin cup into the water and sipped it. He gagged and crouched, jamming his head between his legs and breathing deeply to keep from vomiting. When he felt better he stood up and urinated into the toilet and flushed it, and stretched out again on the blanket, his eyes wide open, thinking. SASHA.

Agatha Ept was categoric: Today was not the moment for a Capricorn and a Virgo to undertake new projects. "I'd be thrilled to explain why," she said," backing toward the bedroom. "To begin with, Pluto is squaring Mars— okay, okay, I can take a hint." And she disappeared through the door.

"She is a crazy American lady," Sergei Kukushkin told Manny when they were alone, "if she is seriously thinking that stars decide our fate."

Manny had come to like Kukushkin. His open features, the worry lines that creased his brow whenever they talked about his wife or daughter, even fhe anxiety betrayed by the metronome-like clicking of his fingernails—they appeared to support the notion that Æ/PINNACLE was a genuine defector bearing genuine information. Manny wished it were otherwise; wished that Sergei wouldn't look him straight in the eye when he talked, wished that he could detect in his handshake a holding back, a hesitation hint of something other than forthrightness. Because if Kukushkin was genuine and Jim Angleton was right, Leo Kritzky was SASHA.

"Did Elena Antonova pick up the pills this morning?" he asked Kukushkin now.

A smile lurked in the Russian's eyes. "She took the first two immediately she returned to the embassy," he said. "Elena said me that she felt relief in minutes." Kukushkin's fingernails fell silent, a sign that a particularly important question was on his tongue. "And SASHA? What has happened with SASHA?"

With an effort Manny kept his eyes on Kukushkin. "Mr. Angleton claims he has discovered his identity."

The Russian asked in a whisper, "And has SASHA been taken into custody?" Manny nodded. "You do not look happy about this."

"Arranging meetings with you, establishing codes and signals that you can use if the circumstances change, relaying questions and bringing back your answers, this is my job. What happens with the serials you give me is in the hands of others."

"And do you honestly think, Manny, that the SASHA in custody is the real SASHA?"

"It's Thursday," Manny said. "According to your information SASHA has been back at his desk at Langley since Monday. It is true that only a handful of our people know your identity. But a number of people from various departments are involved in this—monitoring phone lines, disguising pills for your wife, watchers and handlers keeping track of you and your wife, that kind of thing. Word that there is a high-level defection in the works is bound to seep out. If you are right about SASHA—if he is someone important—he would have heard about it by now. Did you notice your SK people taking any particular precautions?"

Kukushkin shook his head.

"Did your wife think she was followed when she went to the dentist this morning?"

"If she was followed I am not sure she would see it."

"We would see it, Sergei. She was clean when she came out of the subway at Dupont Circle. She was clean when she went back into the subway. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary at the embassy? Anyone paying particular attention to you?"

"The rezident called me in and opened a bottle of Scotch whiskey and offered me a drink."

"He's pleased with the patent reports you bring back?"

Kukushkin thought about this. "I would say he is satisfied, yes. He was in trouble with Moscow Centre last December. A KGB officer at the embassy was recalled to Moscow for claiming he ran an American defector who gave him radar secrets—it developed that this same information was available in aviation magazines. A month later a KGB colonel, working under diplomatic cover, wrote a ten-page report on a conversation he had with your Secretary of Defense Schlesinger when he only shook his hand in a receiving line." The Russian raised his palms. "We are all under great pressure to produce secrets."

Manny judged the time had come to pose the question he had been instructed to ask. "How about it, Sergei? Will you risk it? Will you stay in place now that SASHA is no longer a menace to you?"

"And if I agree..."

Manny understood that the Russian wanted to hear the terms again. "We'll bring you all over at Christmas when you and your family go down to visit Disney World in Florida. There will be a lump sum payment of two hundred fifty thousand dollars sitting in a bank account, and a monthly consultant's stipend of fifteen hundred for a minimum of ten years. There will be a completely new identity and American citizenship, and a two-story house in a residential area of Florida to be decided on by you. There will be a four-door Oldsmobile parked in the driveway."

"What if I sense that they are closing in on me before December?" "We'll devise emergency signals and procedures to pull you and your family out immediately."

Kukushkin inspected his fingernails, then looked up. "I think I am crazy like the American lady in the bedroom, Manny, but I trust you. I do not think you would lie to me. I do not think you would betray me. I will do it—not for the money, although I will be happy to provide security to my family. I will do it to prove to your organization that I am who I say I am— that I am loyal to America."

Manny reached over and the two men shook hands. "You won't regret it, Sergei. I promise you." He looked at his wristwatch. "We still have three quarters of an hour."

Kukushkin himself started the tape recorder and pulled the microphone to the edge of the kitchen table. "I will begin today by telling you what was ln the message that I deposited in the men's room of the Jefferson Hotel for the agent that the rezidentum is running inside your National Security Agency." When the Russian hesitated, Manny smiled encouragingly.

"So, I have already told you that the resident gave me an enciphered note roll up inside the top of a fountain pen. Because the contents did not concern operational information, Borisov boasted to me what was in it. The message said, 'Congratulations on the Second Man'. You must apprehend that KGB agent-handling guidelines call for paying careful attention to the personal lives of American agents. The contents of this particular message suggests that the wife of the American spying inside your NSA gave birth to a second son, probably sometime early in the month of January..."