9

SANTA FE, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1974

JACK CAUGHT AN EARLY MORNING FLIGHT FROM DULLES TO ALBUQUERQUE, then rented a car at the airport and drove an hour up the interstate to Santa Fe. Following the Sorcerer's fuzzy directions as best he could, stopping twice at gas stations to ask directions, he finally found East of Eden Gardens east of the city, on the edge of a golf course. In a billboard planted halfway down the access road, East of Eden Gardens was advertised as a promoters' vision of what paradise must be like, though Jack had a sneaking suspicion the promoters didn't actually live there themselves. Smart folks. The sprawling condominium community, semi-attached bungalows made of fake adobe and set at weird angles to each other, was surrounded by a no-nonsense chain-link fence topped with coils of Army surplus concertina wire to keep the Hispanics from nearby Espanola out. For all Jack knew, there could have been a minefield under the belt of Astroturf inside the fence. His identity was controlled at the gatehouse by an armed and uniformed guard wearing Raybans. "Got a message for you from Mista Torriti," he said, checking Jack's name off the list on the clipboard. "If you was to get here after eleven and before four, you'll find him at the clubhouse." Following the guards instructions, Jack drove through an intestinal tangle of narrow streets named for dead movie stars, past a driving range, past a communal swimming pool shaped to look like the most fragile part of a promoter's body, the kidney.

"Jesus H. Christ, Harvey, I didn't know you'd taken up golf," Jack exclaimed when he found the Sorcerer nursing a Scotch on the rocks at the empty bar.

"Haven't taken up golf," Torriti said, squeezing his Apprentice's hand with his soft fingers, punching him playfully in the shoulder. "Taken up drinking in golf clubs. Everyone who owns a condo is a member. Members get happy-hour prices all day long. All night, too."

The Sorcerer bought Jack a double Scotch and another double for himself, and the two carried their drinks and a bowl of olives to a booth at the back of the deserted clubhouse.

"Where's everybody?" Jack asked.

"Out golfin'," Torriti said with a smirk. "I'm the only one here who doesn't own clubs." He waved toward the adobe condominiums on the far side of the kidney-shaped pool. "It's a retirement home, Jack. You get free maid service, you can order in from the club kitchen, faucet drips and you got a handyman knocking at your door by the time you hang up the phone. Halfa dozen ex-Langley types live out here; we got an all-Company dealer's choice game going Monday nights."

"Aside from drinking and poker, how do you make time pass in the middle of nowhere?"

"You won't believe me if I tell you."

"Try me."

"I read spy stories. I finished one yesterday called The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by someone name of le Carre."

"And?"

"He gets the mood right—he understands that Berlin was a killing field. He understands that those of us who lived through it were never the same again. People could learn more about the Cold War reading le Carre than they can from newspapers. But he loses me when he says spies are people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. What a load of bullshit! How about you, sport? Hows tricks?"

"Can't complain," Jack said.

"So what brings you to Santa Fe? Don't tell me you were just passing through and wanted to chew the fat. Won't swallow that."

Jack laughed. "I wanted to see how retirement was treating the honcho of Berlin Base, Harvey."

Torriti's red-rimmed eyes danced merrily, as if he had heard a good joke. "I'll bet. What else?"

"You read the newspapers?"

"Don't need to. Anything concerning my ex-employer turns up in the news, one of my poker pals fills me in." The Sorcerer plucked an ice cube from the glass and massaged his lids with it. "I heard about the joker from NSA you traded for one of ours, if that's what you want to know. Newspapers said he was a low-level paper pusher, but I wasn't born yesterday."

Jack leaned forward and lowered his voice. "He was a mid-level analysist working on Russian intercepts—"

"Which means the Ruskies knew what we were intercepting, which means they were filling it with shit."

Jack took a sip of Scotch. He wondered if the Sorcerer broke down and ordered solids at lunchtime. "But they didn't know we knew. Now they do."

"How'd you trip to him?"

"We got a walk-in at the Russian embassy. He wanted to defect but we talked him into spying in place until his tour was up. He gave us two important things, Harvey—the NSA mole and a series of serials that led Jim Angleton to SASHA."

The Sorcerer rolled his head from side to side, impressed. "Where's the problem?"

"What makes you think there's a problem?"

"You wouldn't be here if there wasn't."

"Something's bothering me, Harvey. I thought, if your twitching nose was still functioning, you might help me sort through it."

"Try me."

"Like I was saying, based on the walk-in's serials, Angleton identified SASHA. He told us he'd been closing in on him, that it was only a matter of time before he narrowed it down to two or three. The walk-ins serials speeded up the inevitable, that's what Mother said."

"You want to go whole-hog."

Jack was whispering now. "It's Kritzky. Leo Kritzky."

A whistle seeped through Torriti's lips. "The Soviet Division chief! Jesus, it's Kim Philby redux, only this time it's in our shop."

"Angleton's been giving Leo the third degree for four months and then some, but he hasn't cracked. Leo claims he's innocent and Angleton hasn't been able to make him admit otherwise."

"Seems open and shut, sport—everything depends on the walk-in inside the Russian embassy. Flutter him. If he's telling the truth"—Torriti's shoulders heaved inside a very loud sports jacket—"eliminate SASHA."

"Can't polygraph the walk-in," Jack said. He explained how Kukushkin's wife and daughter had suddenly flown home to be with her dying father; how Kukushkin had followed them back to Moscow the next day.

"Did the father die?"

"As far as we can tell, yes. There was a funeral. There was an obituary."

Torriti waved these tidbits away.

"That's what we thought, too, Harv. So we sent Kukushkin's controlling officer to Moscow to speak to him."

"Without diplomatic cover."

"Without diplomatic cover," Jack conceded.

"And he was picked up. And then he confessed to being CIA. And then you traded the NSA mole to get him back."

Jack concentrated on his drink.

"Who was the controlling officer?"

"Elliott Ebbitt's boy, Manny."

Torriti pulled a face. "Never did like that Ebbitt fellow but that's neither here nor there. What did Manny have to say when he came in?"

"He was at Kukushkin's trial. He heard him confess. He heard the verdict. Kukushkin turned up in his cell to ask him to acknowledge being CIA in order to save his family. That's what Manny's so-called confession was all about—it was in return for an amnesty for the wife and kid. That night he heard the firing squad execute Kukushkin—"

"How did he know it was Kukushkin being executed?"

"He cried out right before. Manny recognized his voice."

The Sorcerer munched on an olive, spit the pit into a palm and deposited it in an ashtray. "So what's bothering you, kid?"

"My stomach. I'm hungry."

Torriti called over to the Hispanic woman sitting on a stool behind the cash register. "DOS BIT'S sobre tostado, honey," he called. "DOS cervezas tambien."

Jack said, "I didn't know you spoke Spanish, Harvey."

"I don't. You want to go and tell me what's really bothering you?"

Jack toyed with a salt cellar, turning it in his fingers. "Leo Kritzky and I go back a long way, Harv. We roomed together at Yale. He's my son's godfather, for Christ's sake. To make a long story shorter, I visited him in Angleton's black hole. Mother has him drinking water out of the toilet bowl."

The Sorcerer didn't see anything particularly wrong with this. "So?"

"Number one: He hasn't broken. I offered him a way out that didn't involve spending the rest of his life in prison. He told me to fuck off."

"Considering the time and money you spent to come here, there's got to be a number two."

"Number two: Leo said something that's been haunting me. He was absolutely certain our walk-in would never be fluttered." Jack stared out the window as he quoted Leo word for word. "He said Kukushkin would be run over by a car or mugged in an alleyway or whisked back to Mother Russia for some cockamamie reason that would sound plausible enough. But he wouldn't be fluttered because we would never get to bring him over. And he wouldn't be brought over because he was a dispatched defector sent to convince Angleton that Kritzky was SASHA and take the heat off the real SASHA. And it played out just the way Leo said it would."

"Your walk-in wasn't polygraphed because he rushed back to Moscow for a funeral. After which he was arrested and tried and executed."

"What do you think, Harvey?"

"What do I think?" Torriti considered the question. Then he tweaked the tip of his nose with a forefinger. "I think it stinks."

"That's what I think, too."

"Sure that's what you think. You wouldn't be here otherwise."

"What can I do now? How do I get a handle on this?"

The Hispanic woman backed through a swinging door from the kitchen carrying a tray. She set the sandwiches and the beers down on the table. When she'd gone, Torriti treated himself to a swig of beer. "Drinking a lot is the best revenge," he said, blotting his lips on a sleeve. "About your little problem—you want to do what I did when I ran up against a stone wall in my hunt for Philby."

"Which is?"

"Which is get ahold of the Rabbi and tell him your troubles."

"I didn't know Ezra Ben Ezra was still among the living."

"Living and kicking. He works out of a Mossad safe house in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Saw him eight months ago when he was passing through Washington—we met in Albuquerque and he picked my brain, or what was left of it." The Sorcerer took a bite out of his sandwich, then produced a ballpoint pen and scratched an address and an unlisted phone number on the inside of an East of Eden Gardens matchbook. "A word to the wise—it's not polite to go empty-handed."

"What should I bring?"

"Information. Don't forget to say shalom from the Sorcerer when you see him."

"I'll do that, Harvey."

The midday Levantine sun burned into the back of Jack's neck as he picked his way through the vegetable stalls in the Nevei Tsedek district north of Jaffa, a neighborhood of dilapidated buildings that dated back to the turn of the century when the first Jewish homesteaders settled on the dunes of what would become Tel Aviv. The sleeves of his damp shirt were rolled up to the elbows, his sports jacket hung limply from a forefinger over his right shoulder. He double-checked the address that the Sorcerer had scribbled inside the matchbook, then looked again to see if he could make out house numbers on the shops or doorways. "You don't speak English?" he asked a bearded man peddling falafel from a pushcart.

"If I don't speak English," the man shot back, "why do you ask your question in English? English I speak. Also Russian. Also Turkish, Greek and enough Rumanian to pass for someone from Transylvania in Bulgaria, which is what saved my life during the war. German, too, I know but I invite Hashem, blessed be He, to strike me dead if a word of it passes my lips. Yiddish, Hebrew go without saying."

"I'm looking for seventeen Shabazi Street but I don't see any numbers on the houses."

"I wish I had such eyes," remarked the falafel man. "To be able to see there are no numbers! And at this distance, too." He indicated a house with his nose. "Number seventeen is the poured-concrete Bauhaus blockhouse with the second-hand bookstore on the ground floor, right there, next to the tailor shop."

"Thanks."

"Thanks to you, too, Mister. Appreciate Israel."

The stunning dark-haired young woman behind the desk raised her imperturbable eyes when Jack pushed through the door into the bookstore. "I need help," he told the young woman.

"Everybody does," she retorted. "Not many come right out and admit it."

Jack looked fleetingly at the old man who was browsing through the English language books in the back, then turned to the woman. "I was led to believe I could find Ezra Ben Ezra at this address."

"Who told you that?"

"Ezra Ben Ezra, when I called him from the United States of America. You've heard of the United States of America, I suppose."

"You must be the Sorcerer's Apprentice."

"That's me."

The woman seemed to find this amusing. "At your age you should have become a full-fledged Sorcerer already. Remaining an apprentice your whole life must be humiliating. The Rabbi is expecting you." She hit a button under the desk. A segment of wall between two stands of shelves clicked open and Jack ducked through it. He climbed at long flight of narrow concrete steps that bypassed the first floor and took him directly to the top floor of the building. There he came across a crew cut young man in a dirty sweat suit strip cleaning an Uzi. The young man raised a wrist to his mourfti and muttered something into it, then listened to the tinny reply coming through the small device planted in one of his ears. Behind him, still another door clicked open and Jack found himself in a large room with poured concrete walls and long narrow slits for windows. The Rabbi, looking a decade older than his sixty-one years, hobbled across the room with the help of a cane to greet Jack.

"Our paths crossed in Berlin," the Rabbi announced.

"I'm flattered you remember me," Jack said.

Ben Ezra pointed with his cane toward a leather-and-steel sofa and, with an effort, settled onto a straight-backed steel chair facing his visitor. "To tell you the terrible truth, I am not so great at faces any more but I never forget a favor I did for someone. You were running an East German code-named SNIPER, who turned out to be a professor of theoretical physics named Loffler. Ha, I can see by the expression on your face I hit the hammer on the head. Or should that be nail? Loffler finished badly, if my memory serves, which it does intermittently. His cutout, RAINBOW, too." He shook his head in despair. "Young people today forget that Berlin was a battleground."

"There were a lot of corpses on both sides of the Iron Curtain back then," Jack allowed. "When we met in Berlin you were dressed differently—"

Ben Ezra rolled his head from side to side. "Outside of Israel I dress ultra-religious—I wear ritual fringes, the works. It is a kind of disguise. Inside Israel I dress ultra-secular, which explains the business suit. Can I propose you a glass of freshly squeezed mango juice? A yoghurt maybe? Iced tea, with or without ice?"

"Tea, with, why not?"

"Why not?" Ben Ezra agreed. "Two teas, with," he hollered into the other room where several people could be seen sitting around a kitchen table. Behind them two ticker-tape machines chattered unrelentingly. The Rabbi focused on his American guest. "So what brings you to the Promised Land, Mr. Jack?"

"A hunch."

"That much I know already. The Sorcerer called me long-distance, charges reversed, to say that if I heard from someone claiming to be you, it was." The Rabbi produced a saintly smile. "Harvey and me, we cover each others backsides. He said you had a tiger by the tail."

A dark-skinned Ethiopian girl, wearing a khaki miniskirt and a khaki Army sweater with a revealing V-neck, set two tall glasses of iced tea tinkling with ice cubes on the thick glass of the coffee table. A slice of fresh orange was embedded onto the rim of each glass. She said something in Hebrew and pointed to the delicate watch on her slim wrist. Ben Ezra scratched absently at the stubble of a beard on his chin. "Lama lo," he told her. He pulled the slice of orange off of the glass and began sucking on it. "So you want to maybe tell the Rabbi what's bothering you?"

Jack wondered if Ben Ezra was recording the conversation. His career would come to a sudden stop if the Rabbi played the tape for Angleton, who had run the Mossad account for years and still had admirers here. The Rabbi saw him hesitating. "You are having second thoughts about sharing information. I am not indifferent to such scruples. If you would feel more comfortable taking a rain check on this conversation..."

In his mind's eye Jack could see Leo Kritzky scooping water out of the toilet bowl with a tin cup and deliberately drinking from it. He could hear the defiance in Leo's voice as he rasped, "Go fuck yourself, Jack." What the hell, he thought. I've come this far. And he began to walk the Rabbi through the circumstances surrounding the defection of Sergei Klimov (a.k.a. Sergei Kukushkin). "When Kukushkin was suddenly recalled to Moscow, we sent someone in to contact him—"

"Ah, I am beginning to see the handwriting on the wall," the Rabbi declared. "That explains what some crazy bones was doing in Moscow without diplomatic cover. Your someone was arrested, Klimov-Kukushkin was tried and executed, you swapped the Company arrestee for the NSA mole at the Glienicke Brucke." Ben Ezra pointed to the two glasses of iced tea. "We should drink up before they get warm." He raised one to his lips. "L'chaim—to life," he said and sipped noisily. "You think the trial and execution of this Klimov-Kukushkin could have been staged?"

"He wasn't polygraphed," Jack insisted.

"I am not sure how you think I can help."

"Look, Angleton is convinced Kukushkin was caught and tried and executed, which makes him genuine and his serials accurate. You people have assets in Russia that we only dream about. I thought you might take a second look. If Kukushkin was executed, there ought to be a grave somewhere, there ought to be a grief-stricken wife and daughter scraping to make ends meet."

"If he was not executed, if the whole thing was theater, there ought to be a Klimov-Kukushkin out there somewhere."

"Exactly."

"Where in your opinion should one start one's inquiries?"

"Just before the two of them were arrested, Kukushkin told our guy he was living in a three-room apartment in a hotel reserved for transient KGB officers."

Wrinkled lids closed over the Rabbi's bulging eyes as he searched his memory. "That would be the Alekseevskaya behind the Lubyanka on Malenkaia Lubyanka Street. I suppose, correct me if I am wrong, you have brought with you photographs of this Klimov-Kukushkin and his wife and daughter."

Jack pulled an envelope from his breast pocket. "These are copies of the State Department forms filed by foreign diplomats when they arrive in Washington—I've thrown in several FBI telephoto mug shots for good measure. If your people came up with anything I would be very grateful."

Ben Ezra's eyes flicked open and focused intently on his visitor. "How grateful?"

"I've heard that one of the Nazis on the Mossad's ten most wanted list is Klaus Barbie—"

The Rabbi's voice came across as a wrathful growl now. "He was the Gestapo chief in Lyons during the war—many thousands of Jews, kiddies, women, old men, innocents every last one of them, were dragged off to the death camps because of him. The Butcher of Lyons, as he is known here, worked for the US Army in Germany after the war. He fled Europe one jump ahead of our agents—where we don't know. Yet."

"A file has passed through my hands... in it was the name of the Latin American country where Barbie is believed to be living."

The Rabbi pushed down on his cane, levering himself to his feet. "You would not like to make a down payment for services certain to be rendered?" he inquired. "It is not as if your people and mine are strangers to each other."

Jack stood, too. "Barbie is in Bolivia."

Ben Ezra pulled an index card and a ballpoint pen from a pocket and offered them to Jack. "Write, please, a private phone number where I can reach you in Washington, Mr. Jack. We will for sure be in touch."

Sometime after midnight a frail, gray-haired woman wearing faded silk Uzbek leggings under her ankle-length skirt pushed the cleaning cart through the double doors into the lobby of the Hotel Alekseevskaya. She emptied the ash trays into a plastic bucket and wiped them clean with a damp cloth, rearranged the chairs around the coffee tables, replaced the dessert menus that were torn or stained, polished the mirrors hanging on the walls. Using a skeleton key attached to her belt, she opened a closet and took out the hotel's old Swedish Electrolux. Plugging it into a wall socket, she started vacuuming the threadbare carpets scattered around the lobby. Gradually she worked her way behind the check-in counter and began to vacuum the rugs there, too. The night porter, an elderly pensioner who worked the graveyard shift to supplement his monthly retirement check, always went to the toilet to sneak a cigarette while the Uzbek woman vacuumed behind the counter. Alone for several minutes, she left the Electrolux running and rummaged in the wooden "Mail to be forwarded" bin on one side of the switchboard. She found the small package easily; she'd been told it would be wrapped in brown paper and tied with a length of yellow cord. The package, which had been dropped off by a courier too late to be forwarded that day, was addressed to a recent resident, Elena Antonova Klimova, Hotel Alekseevskaya, Malenkaia Lubyanka Street, Moskva. At the bottom left of the package someone had written in ink: "Pereshlite Adresatu—please forward." The day clerk at the hotel's reception desk had crossed out "Hotel Alekseevskaya" and written in an address not far from the Cistyeprudnyi metro stop. The cleaning woman slipped the small package into her waistband and went back to vacuuming.

When she quit work at eight the next morning, she brought the package to the small used-clothing store on a side street off the Arbat run by the Orlev brothers. It was the older of the two, Mandel Orlev, dressed in the dark suit and dark raincoat associated with operatives of the KGB, who had delivered the package to the hotel the previous afternoon. Mandel, elated to discover that their scheme appeared to have worked, collected his briefcase and made his way to Cistyeprudnyi by metro and then on foot to the address written on the package. Taking a book from the briefcase, he sat reading for hours in the small neighborhood park separated by a low fence from the entrance to number 12 Ogorodnaia. A dozen people came and went but none of them resembled the description of Klimov-Kukushkin or his wife, Elena, or their daughter, Ludmilla. When it started to grow dark Mandel's brother, Baruch, relieved him and hung around until after ten, by which time he was too cold to remain any longer. The next day, and the day following, the two brothers spelled each other watching the entrance to number 12 Ogorodnaia. It wasn't until the morning of the fourth day that their patience was rewarded. A Zil driven by a chauffeur pulled up in front of the door and a man with long, vaguely blond hair and the heavy shoulders and thick body of a wrestler emerged from the back seat. He used a key to open the front door of the building and disappeared inside. Three quarters of an hour later he reappeared, followed by a short, heavy woman with close-cropped hair that was beginning to turn white. The two talked for a moment on the sidewalk until a slender girl of about eight came running out of the building behind them. The parents laughed happily.

In the park, Mandel Orlev positioned his battered briefcase and tripped the shutter of the West German Robot Star II camera hidden under the flap.

10

WASHINGTON, DC, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 1974

OUTSIDE, RAZOR-EDGED GUSTS CURLING OFF THE CHESAPEAKE flayed the trees, giant waves lashed the shoreline. From his room on the third floor of the private sanatorium, Leo Kritzky watched nature's riot through the storm window. His wife, Adelle, was brewing up a pot of coffee on the electric plate. "You look much better," she was saying as she cut the banana cake she'd baked and handed him a wedge. "The difference is night and day."

"No place to go but up," Leo said.

"You planning to tell me what happened?" she asked, her back toward him.

"We've been through all that," Leo said. "Can't."

Adelle turned to face Leo. She had suffered also, though nobody seemed much concerned about that. "The United States Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act over President Ford's veto today," she told him. Try as she might she couldn't keep the anger out of her voice. "Which means ordinary citizens can sue the CIA to get at your secrets. But my husband disappears for four months and one week and turns up looking like he survived the Bataan death march and nobody—not you, not the people who work with you—will tell me what's going on."

Leo said, "That's the way it has to be, Adelle."

From things Jack had said—and not said—Adelle had figured out that the Company had done this to Leo. "You can't let them get away with it," she whispered.

Leo stared out the window, wondering how trees could be pushed so far over and still not break. He had been pushed over, too; like the trees, he had not broken. There had been days when he'd been tempted to sign the confession that Angleton left on the table during the interrogations; the morning he discovered the dead body of the Sphinx of Siberia, he would have killed himself if he could have figured out how to do it.

It was one month to the day since Jack and Ebby had turned up in his padded cell, a doctor and a nurse in tow, to set him free. "You've been cleared, old buddy," Jack had said. His voice had choked with emotion. "Angleton, all of us, made a horrible mistake."

Tears had welled in Ebby's eyes and he had had to look away while the doctor examined Leo. His hair, or what was left of it, had turned a dirty white, his bruised eye sockets had receded into his skull, a scaly eczema covered his ankles and stomach.

"Where are we here—Gestapo headquarters?" the doctor had remarked as he was taking Leo's pulse. He had produced a salve for the eczema and a concoction of vitamins in a plastic container, which Leo began sipping through a straw. "What in God's name did you guys think you were doing?"

Leo had answered for them. "They were defending the Company from its enemies," he had said softly. "They only just discovered I wasn't one of them."

"We were led up the primrose path," Ebby had said miserably. "Somehow we have to make it up to you."

Leo had plucked at Jack's sleeve while they were waiting for the nurse to return with a wheelchair. "How'd you figure it out?" he had asked.

"You figured it out," Jack had said. "You predicted the walk-in would never be fluttered. He wasn't. The Russians pulled him back to Moscow on a pretext, just the way you said they would. Then they arrested him. There was a trial and an execution. Only it all turned out to be theater. We found out the walk-in was still among the living, which meant his serials were planted. For some reason they wanted Angleton to decide you were SASHA."

"Trying to throw him off the scent of the real SASHA," Leo had guessed.

"That's as good an explanation as I've heard," Jack had said.

"And Angleton? Does he admit—"

"His days are numbered. Colby is offering him a Chief of Station post to get him out of Washington. Angleton's hanging on to counterintelligence with his fingernails. He's mustering his troops but there aren't many of them left. Skinny is the Director's trying to work up the nerve to fire him."

"Not Angleton's fault," Leo had said.

Leo's lucidity had unnerved Ebby. "After what you've been through how can you, of all people—"

"Heard you say it more than once, Eb. If something's worth doing, worth doing badly. Can't run counterintelligence wearing kid gloves. It's a dirty job. Mistakes inevitable. Important not to be afraid of making them."

Leo had been helped to his feet by Jack and Ebby. Before allowing himself to be taken from the room, he had shuffled over to the toilet and reached down behind the pipes to recover the corpse of the moth he had hidden there. "If only you'd held out a bit longer," he had whispered, "you would have been set free."

Now, in the third-floor room of the private sanatorium, Adelle filled two cups with steaming coffee. She gave one to Leo at the window and pulled over a chair to sit next to him. "I wasn't going to hit you over the head until you'd had a chance to mend," she said. "But I think we have to talk about it—"

"Talk about what?"

"Your attitude. Jack let slip that the legal people came by to offer you a package settlement."

"Jack ought to learn to keep his lips buttoned."

"He and the others—they're all kind of awed by your attitude. You seem to have waived any claim to compensation."

"In any combat situation soldiers are wounded or killed by friendly fire all the time. I've never heard of any of them suing the government."

"There's no war on, Leo—"

"Dead wrong, Adelle. You were close enough to Lyndon Johnson to know there's a hell of a war raging out there. I was wounded by friendly fire. As soon as I'm well enough I plan to return to the battle."

Adelle shook her head incredulously. "After what you've been through— after what they put you through—after what I and the girls have been through!—you still refuse to quit the Company." She gazed out the window. After a while she said, "We honeymooned not far from here."

Leo nodded slowly. "We watched the sun rising over Chesapeake Bay..."

"Our life together began with two deaths—your dog and my cat. And then we turned our backs on death and went forward toward life." She started to choke up. "Everything happening at once... my father dying... you disappearing without a trace. I couldn't sleep, Leo... I stayed up nights wondering if you were alive, wondering if I'd ever see you again. All those nights, all those weeks, I felt that death was right behind me, looking over my shoulder. It can't go on like this, Leo. You have to choose—"

"Adelle, this conversation is a terrible mistake. You're too emotional. Give it time—"

"You can only have one of us, Leo—the Company or me."

"Please don't do this."

"I've made up my mind," she announced. "I tried to bring up the subject several times before you disappeared for four months. With you recovering in this clinic, I was only waiting for the right moment."

"There is no right moment for such conversations."

"That's true enough. So here we are, Leo. And I'm asking you the wrong question at the wrong moment. But I'm still asking. Which will it be?"

"I'll never quit the Company. It's what I do for a living, and what I do best—protecting America from its enemies."

"I loved you, Leo."

He noticed the past tense. "I still love you."

"You don't love me. Or if you do, you love other things more." She stood up. "You can keep the house—I'll move into Daddy's. If you have a change of heart..."

"My heart won't change—it's still with you, Adelle. With you and with the girls."

"But you've got this zealot's head on your shoulders and it overrules your heart—that's it, isn't it, Leo?" She collected her duffle coat from the foot of the bed and headed for the door. She looked back at the threshold to see if he would say something to stop her. They eyed each other across the chasm that separated them. Behind Leo, nature's riot whipped angrily at the panes of the storm window. Flicking tears away with a knuckle, Adelle turned on a heel and walked out of her twenty-three year marriage.

Nellie, looking radiant in a flaming-orange body-hugging knee-length dress with long sleeves and a high collar, clung to Manny's arm as the Justice of the Peace carefully moistened the official seal with his breath, and then stamped and signed the marriage certificate. "Reckon that 'bout does it," he announced. "Never could figure out at which point in the ceremony you're actually hitched but you sure as shootin' are now. You want to put the certificate into one of these leather frames, it'll run you ten dollars extra."

"Sure, we'll take the frame," Manny said.

Nellie turned to her mother and Ebby, who were standing behind them. "So the dirty deed is done," she told them with a giggle.

Jack, Millie, and their son, Anthony, came up to congratulate the newlyweds. Half a dozen of Manny's friends from the Soviet Division, along with their wives or girl friends, crowded around. Leo, on a day's furlough from the private sanatorium, waited his turn, then kissed the bride and shook Manny's hand. He nodded at them and it took a moment or two before he could find words. "I wish you both a long and happy life together," he said softly.

Elizabet called out, "Everyone's invited back to our place for Champagne and caviar."

"I'm going to get high on Champagne," Anthony announced.

"No, you're not, young man," Jack said.

Anthony, showing off for his godfather, persisted, "Don't tell me you never got drunk when you were a teenager."

"What I did when I was fourteen and what you do when you're fourteen are two different kettles of fish," Jack informed his son.

Elizabet handed out sachets of birdseed (on the instructions of Nellie, who had heard that rice swelled in the stomachs of birds and killed them), and the guests bombarded the newlyweds as they emerged from the front door. The wedding guests brought around their cars and, horns honking, followed Manny's Pontiac with the empty beer cans trailing from the rear bumper back toward Ebby's house. In the last car, Anthony eyed his godfather's white hair, which had grown back into a stubbly crew cut. "Dad says you've been through the ringer, Leo," the boy said. "How much can you tell me?"

Leo, concentrating on the road, said, "Jack's already told you more than I would have."

"I don't have a need to know, right?"

"You're making progress, Anthony."

"Yeah, well, as I plan to make the CIA my life's work I've got to learn the ropes early." He watched Leo drive for a while, then said, "There are four or five of us at my school who have parents working at Langley. Sometimes we get together after school and trade information. Naturally, we make sure nobody can overhear us—"

With a straight face, Leo asked, "Do you sweep the room for microphones?"

Anthony was taken aback. "You think we ought to?"

"I wouldn't put it past the KGB—bug the kids in order to find out what the parents are up to."

"Do you guys do that in Moscow with the kids of KGB people?" Anthony waved a hand. "Hey, sorry. I don't have a need to know. So I take back the question."

"What did you find out at these bull sessions of yours?"

"We read about Manny being traded for the low-level Russian spy in the papers, so we kicked that around for a while. One kid whose dad forges signatures said he'd overheard his father telling his mother that the Russian spy was much more important than the CIA let on. A girl whose mother works as a secretary on the seventh floor told her husband that a task force had been set up to deal with something that was so secret they stamped all their paperwork NODIS, which means no distribution whatsoever except to the Director Central Intelligence and a designated list of deputies."

Leo said, "I know what NODIS means, Anthony." When he returned to Langley he would have to circulate a toughly worded all-hands memorandum warning Soviet Division officers not to talk shop at home. "What else did your group discuss?"

"What else? A girl I know's father who is a lie defector specialist said that someone code-named Mother had called him in to polygraph a high-ranking CIA officer who was being held in a secret—"

Suddenly Anthony's mouth opened and his face flushed with embarrassment.

"Held in a secret what?"

Anthony went on in an undertone. "In a secret cell somewhere in Washington."

"And?"

"And the person's hair had become white as snow and started to fall out in clumps—"

A stoplight on the avenue ahead turned red. The car in front ran it but Leo pulled up. He looked at his godson. "Welcome to the frontier that separates childhood from adulthood. If you really plan on joining the CIA some day, this is the moment to cross that frontier. Right here, right now. The problem with secrets is that they're hard to keep. People let them slip out so that others will be impressed by how much they know. Learn to keep the secrets, Anthony, and you might actually have a shot at a CIA job. We're not playing games at Langley. What you've figured out—nobody has a need to know."

Anthony nodded solemnly. "My lips are sealed, Leo. Nobody will hear it from me. I swear it."

"Good."

Ebby and Elizabet were handing out long-stemmed glasses filled with Champagne when Leo and Anthony finally arrived. Leo helped himself to a glass and handed a second one to Anthony. Jack said, "Hey, Leo, he's only a kid—he shouldn't be drinking."

"He was a kid when he started out this afternoon," Leo replied. "On the way here he crossed the line into manhood."

"To the bride and groom," Ebby said, raising his glass. "To the bride and groom," everyone repeated in chorus. Leo clicked glasses with Anthony. The boy nodded and the two of them sipped Champagne.

Later, as Manny was struggling to open another bottle, Ebby came back downstairs from his den. He was carrying a small package wrapped in plain brown paper, which he handed to his son. "This is my wedding present to you," he told him. With everyone looking on, Manny tore the paper off the package to reveal a beautifully crafted mahogany box that Ebby had had made to order years before. Manny opened the box. Fitted into the red felt was a British Webley Mark VI revolver with "1915" engraved in the polished wood of the grip. Manny knew the story of the weapon—it was the revolver that the young Albanians had presented to Ebby before they set off on their fatal mission to Tirane. He hefted the weapon, then looked up at his father. Watching from the side, Elisabet brought the back of a fist to her mouth. "Consider this a sort of passing of the torch," Ebby said.

Manny said, "Thanks, Dad. I know what this gun means to you. I will never forget where you got it. And I will always be true to it."

Anthony whispered to Leo, "Where did he get the gun, Leo?" He spotted the knowing smile on his godfather lips and smiled back. "Hey, forget I asked, huh?"

Leo drove down Dolly Madison Boulevard in McLean, Virginia, past the "CIA Next Right" sign that was swiped so often by souvenir hunters the Company ordered replacements by the dozen, and turned off at the next intersection. Braking to a stop at the gatehouse, he rolled down the window and showed the laminated card identifying him as a CIA officer to one of the armed guards. (Leo's appearance had altered so drastically that Jack had taken the precaution of providing him with new ID bearing a more recent photograph.) Driving slowly down the access road, he saw the statue of Nathan Hale (put there on the initiative of Director Colby) outside the front entrance as he pulled around to the ramp leading to the basement garage reserved for division heads and higher. Leo reached for his laminated card but the guard manning the control booth waved to indicate he recognized the Soviet Division chief. "Glad to see you back, Mr. Kritzky," he called over the loudspeaker. "The Director asked for you to come straight on up to his office when you got in."

Waiting for the Director's private elevator to descend, Leo could hear the secret printing press humming in a room at the back of the garage; at the height of the Cold War it had worked twenty hours a day turning out birth certificates, foreign passports and driver's licenses, along with bogus copies of newspapers and propaganda handbills. When the doors opened, Leo stepped in and hit the only button on the stainless steel panel, starting the elevator up toward the Director's seventh floor suite of offices. His head was bowed in thought as the elevator slowed. He was a bit nervous about what he'd find on this first day back on the job. Jack had filled him in on the storm brewing over Angleton's HT/LINGUAL mail opening operation; a New York Times reporter named Seymour Hersh had gotten wind of the illegal project, which had been running for twenty years before Colby finally closed it down in 1973, and was going to break the story any day now. Everyone topside was bracing for the explosion and the inevitable fallout.

The elevator doors slid open. Leo heard a ripple of applause and raised his eyes and realized that he had walked into a surprise party. Colby, Ebby and Jack stood in front of half a hundred or so staffers, including many from Leo's own Soviet Division. Jack's wife and Manny were off to one side, applauding with the others and smiling. Few of those present knew where Leo had been, but they only had to catch a glimpse of the reed of a man coming off the elevator to realize that he had returned from a hell on earth. He had lost so much weight that his shirt and suit were swimming on him. Shaken, Leo looked around in bewilderment. He spotted dozens of familiar faces—but Jim Angleton's was not among them. Leo's personal secretary and several of the women from the Soviet Division had tears in their eyes. The Director stepped forward and pumped his hand. The applause died away.

"On behalf of my colleagues, I want to take this opportunity to welcome back one of our own," Colby said. "Leo Kritzky's devotion to duty, his loyalty to the Company, his grace under fire, have set a high standard for us and for future generations of CIA officers. It is in the nature of things that only a handful here are aware of the details of your ordeal. But all of us"—the Director waved an arm to take in the crowd—"owe you a debt of gratitude."

There was another ripple of applause. When the crowd had quieted down Leo spoke into the silence. His voice was husky and low and people had to strain to hear him. "When I came aboard what we used to call Cockroach Alley, some twenty-four years ago, it was with the intention of serving the country whose system of governance seemed to offer the best hope to the world. As a young man I imagined that this service would take the form of initiating or becoming involved in dramatic feats of espionage or counterespionage. I have since come to understand that there are other ways of serving, no less important than reporting to the trenches of the espionage war. As the poet John Milton said, 'They also serve who only stand and wait.' Director, I appreciate the welcome. Now I think I'd like to get back to my division and my desk, and get on with the tedious day-to-day business of winning the Cold War."

There was more applause. The Director nodded. People drifted away. Finally only Jack and Ebby remained. Ebby stood there shaking his head in admiration. Jack opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it and raised a finger in salute. He and Ebby headed back toward the DD/O's shop on the seventh floor.

Leo took a deep breath. He was home again, and relieved to be.

Angleton was on the carpet, figuratively as well as literally. "What did you tell this Hersh fellow?" he demanded.

Colby had come around the side of his enormous desk and the two men, standing toe to toe, confronted each other. "I told him HT/LINGUAL was a counterintelligence program targeting the foreign contacts of American dissidents, that it had been fully authorized by the President, that in any case the whole mail-opening program had been terminated."

Angleton said bitterly, "In other words you confirmed that we opened mail."

"I didn't need to confirm it," Colby said. "Hersh knew it already."

"He didn't know it was a counterintelligence program," Angleton snapped. "You pointed the finger at me."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Jim, but HT/LINGUAL was your brainchild. Your people opened the envelopes. Your people indexed the names of three hundred thousand Americans who sent or received mail from the Soviet Union over a period of twenty years."

"We had reason to believe the KGB was using ordinary mail channels to communicate with their agents in America. We would have been chumps to let them get away with this because of some silly laws—"

Colby turned away. "These silly laws, as you call them, are what we're defending, Jim."

Angleton patted his pockets, hunting for cigarettes. He found one and jammed it between his lips but was too distracted to light up. "It is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of that government."

Colby peered out a window at the Virginia countryside. A thin haze seemed to rise off the fields. From the seventh floor of Langley it looked as if the earth were smoldering. "Let's be clear, Jim. The role of counterintelligence is to initiate penetrations into the Russian intelligence services and to debrief defectors. As for uncovering Soviet penetrations within the CIA, well, we have the entire Office of Security to protect us. That's their job. Now, how many operations are you running against the Soviets? I never heard of a single one. You sit in that office of yours and, with the exception of Kukushkin, shoot down every single Soviet defector who is recruited by luck or good intelligence work. And the one you don't shoot down turns out to be a dispatched agent dangling false serials. The situation is quite impossible." Colby turned back to face Angleton. "The Times is running the Hersh story on your domestic spying operation the day after tomorrow. This is going to be tough to handle. We've talked about your leaving before. You will now leave, period."

Angleton snatched the unlit cigarette from between his bloodless lips. "Am I to understand that you are firing me, Director?"

"Let's just say that I'm retiring you."

Angleton started toward the door, then turned back. His lips moved but no sounds emerged. Finally he managed, "Philby and the KGB have been trying to destroy me for years—you're serving as their instrument."

"Counterintelligence will still exist, Jim."

"You're making a tragic mistake if you think anybody else can do what I do. To begin to thread your way through the Counterintelligence quagmire, you need eleven years of continuous study of old cases. Not ten years, not twelve but precisely eleven. And even that would make you only a journeyman Counterintelligence analyst."

Colby returned to his desk. "We'll do our best to muddle through without you, Jim. Thanks for stopping by on such short notice."

The Deputy Director/Intelligence and his second-in-command, the Deputy Director/Operations (Ebby) and his Chief of Operations (Jack), the various area division chiefs, Angleton representing Counterintelligence, along with senior representatives from the Office of Security, the Office of Technical Services and the Political Psychological Division had crowded into the small conference room across from the DCI's office for the regular Friday nine o'clock tour de horizon. The deputy head of the Political Psychological Division, a dead pipe clenched in his jaws, was winding up a thumbnail portrait of the Libyan dictator Muammar Al-Qaddafi, who had recently pushed world crude prices up by cutting back on oil exports. "Popular belief to the contrary not withstanding," he was saying, "Qaddafi is certainly not psychotic, and for the most part is in touch with reality. He has what we would call a borderline personality disorder, which means that the subject behaves crazily one day and rationally the next."

"Strikes me as a fairly accurate description of some of us," the Director quipped, drawing a chuckle from the troops around the table.

"If the KGB has a psychological division, that's exactly how they would have diagnosed Nixon when he invaded Cambodia in 1970," remarked Leo, who was sitting in on his first regular topside session since his return to Langley.

"Seems to me that this is precisely the kind of personality a leader needs to project," Ebby pointed out. "That way the opposition can't count on being able to predict what he'll do in any given situation."

Jack said, "The question is: Are the Qaddafis and the Nixons suffering from borderline personality disorders—or just trying to convince each other that they are?"

The Director, presiding from the head of the table, glanced at his watch. "We'll put that intriguing question on a back burner for now. I have one more matter to raise before we break up. I want to announce, to my great regret, the retirement of Jim Angleton here. I don't need to tell anyone in this room that his contributions to the Company in general, and Counterintelligence in particular, are nothing short of legendary. His service to the United States, which goes back to his days at Ryder Street in London during the war, are a matter of record. I accepted Jim's resignation with deep regret. But he's an old warhorse and if anyone deserves a pasture, he does."

Colby's announcement was greeted with stunned silence; an earthquake under the foundations of Langley wouldn't have shaken the people gathered around the table more. Ebby and Jack studiously avoided looking at each other. Several of the Barons couldn't resist glancing at Leo Kritzky, who was staring out a window, lost in thought. The Director smiled across the table at the chief of Counterintelligence. "Would you care to say a word, Jim?" he asked.

Angleton, a lonely and skeletal figure of a man at the bitter end of a long and illustrious career, slowly pushed himself to his feet. He raised one palm to his forehead to deal with the migraine lurking behind his eyes. "Some of you have heard my Nature of the threat presentation before. For those who haven't I can think of no more appropriate swan song."

Angleton cleared his throat. "Lenin once remarked to Feliks Dzerzhinsky: 'The West are wishful thinkers, so we will give them what they want to think."' Avoiding eye contact with the Company Barons around the table, Angleton droned on. "When I worked at Ryder Street," he said, "I learned that the key to playing back captured German agents was orchestration—where layer upon layer of confirming disinformation supports the deception. This is what the Soviets have been doing for years—as part of a master plan they've been feeding layer upon layer of mutually reinforcing disinformation to the wishful thinkers in the West. They achieve this through the sophisticated use of interlocking agents-in-place and dispatched defectors. I have determined that the British Labor leader Hugh Gaitskell, who died in 1963 of lupus disseminata, was murdered by KGB wetwork specialists. They employed the Lupus virus as an assassination weapon so that Moscow could insert its man, Harold Wilson, into the Labor post and position him to become Prime Minister, which is the job he holds today. Wilson, who made many trips to the Soviet Union before becoming Prime Minister, is a paid agent of the KGB. Olaf Palme, the current Swedish Prime Minister, is a Soviet asset recruited during a visit to Latvia. Willy Brandt, the current West German chancellor, is a KGB agent. Lester Pearson, the Canadian Prime Minister until two years ago, is a KGB agent. Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, is a longtime Soviet agent. Averell Harriman, the former ambassador to the USSR and the former governor of New York State, has been a Soviet agent since the 1930s. Henry Kissinger, the National Security Adviser and Secretary of State under Nixon, is objectively a Soviet agent. What these agents-in-place have in common is that they all advocate and defend, which is to say orchestrate, the Soviet strategy of detente. Make no mistake about it, gentlemen, detente, along with such Soviet-inspired chimera as the Sino-Soviet split, the Yugoslav or Rumanian deviations, the Albanian defection, the Italian Communist Party's presumed independence from Moscow, are part of a master disinformation scheme designed to destabilize the West, to lure us into thinking that the Cold War has been won."

Several of the Barons around the table glanced uneasily at the Director. Colby, who had anticipated a short valedictory, didn't have the heart to interrupt Angleton.

"Dubcek's so-called Prague Spring," Angleton plunged on, "was part of this disinformation campaign; the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was worked out by Brezhnev and Dubcek in advance. The differences between Moscow and the so-called Euro-Communists in Western Europe are phony, part of the KGB Disinformation Departments global theater."

The counterintelligence chief scoured his bone-dry lips with the back of a hand. "If the facts I have outlined have been questioned at the highest level within our own intelligence organization, it can be said that this is the handiwork of the Soviet mole inside the CIA code named SASHA, who has twisted the evidence and caused many in this room to overlook the obvious menace. Which brings me to the greatest Soviet plot of all—one designed to ravage the economies of the Western industrial nations, bringing on civil unrest that will ultimately result in the triumph of the Moscow-oriented left in national elections. I have determined that the mastermind of this long-term KGB plot is none other than the almost mythical controlling officer who directed the activities of Adrian Philby, and today directs the activities of SASHA. He is known only as Starik—in Russian, the Old Man. The plot he has been concocting for at least the last ten years, and possibly longer, involves siphoning off hard currency from the sale of Soviet gas and oil and armaments abroad, and laundering these sums in various off-shore banking institutions against the day when he will use the vast sum that he has accumulated to attack the dollar. Ha, don't suppose that I can't see your reactions—you think this is far-fetched." Angleton's eyelids began to flutter. "I have discovered that the Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, is investigating reports that the Vatican Bank has been receiving mysterious deposits and sending the money on to a variety of off-shore accounts. The money-laundering operation bears the Russian code name KHOLSTOMER. The English equivalent is STRIDER—it's the nickname of the piebald gelding in Tolstoys 'Strider: The Story of a Horse.'"

Shaking himself out of a near-trance, Angleton opened his eyes and began to speak more rapidly, as if he were running out of time. "Obviously these serials—Gaitskell, Wilson, Paime, Brandt, Pearson, Hollis, Harriman, Kissinger, Starik, KHOLSTOMER—weren't handed to me on a silver platter. Far from it. I teased them out of the wilderness of mirrors during thousands of hours of painstaking attention to the minutiae that nobody else bothers with. The process, like the art of fly-fishing, requires infinite patience. Oh, some people would have you think that all you have to do is go out there and toss a fly onto the river and you'll wind up with a trout. But it's not that way at all, gentlemen. You can take my word for it. The first thing you have to do if you want to catch the mythical brown giant of a trout that swims the upper reaches of the Brule is to observe what the fish are feeding on." Angleton was leaning over the table now, eager to share his professional secrets with his colleagues. "You catch a small trout, you slit it open, you empty the contents of the stomach into a celluloid cup. And when you see what it's been feeding on, you fashion a fly that resembles it. You can give the illusion of a real fly with the coloring of your hackle and wings and all the feathers you put on it. And it will float down the river with its hackles cupped up, and if you do it correctly, the trout really believes that it is a fly. And that, gentlemen," he announced triumphantly, "is how you get a strike..."

The Director stood up and said, very quietly, "Thank you, Jim."

Looking preoccupied, Colby turned and walked out of the room. One by one the others followed him until only Leo and Angleton were left.

"I know it's you," Angleton murmured. His brow was pleated in pain. "I see the whole thing clearly now—you really are SASHA. Kukushkin was sent over by Starik to feed me serials that would lead me to you because he knew it was only a matter of time before I teased your identity out of the wilderness. Then Starik organized the mock trial and execution knowing we would walk back the cat and discover that Kukushkin was still alive. Which would free you and undermine my credibility. The whole thing was a KGB plot to ruin me before I could identify SASHA... before I could expose KHOLSTOMER."

Leo scraped back his chair and rose. "I bear you no hard feelings, Jim. Good luck to you."

As Leo walked out the door, Angleton was still talking to himself. "The trick, you see, is to cast as far as you can and let the fly float back down stream with its hackles cupped up, and from time to time you give it a little twitch"—his wrist flicked an imaginary rod—"so that it dances on the surface of the water. And if you are subtle enough and deft enough, above all if you don't rush things, why, the son of a gun will snap at it and you'll have your trout roasting on the spit for supper..."

His voice faded as he settled heavily into the chair and braced himself for the lesser pain of the inevitable migraine.

The red bulb burning in the darkroom had turned Starik's skin fluorescent—for an instant he had the eerie feeling that his hands resembled those on the embalmed corpse of Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square. Under Starik's lucent fingers, details began to emerge on the twelve-by-fifteen black-and-white print submerged in the shallow pan filled with developer. Using a pair of wooden tongs, he pulled the paper out of the bath and held it up to the red light. It was underexposed, too washed out; the details that he had hoped to capture were barely visible.

Developing the film and printing enlargements had calmed Starik down. He had returned from the showdown in the Kremlin in a rage, and had actually spanked one of the nieces on her bare bottom for the minor transgression of wearing lipstick. (He had fired the maid who had given it to her.) Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the rising star in the Soviet hierarchy, had lost his nerve, and no amount of persuasion could induce him change his mind. Starik had first briefed Brezhnev on KHOLSTOMER the year before. The First Secretary had been impressed with the meticulous planning that had gone into the project over a twenty-year period; impressed also by the fact that sizable sums of hard currency had been squirreled away with infinite patience and in relatively small doses so as not to attract the attention of the Western intelligence services. The potential of KHOLSTOMER had staggered Brezhnev, who suddenly saw himself presiding over the demise of the bourgeois capitalist democracies and the triumph of Soviet Socialism across the globe. The history books would elevate him to a position alongside Marx and Lenin; Brezhnev would be seen as the Russian ruler who led the Soviet Union to victory in the Cold War.

All of which made his current reticence harder to fathom. Starik had gotten approval for the project from his immediate superior, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, as well as the Committee of Three, the secret Politburo panel that vetted intelligence initiatives, then gone to the Kremlin to clear the final hurdle. He had argued his case to Brezhnev with cool passion. American inflation was soaring and consumers were feeling the pinch:, sugar, for instance, had doubled to thirty-two cents a pound. The Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted to 570, down from 1003 two years earlier. The hike in crude oil prices after the 1973 Middle East war (to $11.25 a barrel, up from $2.50 at the beginning of that year) made the American economy particularly fragile; an attack on the dollar stood a good chance of accelerating the crisis and throwing the economy into a recessionary spiral from which it would never recover. On top of everything, the single American who might have exposed Soviet intentions had been discredited and sent into retirement. Conditions for launching KHOLSTOMER couldn't be more propitious.

Tucked into a wicker wheelchair with a blanket drawn up to his armpits and a small electric heater directed at his feet, wearing a fur-lined silk dressing gown buttoned up to the neck, Brezhnev had heard Starik out and then had slowly shaken his massive head. Khrushchev had attempted to destabilize the Americans when he installed medium-range missiles in Cuba, the First Secretary had reminded his visitor. Starik knew as well as he did how that episode had ended. John Kennedy had gone to the brink of war and a humiliated Khrushchev had been forced to withdraw the missiles. The Politburo— Brezhnev in the forefront—had drawn the appropriate conclusions and, two years later, had packed Khrushchev off into forced retirement.

Brezhnev had kicked aside the electric heater and had wheeled himself out from behind his vast desk equipped with seven telephones and a bulky English dictaphone. His bushy eyebrows arched in concentration, his jowls sagging in anxiety, he had informed Starik that he didn't intend to end up like Khrushchev. He had given KHOLSTOMER his careful consideration and had become convinced that an economically weakened America would react to an attack on the dollar like a cornered cat, which is to say that Washington would provoke a war with the Soviet Union in order to save the American economy. Don't forget, he had lectured Starik, it was the Great War that had saved the American economy from the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929. When the economy needed boosting, so the Kremlin's Americanologists argued, the capitalists invariably turned to war.

Brezhnev had not closed the door entirely on KHOLSTOMER. Perhaps in five or seven years, when the Soviet Union had built up its second strike capacity to the point where it could deter an American first strike he would be willing to take another look at the project. In any case it was a good card to keep up his sleeve, if only to prevent the Americans from one day attacking the Soviet economy in a similar way.

Now, in his attic photography shop at Apatov Mansion in Cheryomuski, Starik set the timer on the Czech enlarger to seven seconds, then exposed the photographic paper and slipped it into the pan filled with developer. After a while details began to emerge. First came the nostrils, then the eye sockets and oral cavities, finally the rosebud-like nipples on the flat chests of the bony klieg-scrubbed bodies. Using wooden tongs, Starik extracted the print from the bath and slipped it into a pan of fixative. Studying the washed-out enlargement, he decided that he was reasonably pleased with the finished product.

In a curious way photography had a lot in common with intelligence operations. The trick with both was to visualize the picture before you took it, then attempt to come as close as possible to what had been in your imagination. To succeed required endless patience. Starik consoled himself with the notion that his patience would pay off when it came to KHOLSTOMER, too. Brezhnev wouldn't be around forever. He had suffered a series of mild strokes earlier in the year (caused, according to a secret KGB report, by arteriosclerosis of the brain) that left him incapacitated for weeks on end. Since then an ambulance manned by doctors who specialized in resuscitation accompanied him everywhere. Andropov, who had been head of the KGB since 1967 and a member of the Politburo since 1973, had already confided to Starik that he saw himself as Brezhnev's logical successor. And Andropov was an ardent champion of KHOLSTOMER.

The first December blizzard was howling outside the storm windows when Starik settled onto the great bed that night to read the nieces their bedtime story. Electricity cables, heavy with ice, had sagged to the ground, cutting all power to the Apatov Mansion. A single candle burned on the night table. Angling the frayed page toward the flickering light, Starik came to the end of another chapter.

"Alice ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree. 'It can never get at me here,' she thought: 'it's far too large to squeeze itself in among the trees. But I wish it wouldn't flap its wings so—it makes quite a hurricane in the wood."'

The nieces, snuggling together in a tangle of limbs, sighed as if with one voice. "Oh, do read us a tiny bit more," begged Revolucion.

"Yes, uncle, you must because we are too frightened by what was chasing Alice to fall asleep," Axinya insisted.

"If you will not read to us," pleaded the angelic blonde Circassian who had been spanked for wearing lipstick, "at least remain for a long while with us."

Starik moved to get up from the bed. "I am afraid I still have files to read," he said.

"Stay, stay, oh, do stay," the girls cried altogether. And they clutched playfully at the hem of his nightshirt.

Smiling, Starik tore himself free. "To become drowsy, girlies, you must plunge deeper into the wonder of Alice's Wonderland."

"How in the world can we do that if you will not read to us?" Revolucion inquired.

"It is not terribly difficult," Starik assured them. He leaned over the night table and blew out the candle, pitching the room into utter darkness. "Now you must try, all of you, each in her own imagination, to fancy what the flame of a candle would look like after the candle is blown out."

"Oh, I can see it!" exclaimed the blonde Circassian.

"It is ever so pretty," Revolucion agreed, "drifting across the mind's eye."

"The flame after the candle is blown out looks awfully like the light of a distant star with planets circling around it," Axinya said dreamily. "One of the planets is a wonderland where little nieces eat looking-glass cakes and remember things that happened the week after next."

"Oh, let's do go there quickly," Revolucion cried eagerly.

"Only close your eyes, girlies," Starik said gruffly, "and you will be on your way to Alice's planet."

INTERLUDE

THE CALABRIAN

Alice thought with a shudder, "I wouldn't have been the messenger for anything!"

CIVITAVECCHIA, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1978

AT 6:40 A.M., UNDER A BLEAK SKY, SAILORS ON THE FIVE-THOUSAND ton Vladimir Ilyich singled up all lines and cast off from the pier. The moment the ship was no longer attached to land, a whistle sounded. The deckhand standing at the stern pole lowered the Soviet flag as a signalman raised another on a halyard. An Italian tug pulled the bow out and cast off the hawser, and the freighter, loaded with a cargo of Fiat engines, heavy lathes and refrigerators, slipped out on the morning tide toward the open sea. On the flying bridge, atop the wheel house, a reed-like figure with a wispy white beard watched as the Italian coast transformed itself into a faint smudge on the horizon. Starik had been up since midnight, drinking endless cups of instant espresso in the dockside warehouse as he waited for the messenger to bring word that the threat to KHOLSTOMER had been eliminated. Seventeen minutes after three, a dirty yellow Fiat minicab had drawn up before the side door. The Calabrian, walking with a perceptible limp, had come into the room. A man of few words, he had nodded at Starik and had said, "La cosa e fatta." Starik's niece, a wafer-thin half-Italian, half-Serbian creature called Maria-Jesus, had translated into Russian. "He tells you," she said, thrilled to be useful to Uncle, "the thing is done."

From the deep pockets of a Dominican cassock, the Calabrian retrieved the small metal kit with the syringe, the tumbler with traces of doped milk, the phial that had contained uncontaminated milk, the surgeon's gloves and the lock-pick, and set them on a table. Then he handed the Russian a brown dossier with the words KHOLSTOMER printed in Roman letters on the cover. Starik motioned with a finger and the girl handed the Calabrian a sailor's canvas duffle bag containing $1 million in used bills of various denominations. The Calabrian opened the flaps and fingered the packets of bills, each bound by a thick rubber band. "If you again need my services " he said, "you will know how to find me."

Standing in the wheel house of the Vladimir Ilyich at first light, Starik had watched as the Master worked his way down the checklist for getting underway. The engine room telegraph was tested. The rudder was swung from port to starboard and back to midships. Sailors posted at the windlass phoned up to the bridge to say they were ready to trip the riding pawls and let go the anchors if an emergency arose. Deckhands in black turtleneck sweaters and oilskins prepared to single up the heavy lines dipped onto the bollards and retrieve the fenders.

While these preparations were going on, a small fishing boat fitted with powerful diesel engines quit a nearby quay. Once clear of the breakwater it turned due south in the direction of Palermo. Both the Calabrian and his Corsican taxi driver with the broken, badly set nose were on board. Peering through binoculars, Starik spotted them standing on the well deck; one was cupping the flame of a match so that the other could light a cigarette. Over the radio speaker in the pilothouse, a program of early morning Venetian mandolin music was interrupted for an important announcement. Maria-Jesus provided a running translation. There were reports, so far unconfirmed, that Pope John Paul I, known as Albino Luciani when he was the Patriarch of Venice, had suffered a cardio-something attack during the night. The last rites of the church had been administered, leading some to speculate that the Pope, after a reign of only thirty-four days, was either dead or near death. Cardinals were said to be rushing to the Vatican from all over Italy. When the regular program resumed, the station switched to solemn funereal music. As the lines were being singled up on the Vladimir Ilyich, Starik raised the binoculars to his eyes again. The fishing boat was hull down already; only the lights on its mast and tackle were visible. Suddenly there was a muffled explosion, no louder than a distant motor coughing before it caught. Through the binoculars Starik could see the mast and tackle tilt crazily to one side, and then disappear altogether.

Filling his lungs with sea air, Starik fondled the back of Maria-Jesus's long neck. He craved one of his Bulgarian cigarettes; on the advice of a Centre doctor he had recently given up smoking. He comforted himself with the thought that there were other pleasures to be taken from life. Like Alice, he had run fast enough to stay in the same place; the messenger had been buried at sea and the Pope, who had made no secret of his intention to crack down on the money-laundering activities of the Vatican bank, would take the secrets of KHOLSTOMER with him to the grave. And in five days time Starik would be home with his adopted nieces, reading to them from the fable that taught the importance of believing six impossible things after breakfast.

PART FIVE

"Look, look!" Alice cried, pointing eagerly. "There's the White Queen running across the country! She came flying out of the wood over yonder— How fast those Queens can run!" "There's some enemy after her, no doubt," the King said, without even looking round. "That wood's full of them."

Snapshot: the amateur black-and-white photograph, which made front pages around the world, shows the two American hostages being held somewhere in Afghanistan by Commander Ibrahim, the legendary leader of the fundamentalist splinter group Islamic Jihad. The young woman, the well-known television journalist Maria Shaath, regards her captors with an impatient smile; one of her producers in New York said she looked as if she were worried about missing a deadline. Standing next to her, his back to a poster of the Golden Dome Mosque In Jerusalem, is the young American whom Islamic Jihad identified as a CIA officer and the US government insists is an attache assigned to the American consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan. The American stares into the camera with a detached, sardonic grin. Both prisoners appear pale and tired from their weeks in captivity.

1
PESHAWAR, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1983

SO MUCH DUST HAD BEEN KICKED UP ON THE DIRT FIELD NEXT TO THE sprawling Kachagan Refugee Camp that the spectators in the wooden bleachers heard the hoofbeats before they saw the horses. "The Pashtun tribesmen call the game buzkashi—literally 'goat-grabbing,'" Manny explained. He had to shout into Anthony's ear to be heard over the clamor of the crowd. On the field, twenty horsemen wheeled in a confused scrimmage, pushing and punching each other as they leaned from saddles to reach for something that had fallen to the ground. "Think of it as a rougher version of polo," Manny went on. "They toss a headless goat onto the field. Anything goes short of using knives. Your team gets points when you wrestle the carcass away from the other team and drop it into the scoring circle."

"How long does this go on?" inquired Anthony, newly arrived from Islamabad and still wearing the sweat-stained khaki suit and Clark boots he had traveled in.

Manny had to laugh. "It goes on nonstop until the horses or the riders collapse from exhaustion."

Anthony McAuliffe was a gangly twenty-three-year-old six-footer with open, rugged features and a mop of flaming-red hair, the spitting image of his father, Jack. He gazed across the field at the scores of young men sitting on a low wooden fence, passing joints (so Manny had said) from hand to hand as they egged on the riders of their favorite team. Suddenly Cornell's fraternity parties, basic training at the Farm, his initial tour of duty at Langley all seemed like images from a previous incarnation. Behind the bleachers, half-naked kids fought over a dead chicken as they imitated the adults on horseback. Beyond the playing field, Anthony could make out a mass of low mud houses stretching off as far as the eye could see. Back in Islamabad, the briefing book for officers posted to Peshawar said that so many refugees had come over the mountain passes from Afghanistan since the start of the jihad against the Soviet invasion, almost four years before, that the international agencies had given up trying to count them.

Manny must have noticed the expression on Anthony's face. "Culture shock is curable," he observed. "In a week or two all this will seem perfectly ordinary to you."

"That's one of the things I'm worried about," Anthony shot back.

A roar went up from the crowd as a rider wrenched the goat's carcass from the hands of an opponent and spurred his horse away. With a whoop the opposing team tore after him in hot pursuit. Once again the riders were lost in the dust billowing from the playing field. One of Manny's two bodyguards, a bearded tribesman wearing a thick woolen vest with a jeweled knife in his belt and a double-barreled shotgun under one arm, pointed to his watch. Manny led Anthony off the bleachers and the two started toward the parking lot. The second bodyguard, a giant of a man with a black turban around his head, brought up the rear. Manny's driver, slouched behind the wheel of an old Chevrolet, a joint sticking out of his mouth, came awake. "Where to, chief man?" he asked.

"Khyber Tea Room in Smugglers' Bazaar," Manny ordered as he and Anthony settled onto the rear seat. One of the bodyguards slid in next to Manny, the other rode shotgun up front.

"Where'd you scrounge these guys?" Anthony asked under his breath. "Central casting?"

"They're both Afridis, which is the tribe that controls the Khyber Pass," Manny said. "The one with the knife in his belt used to slit the throats of Russians the way Muslims slaughter goats for holy day feasts."

"How can you be sure he won't slit ours?"

"You can't." Manny patted the shoulder holster under his bush jacket. "Which is why I keep Betsy around."

Honking nonstop at bicycles and mobilettes and donkey carts and men pulling wheelbarrows filled with television sets or air conditioning units or electric typewriters, the driver turned west onto the Grand Trunk Road. They passed an ancient German bus, its red paint faded to a washed-out pink, the original sign ("Düsseldorf-Bonn") still visible above the front window, and several diesel trucks whose bodies had been repaired so often they resembled old women who had had one face lift too many. Manny pointed at the road ahead. "Khyber Pass starts twenty or so kilometers down there—Darius's Persians, Alexander's Greeks, Tamerlane's Tartars, Babur's Moguls all came through here."

"Now it's our turn," Anthony said.

Infantrymen armed with automatic rifles waved the car to a stop at a checkpoint. At the side of the road, a soldier in the back of a Toyota pickup truck trained a needle-thin machine gun on the Chevrolet. "Pakis," Manny murmured. "They control the road but their authority ends fifty meters on either side of it. Beyond that it's the mountain tribesmen who rule the roost."

"Shenasnameh," a Pak subaltern with the waxed whiskers and long sideburns of a British sergeant major barked. "Identity papers."

Manny produced a fistful of crisp twenty-dollar bills from a pocket and cracked the window enough to pass them through. The Pak soldier took the money and, moistening a thumb, slowly counted it. Satisfied, he saluted and waved the car through.

Smugglers' Bazaar, a warren of shack-like stalls selling everything under the sun, was swarming with tribesmen in shalwar qamiz—the traditional Afghan long shirt and baggy trousers. Wherever Anthony looked there was evidence of war: men with missing limbs hobbled on wooden crutches, a teenage girl tried to flag down a passing taxi with the stump of an arm, Pajero Jeeps crammed with bearded mujaheddin brandishing weapons roared off toward the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan, makeshift ambulances filled with the wounded and the dying raced with screaming sirens back toward Peshawar. In an empty lot between shacks, gun dealers had spread their wares on tarpaulins. There were neat rows of Israeli Uzis and American M-1s and both the Russian and Chinese versions of the AK-47, and every kind of pistol imaginable. Two Syrians had set up World War II machine guns on straw mats. Next to them, on another straw mat, a man wearing the dark flowing robes of a desert Bedouin was selling camouflage fatigues, cartridge belts and black combat boots. Mules loaded with green ammunition boxes were tied to a fence near a trough filled with muddy water. Afghan warriors with assault rifles slung over their shoulders strolled through the open-air market, inspecting weapons and haggling over the prices.

The Chevrolet turned onto a pitted side lane and bumped its way down it to a two-story wooden house with a sign over the door that read, in English: "Last drinkable tea before the Khyber Pass." Manny signaled for the bodyguards to remain with the car. He and Anthony crossed a narrow bridge over what smelled like an open sewer. "We're here to meet the Lion of Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Massoud," Manny explained. "He's a Tadzhik from the Panjshir Valley, which knifes north of Kabul all the way to the Tadzhik border. His people bear the brunt of the fighting against the Russians—the six other resistance groups spend a lot of their time fighting each other."

"So why don't we funnel the arms directly to him?" Anthony asked.

"The Pak Intelligence Directorate, the ISI, cornered the market on handing out American largess. Basically, they have other fish to fry—they want the war to end with a fundamentalist Afghanistan to strengthen their hand against India."

"I can see I've got a lot to learn," Anthony said.

"The Company has a lot to learn," Manny said. "I hope the report you'll write will open their eyes to a great many things."

Inside, a woman dressed in a shroud-like burqa squatted before a chimney and worked the bellows, heating the kettles suspended above the wood fire. In an alcove off to one side, an itinerant dentist was drilling into the tooth of an Afghan fighter who had come through the Khyber Pass with Massoud the night before. A teenage boy pedaling a bicycle welded into a metal frame ran the lathe that turned the drill in the dentist's fist. "Don't get a toothache here," Manny warned. "They fill cavities with molten shotgun pellets."

They climbed the narrow steps to the private room on the second floor. Two of Massoud's bodyguards stood outside the door. For some reason both of them had ear-to-ear grins splashed across their faces. The taller of the two cradled a vintage German MP-44 in his arms, the other had an enormous Czech pistol tucked into his waistband and held a small bamboo cage containing a yellow canary.

"The canary is the Afghan resistances early warning system," Manny said.

"Against what?"

"The bird'll keel over at the first whiff if the Russians use chemical or biological weapons."

Massoud, a thin, bearded man with a direct gaze and an angelic smile, rose off the prayer rug to greet the Company's Chief of Station at Peshawar. "Manny, my friend," he said, shaking his hand warmly and drawing him into the room. He gestured toward the prayer rugs scattered on the floor. "I am deeply glad to see you again."

Manny saluted Massoud in Dari, then switched to English so his American friend could follow the conversation. "Meet a comrade, Anthony McAuliffe," Manny said.

Massoud nodded once at him but didn't offer to shake hands. As the visitors settled cross-legged onto the rugs, a teenage girl with a shawl draped over her head shyly approached and filled two tin cups with khawa, the watery green tea that was standard fare in the tribal area.

Massoud made small-talk for a quarter of an hour—he brought Manny up to date on the shifting front lines inside Afghanistan and the Soviet order of battle, gave him the names of fighters he knew who had been killed or wounded in the three months since they last met, described a daring attack he had led against a Soviet air base in which three helicopters had been blown up and a Russian colonel had been taken prisoner. Manny wanted to know what had happened to the Russian. "We offered to trade him for the two mujaheddin who were taken prisoner in the raid," Massoud said. "The Russians sent them back alive and strapped to the saddles of pack animals, each with his right hand cut off at the wrist." Massoud shrugged. "We returned their colonel missing the same number of hands."

At dusk, wood-burning stoves were lighted in the stalls and a sooty darkness settled over the bazaar area. Massoud accepted another cup of green tea as he got down to business. "It is this way, Manny," he began. "The modern weapons that you give to the Pakistani Intelligence Directorate finish up in the hands of the Pakistani Army, which then passes down its old hardware to the mujaheddin. We go into battle against the Soviet invaders at a great disadvantage. The situation has gotten worse in the last months because the Russians are starting to employ spotter planes to direct the firepower of their helicopters."

"There are portable radars that could detect the helicopters."

Massoud shook his head. "They fly through the valleys at the height of the tops of trees and fall upon us without warning. Our anti-aircraft guns, our machine guns are of no use against their armor plating. A great many mujaheddin have been killed or wounded this way. Radar will not improve the situation. Heat-seeking Stingers, on the other hand—" He was referring to the shoulder-fired ground-to-air missile that could blow planes or helicopters out of the sky at a distance of three miles.

Manny cut him off. "Stingers are out of the question. We've asked our Pentagon people—they're afraid the missiles will wind up in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists once the war is won."

"Give them to me, Manny, and the fundamentalists will not rule Afghanistan when the Russians are defeated." Massoud leaned forward. "The group which defeats the Russians will decide the future of Afghanistan—if the United States of America wants a free and democratic state, you must support me."

"Your Tadzhiks are a minority ethnic group. You know as well as I do that we can't give you high-tech weapons without upsetting the delicate balance between the various resistance groups."

"If not the Stinger," Massoud pleaded, "then the Swiss Oerlikon—it has the fire power to bring down the Russian helicopters."

"The Oerlikon is the wrong weapon for a guerrilla war. Its armor-piercing ammunition is expensive, the guns themselves are very sophisticated and require complicated maintenance. Our people say the Oerlikon wouldn't be operational after the journey over the Khyber Pass."

"So what is left?" Massoud asked.

"Conventional weapons."

"And the most conventional of all weapons is the surrogate who fights your war for you."

"It's your country that was occupied by the Russians. It's your war."

"Bleeding the Soviets is in your interest—"

"Is there anything else on your shopping list?"

Throwing up a palm in defeat, Massoud pulled a scrap of paper from the pocket of his woolen pants. "Medical supplies, especially anesthesia and antibiotics. Artificial limbs, also—unless, of course, your Pentagon worries that they will end up on the bodies of fundamentalists when the Russians are defeated."

Manny scribbled notes to himself in a small spiral notebook. "I'll do what I can," he said.

Massoud rose gracefully to his feet. "I, too, will do what I can, Manny." He threw an arm over Manny's shoulder and steered him off to one side. "I have heard it said that the Peshawar KGB rezident, Fet, is trying to establish contact with Islamic fundamentalist groups, for what purpose I do not know. I thought this information would be of interest to you."

Manny said thoughtfully, "It is."

The Lion of Panjshir turned to Anthony and regarded him with a cheerless half-smile. "Afghanistan was once an unbelievably beautiful country," he said. "With the war a kind of gangrene has infected its arteries. Newcomers have a hard time seeing beyond the infection." The half-smile brightened into a full-blown smile; small lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes. "Try anyhow."

Anthony stood up. "I will," he vowed.

As the Chevrolet passed the airport on the way back to Peshawar, Manny pointed to the runway, visible behind a chain-link fence draped with Turkistan carpets, Bukhara silks and Kurdistan lambskins set out by street vendors. "Gary Powers's U-2 took off from here in 1960," he remarked.

"That's the year I was born," Anthony noted.

"I was thirteen at the time," Manny said. "I remember Ebby coming back from work looking as if he'd seen a ghost. When Elizabet asked him what'd happened, my father switched on the radio and we listened to the news bulletin in the kitchen—Francis Gary Powers had been shot down by a Soviet ground-to-air missile over Sverdlovsk. That's when I learned the expression 'When the shit hits the fan."'

They stopped at the fortress-like American consulate in the British Cantonment long enough for Manny to check the incoming traffic, then headed down Hospital Road, turned left onto Saddar and pulled up in the lot behind Dean's Hotel, the local watering hole for Peshawar's diplomats and journalists and visiting firemen. The armed chowkidar at the entrance, a clean-shaven Pashtun disfigured with napalm burn scars, recognized Manny and waved him and Anthony in but stopped the two Saudi civilians behind them to inspect their diplomatic passports. Manny led the way through the seedy lobby into the courtyard restaurant, snared a table just vacated by three Pakistanis and ordered an assortment of Chinese appetizers and two Murree beers from the Afghan boy waiting on tables. The appetizers were sizzling on the plates when a young woman with dark hair cut boyishly short slipped uninvited into a vacant chair. She was wearing khaki riding trousers tucked into soft ankle-high boots and a long, tight collarless cotton shirt buttoned up to the soft pale skin of her neck. She plucked some fried lamb from a plate with her fingertips and popped it into her mouth. "What did Massoud have to tell you that I don't already know?" she demanded.

"How do you know I saw Massoud?" Manny asked.

The young woman raised her very dark eyes, which were brimming with laughter. "I heard it from a rabid fundamentalist name of Osama bin Laden when I was drinking watered-down whiskey at the Pearl bar." She produced a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and, when the two men declined, stabbed one into her mouth and lit it with a small silver lighter. "Have your paths crossed?"

When Manny shook his head no, she said, "Doesn't surprise me—he loathes the West as much as he loathes Russians, and America symbolizes the West. Bearded guy, thirtyish, gaunt, with a gleam of icy charm where his eyes ought to be. He's a full-time fund raiser for several of the mujaheddin groups. You guys might want to save string on him—the word on bin Laden is he inherited a few hundred million from his Saudi father and has big plans about how to spend it."

Manny flashed a knowing look in Anthony's direction. "Say hello to Maria Shaath, who has more balls than a lot of her male colleagues. She's famous for turning to the camera on a battlefield and saying: 'Afghanistan is a place where armed children with long memories set out to right wrongs done to the great-grandfarners of their grandfathers.' Maria, meet Anthony McAuliffe."

Anthony said, "I've seen you on TV."

Maria fixed her straightforward gaze on Anthony. "Another spook?" she asked sweetly.

Anthony cleared his throat. "I'm an attache at the American consulate."

"Yeah, sure, and I'm Maria Callas, come to entertain the mujaheddin at the Khyber Pass with arias from Italian operas." She turned back to Manny "He's green behind the ears—tell him the score."

"He's been flown in to work up a report on the weapon pipeline— the people who pay our salaries want to know how much of what they send to the Pak ISI is getting through to the folks actually shooting at Russians."

Maria helped herself to Anthony's mug of beer, then wiped her lips on the back of her small fist. "I could have saved you the trip out," she said. "The answer is precious little. Buy me dinner and I'll let you pick my brain." And she smiled a tight-lipped smile.

"Afghanistan is a can of worms," she said over a bowl filled with what the menu billed as chop suey. "It's a place where you can trade a copy of Playboy for a bottle of fifteen-year-old Scotch whiskey, and get your throat cut if you're caught sleeping with your feet pointed toward Mecca. Actually, there are a lot of overlapping wars going on: ethnic wars, clan wars, tribal wars, drug wars, religious wars, the Iranian Shi'ites versus the Afghan Sunni, taleb studying the Koran in their Pak medressas versus the Afghan diaspora in the secular universities, Massoud's Tadzhiks versus everyone, Saudi Wahhabi versus the Iraqi Sunnis, capitalists with a small C versus Communists with a capital C, Pakistan versus India."

"You left out the last but not least," Manny said. "The Afghan freedom fighters versus the Russians."

"There's that war, too, though sometimes it gets lost in the shuffle. Look, the truth of the matter is that the Americans only vaguely understand what's going on and, more often than not, wind up backing the wrong horse. You need to stop looking for quick fixes to long-term problems.

"We're not going to give them Stinger missiles, if that's what you mean," Manny insisted.

"You will," Maria predicted. "In the end the itch to get even for Vietnam will overwhelm sweet reason. Then, when the war's over the bin Ladens will turn whatever weapons you give them against you."

Anthony asked, "What would you do if you were the American President?"

"First off, I'd stop supplying weapons to the former Peugeot salesman who claims to be a descendant of the Prophet. I'd give the cold-shoulder to splinter groups which want to create the perfect Islamic state modeled after the seventh-century Caliphate."

"Are you saying Russian rule in Afghanistan is the lesser of two evils?" Anthony wanted to know.

"I'm saying you're laying the groundwork for the next disaster by settling for the quickest solution to the last disaster. I'm saying hang in there. I'm saying the journey isn't over until you've copulated with the camel."

Manny pulled a face. "Copulating with a camel is a high price to pay for getting where you're going."

Maria batted her slightly; Asian eyes. "Don't knock it if you haven't tried it."

Manny said, "Are you speaking from experience?"

Marie shot back, "Bilagh!"

Manny translated for Anthony. "That's the Persian equivalent of 'fuck you.'"

Laughing to herself, Maria went off to mooch a cup of coffee from Hippolyte Afanasievich Fet, the local KGB rezident. Fet, a mournful middle-aged man with sunken cheeks, was the laughing stock of Peshawar because of his uncanny resemblance to Boris Karloff. He was dining at a corner table with his much younger and deliciously attractive wife, and two male members of his staff.

Maria caught up with Manny and Anthony in the parking lot three quarters of an hour later. "Can I bum a lift back to University Town?" she asked.

"Why not?" Manny said.

The two bodyguards squeezed in next to the driver and Maria settled into the back of the car between Manny and Anthony. "What did Boris Karloff have to say?" Manny inquired.

"Hey, I don't tell him what you say to me," she remarked.

"But he asks?"

"Of course he asks."

Manny got the point. "I withdraw the question," he said.

The sun was dipping below the Suleiman Range as the car swung off Jamrud Road west of the airport and cut through the quiet, grid-like streets filled with consulates and plush private homes rented by US-AID officials and Pakistani brass and Afghan resistance leaders. The Company had a high-walled villa sandwiched between the estate of a Pashtun drug dealer and a warehouse filled with artificial limbs. Maria shared a house with half a dozen other journalists one street over. The Chevrolet slowed at an intersection to let a bus filled with children pass. A sign at the side of the road said in English: "Drive with care and seek help from Almighty Allah."

"There are two kinds of experts in Afghanistan," Maria was saying. "Those who have been here less than six weeks and those who have been here more than six months."

"Which category do you fall into?" Anthony asked. Up ahead, a cart pulled by oxen was blocking the street. Two men wearing long shirts and baggy trousers appeared to be wrestling with a broken axle. "I'm in the second category," Maria started to explain. "I've been here for seven months—"

In the front of the Chevrolet, the driver looked around nervously as he pulled up twenty meters from the cart. "Don't like this," he muttered. The bodyguard with the turban around his head tugged a .45 automatic from his shoulder holster. From behind them came the screech of brakes. Three Jeeps skidded to a stop, pinning the Chevrolet in their headlights.

"Dacoit," cried the driver. "Bandits."

The bodyguard with the shotgun flung open the door and dove for the ground and rolled once and fired both barrels at the nearest Jeep. One of the headlights sizzled out. The staccato rattle of automatic fire filled the night. Glass shattered. Dark figures loomed around the car. The driver, hit in the chest, slumped forward onto the wheel. The car's horn shrieked. The turbaned bodyguard fell to the right, his torso hanging half out of the open door. On the road, a man kicked the shotgun out of the hands of the bodyguard and rammed the muzzle of a rifle into his back and pulled the trigger. The bodyguard twitched, then lay still. In the Chevrolet, Manny wrestled Betsy from his shoulder holster. Before he could throw the safety, hands reached in and dragged him from the back seat. Bearded men hauled Anthony and Maria out the other door toward one of the two tarpaulin-covered trucks behind the Jeeps. Behind them, one of the assailants bent over the turbaned bodyguard to make sure he was dead. The bodyguard twisted and pointed his pistol and pulled the trigger at point-blank range, and a .45 caliber bullet with grooves hand-etched into its soft head shattered his attacker's shoulder. Another man wearing combat boots kicked the bodyguard hard in the head, then reached down and slit his throat with a razor-sharp Turkish yataghan.

In the back of the tarpaulin-covered truck, the three prisoners were shoved to the floor and their hands were lashed behind their backs with leather thongs. Foul-smelling leather hoods were pulled over their heads. Maria's muffled voice could be heard saying, "Oh, shit, this is all I needed." Under their bodies, the truck vibrated as the driver floored the gas pedal and rattled off down a side street. Minutes later the two trucks, running without headlights, bounced onto a dirt track and headed cross-country in the direction of the Khyber Pass.

Hippolyte Afanasievich Fet made his way through the maze of alleyways of the Meena Bazaar to the tattoo shop above the Pakistani acupuncturist with the colorful sign out front that read, "Eyes, Ears, Nose, Throat & Sexual Problems." The two bodyguards, unzipping their jackets so they could get at their shoulder holsters quickly, went up the creaking stairs first to inspect the premises. One emerged to say it was safe for Fet to enter. He went inside and sat down in the red barber's chair in the middle of the room, which was illuminated by a single forty-watt overhead electric bulb. Shadows danced on the woven straw mats covering the wooden walls. The floor was smudged with green from the naswar—the small balls of tobacco, lime and spices Pakistanis kept tucked under their lower lip—that had been expectorated by clients. From outside came the sound of two mountain tribesmen, high on hashish, urinating into the stream of sewage running along the curb.

Fet glanced at the telephone on the table and then at his wristwatch. One of the bodyguards said, "Maybe your watch is fast."

"Maybe it didn't come off," said the second bodyguard from the door.

"Maybe you should keep your opinions to yourselves," Fet growled.

At three minutes after midnight the phone rang. Fet snatched it off the hook. A voice on the other end of the line said, in heavily accented English, "Ibrahim is on his way to Yathrib. He is not alone."

Fet muttered "Khorosho" and severed the connection with his forefinger. He dialed the number of the duty officer in the Soviet consulate. "It's me," he said. "I authorize you to send the coded message to Moscow Centre."

The truck had been climbing a steep mountain track for the better part of three hours. At first light the driver, downshifting and veering to avoid shell holes filled with rainwater, steered the vehicle onto a level clearing and cut the motor. The tarpaulin was unlaced and flung back, the tailboard was lowered and the three prisoners, their wrists bound behind their backs, were prodded onto solid ground. Hands pulled the leather hoods off their heads. Filling his lungs with fresh mountain air, Anthony looked around. They were obviously in some sort of guerrilla encampment high in the mountains—though it was impossible to say whether they were still in Pakistan or had crossed into Afghanistan. Layers of blue-gray mountain ridges fell away to a cinereous horizon stained with veins of tarnished silver. Anthony had the feeling you could see for centuries, and said so.

"You're confusing time and space," Maria remarked sourly.

"I thought they were pretty much the same thing," Anthony insisted.

"Two sides of the same coin," Manny agreed.

"Exactly," said Anthony.

Around the guerrilla camp bearded men, some with blankets over their shoulders, others wearing surplus US Army coats, were loading arms and ammunition onto donkeys and camels. Nearby, yelping dogs brawled over a bone. Next to a long low mud-brick structure, a bearded mullah wearing a white skull cap read from the Koran to a circle of men sitting cross-legged in the dirt. At the edge of the clearing, a teenage boy fired a bazooka into a tree at point blank range, felling it in a shower of splinters. Then he dragged over a wheelbarrow and began to collect firewood.

Its engine straining, black exhaust streaming from the tailpipe, the second truck came up the mountain track and pulled to a stop on the flat. A lean and graceful figure emerged from the passenger seat. He was wearing a black turtleneck under a soiled knee-length Afghan tunic, thick English corduroy trousers, hand-made Beal Brothers boots and a brown Pashtun cap with an amulet pinned to it to ward off sniper bullets. His skin was fair, the hair under his cap long and matted, his short beard tinted reddish orange with henna. He had the dark, intense eyes of a hunter, with shadowy hollows under them that didn't come from lack of sleep. The fingers of his left hand worked a string of ivory worry beads as he approached the captives. He gazed out over the hills.

"Five years ago," he said, speaking English with the high-pitched, rolling accent of a Palestinian, "I was standing on this mountain top watching Russian tanks come down that road in the valley. My men and me, we sat on these stones all morning, all afternoon, all evening, and still the tanks came. We stopped counting after a time, there were so many of them. Many of the new recruits to the jihad came from the mountains and had never seen an automobile before, but Allah gave them the strength to war against tanks. They fired rockets at the tanks using hammers when the percussion mechanisms on the launchers broke down. Since then, many tanks have been destroyed and many mujaheddin have died. Against the tanks we are still making war."

From far below came the distant whine of jet engines, though no planes were visible. The men on the hilltop stopped what they were doing to stare down into the murky depths of the valleys. Flares burst noiselessly, illuminating the low ground haze more than the ground. Green and red tracer bullets intersected in the sky and napalm canisters exploded into bright flames on a thread of road that ran parallel to a stream. The fingers of the tall guerrilla leader kneaded the worry beads as he turned to face the three prisoners.

"I am Commander Ibrahim. You are on my territory. Pakistani law is behind us, Afghan law is ahead of us. Here Pashtunwali—the Pashtun moral code— is the highest law and I am its custodian."

Four mujaheddin pulled a stretcher from the back of the second truck and started toward the low mud-brick building carrying the warrior who had been shot by the bodyguard in the attack on the Chevrolet. What remained of his shoulder was held in place with a blood-soaked bandanna knotted across his chest. His body quaking, the wounded man groaned in agony. Ibrahim scooped brackish rainwater from a puddle with a rusty tin can and, propping up the wounded mans head, moistened his lips. Then he and the three captives trailed after the stretcher. Anthony ducked under a low lintel into a dark room that was filled with smoke and smelled of hashish. Half a dozen guerrillas too young to grow beards sat around a small potbellied stove sucking on hookahs. Two old men tended to the wounded man, who had been stretched out on a narrow wooden plank. One held an oil lamp above his shattered shoulder while the other peeled away the bandanna and coated the raw wound with honey. The prisoners followed Ibrahim into a second room. Here a young boy cut the thongs binding their wrists and, motioning them toward straw-filled pillows set on the floor, offered each a bowl of scalding apple tea. Ibrahim drank in noisy gulps. After a while the boy returned with a copper tray filled with food—each of the prisoners and Ibrahim was given a piece of nan, a flat unleavened bread baked in a hole in the ground, and a small wooden bowl filled with a greasy goat stew and sticky rice. Ibrahim began eating with the fingers of his left hand—Manny noticed that he hardly used his right arm, which rested in his lap. The prisoners, eyeing one another, ate hungrily.

When he'd finished his bowl, Ibrahim belched and leaned back against the wall. "While you are with me," he said, "you will be treated, in so far as it is possible, as guests. I counsel you to rest now. At sunset we will set out on a long journey." With that, Ibrahim removed his cap and, drawing his knees up to his chin, curled up on two cushions. Within moments, so it seemed, he was sound asleep.

Maria pulled a pad from a pocket and filled a page with tiny handwriting. Manny caught Anthony's eye and, nodding toward the two small windows covered with thick iron grilling, mouthed the word "escape." The two leaned their heads back against the wall but sleep was impossible. From the next room came the unrelenting moaning of the wounded man, and from time to time a muffled cry of "lotfi konin" repeated again and again.

Near midnight, one of the old men who had been tending the wounded man came into the room and touched Ibrahim's elbow. "Rahbar," he said, and he bent down and whispered something in the commander's ear. Sitting up, Ibrahim lit a foul-smelling Turkish cigarette, coughed up the smoke after the first drag, then climbed to his feet and followed the old man out of the room. The wounded man could be heard pleading "Khahesh mikonam, lotfi konin. " Manny explained to the others, "He says, 'I beg you, do me a kindness. '"

The voice of Ibrahim intoned, "Ashadu an la ilaha illallah Mohammad rasulullah." The wounded man managed to repeat some of the words. There was a moment of silence. Then the sharp crack of a low-caliber revolver echoed through the building. Moments later Ibrahim strode back into the room and settled heavily onto the straw-filled pillow.

"He was a virtuous Muslim," he declared, "and a shaheed—what we call a war martyr. He will certainly spend eternity in the company of beautiful virgins."

Maria asked from across the room, "What happens when a virtuous Muslim woman dies?"

Ibrahim considered the question. "She will surely go to heaven, too. After that I cannot be sure."

Well before the first breath of dawn reached the clearing, the three prisoners were shaken awake and offered dried biscuits and tin cups filled with strong tea. Ibrahim appeared at the door. "You will be locked in the room while we bury our comrade," he said. "After which our journey will begin."

When he'd gone, bolting the door behind him, Manny sprang to his feet and went over to one of the small windows covered with iron mesh. He could make out four men carrying the corpse, which was shrouded in a white sheet and stretched out on a plank, across the clearing. Walking two abreast, a long line of mujaheddin, some holding gas lamps or flashlights, followed behind. The cortege disappeared over the rim of the hill. Anthony tried the door but it didn't give. Maria whispered, "What about the grille on the windows?"

Manny laced his fingers through the grille and tugged at it. "It's cemented into the bricks," he said. "If we had a knife or screwdriver we might be able to work it out."

Anthony spotted a can of insecticide in a corner. He picked it up and shook it—there was still some fluid left in it. "Give me your cigarette lighter," he ordered Maria.

Manny saw instantly what he was up to. He took the lighter and thumbed the wheel, producing a flame, and held it near the grille. Anthony raised the can's nozzle up to the lighter and sprayed the insecticide through the flame, turning it into a jury-rigged flame-thrower that slowly melted the grille. When three sides of a square had been melted, Manny bent the grille out. "You go first," Anthony said.

Manny didn't want to waste time arguing. He hiked himself up on the sill and worked his body through the small opening. Ragged ends of the grille tore his clothing and scratched his skin. Anthony pushed his feet from behind and Manny squirmed headfirst through the window and tumbled to the ground outside. Anthony squatted and Maria stepped onto his shoulder and started to wriggle through the opening. She was half out when the bolt of the door was thrown and Ibrahim appeared on the threshold. Anthony cried out, "Run for it, Manny!"

Ibrahim shouted an alarm. Feet pounded in the clearing outside the mud-walled building as the mujaheddin raced to cut off Manny. Cries rang out. Jeeps and trucks roared up to the lip of the clearing and played their headlights on the fields dropping away to a ravine. Shots were fired. In the room, Maria slipped back through the opening into Anthony's waiting hands. Her shoulders and arms bleeding from a dozen scratches, she turned to face Ibrahim. He motioned with a pistol for them to quit the building and came out into the clearing behind them.

The manhunt ended abruptly. The headlights on the Jeeps and trucks flicked out one after the other. One of the bearded fighters ran over and said something to Ibrahim in a low voice. Then he joined the others kneeling for the first prayer of the day. Rows of men prostrated themselves in the dirt facing Mecca. Ibrahim turned to Anthony as two of his men tied the prisoners' wrists behind their backs. "My fighters tell me the escaped prisoner is for sure dead." He stared out over the praying mujaheddin to the glimmer of light touching the top of the most distant mountain ridge, hunched like the spine of a cat. "So I think," he added, "but God may think otherwise."

2

WASHINGTON, DC, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1983

THAT'S A LOT OF CRAP, SENATOR," DIRECTOR CASEY GROWLED INTO the phone. He dipped two fingers into the Scotch and soda and slicked back the last few strands of white hair on his scalp. "If there was a shred of truth to any of it I'd submit my resignation tomorrow." He listened for a while, screwing up his lips and tossing his head the way the senator did when he presided over the Select Committee on Intelligence. "Look," Casey finally said, cutting into the soliloquy, "everyone and his brother knows I ran the President's campaign. But what's-his-name in the Washington Post is out to lunch when he suggests I'm running his re-election campaign from Langley."

Casey held the phone away from his ear and let the senator drone on. He'd heard it all before: the motivating force in the White House was the President's popularity; the search for popularity drove policy; the best-kept secret in the capitol was that Reagan and his senior White House people were ignoramuses when it came to foreign affairs; the President had a hearing problem so you couldn't be sure, when you briefed him, that you were getting through to him; he never came right out and said no to anything, it was always Yes, well or Sounds all right to me but, uh, after which the sentence trailed off; decisions, when you managed to get any, filtered down from the White House staff and it wasn't certain where they came from; for all anybody knew Nancy Reagan could have been running the country. The terrible part was that it was all true, though Casey wasn't about to tell the senator that; Reagan had never fully recovered from the bullet that John Hinckley had pumped to within an inch of the President's heart two and a half years before. "The story that he can't locate his chief of staff's office—it's a bad rap, senator," he said, forever loyal to his old pal, Ron. "Reagan's a big picture man but he's been on top of everything I've brought up to the White House, up to and including the downing of the Korean 747 that strayed into Soviet air space two weeks ago."

Casey's daughter, Bernadette, stuck her head in the door of the den and pointed upstairs: the people her father was expecting had turned up. "Senator, let me get back to you—I've got some Company business to attend to." He listened for another moment, then mumbled "Count on it" and hung up.

"Tell them to come on in," he told his daughter.

Ebby, Bill Casey's Deputy Director Central Intelligence, had met the plane carrying Manny at McGuire Air Force Base and driven his son (after a hurried phone call to Nellie) straight out to the Director's new tan brick house in the posh development carved out of the old Nelson Rockefeller estate off Foxhall Road in northwest Washington. As they made their way down half a level and through the three sitting rooms, he told Manny, "Jack may turn up, too. He's worried sick about Anthony—if you have any gory details, for crying out loud keep them to yourself. No point in alarming him more than we have to."

"Anthony wasn't hurt or anything," Manny said. "It was plain bad luck that he and the Shaath woman didn't make it through the window. I still kick myself for going first—"

"No one faults you so don't fault yourself."

He stepped into the den and Casey came off the couch to seize his hand. "This is my boy, Manny," Ebby said.

Casey waved both of them to leather-covered easy chairs. "I don't need to tell you how glad I am you got your ass out of there," he remarked. Sinking back onto the couch, he asked Manny about the escape.

"Anthony gets the credit," Manny said, and he went on to explain how Jack's son had turned a can of insecticide into a blowtorch to burn away the wire mesh on the window. "I'd slipped through and Maria Shaath was halfway out when the guerrilla leader—"

Casey, renowned for his photographic memory, had read the cable that Manny filed from Islamabad. "The one who calls himself Commander Ibrahim?" he said.

"Commander Ibrahim, right. They'd just buried the fighter who'd been shot in the attack and Ibrahim turned up at the door and gave the alarm. In the darkness I scrambled down into a ravine and up the other side. Headlights came on above me, illuminating the area. There were shots. I threw up my arms as if I'd been hit and fell over the lip of a bluff. Then I just let myself roll downhill. After that it was a matter of walking for three days in the general direction of the rising sun."

The DCI, a lawyer by training who had been chief of the Special Intelligence Branch of the OSS at the end of World War II, savored the cloak-and-dagger side of intelligence operations. "You make it sound easy as falling off a log," he said, leaning forward. "What did you do for food and water?"

"Water was no problem—I came across streams and rivulets. As for food, I took a refresher survival course at the Farm before I went out to Peshawar, so I knew which roots and mushrooms and berries were edible. Three days after my escape I spotted a campfire. It turned out to be an Afridi camel caravan running contraband over the Khyber from Afghanistan. I gave them the five hundred-dollar bills hidden in my belt. I promised them that much again when they delivered me to Peshawar."

When Jack turned up Manny had to go through the escape again for him. Director Casey, whose lack of patience was legendary, fidgeted on the couch. Jack, his face tight with worry, asked, "What condition was Anthony in when you last saw him?"

"He wasn't wounded in the kidnapping, Jack," Manny said. "He was in great shape, and very alert."

The Director said, "As far as I'm aware, we don't have string on a Commander Ibrahim."

Jack said, "There was nothing in Central Registry. The Afghanistan desk at State never heard of him. The National Security people have no string on him either."

"Which means," Ebby said, "that he's just come out of the woodwork."

"Aside from the physical description Manny's provided, what do we know about him?" the Director asked.

"He spoke English with what I took to be a Palestinian accent," Manny offered. "Which could mean he was brought up in the Middle East."

"He might have cut his teeth in one of the Hezbollah or Hamas training camps," Jack said. He turned to the Director. "We ought to bring the Israelis in on this—they keep close tabs on Islamic fundamentalists in the Palestinian ranks."

"That's as good a place as any to start," Casey agreed. "What about the report from the Kalasha informant?"

Jack, quick to clutch at any straw, said, "What report are we talking about?"

Ebby said, "This came in late last night. We have an informant among the Kalasha, which is an ancient tribe of non-Muslims living in three valleys along the Afghanistan frontier, who claims that a Palestinian named Ibrahim had been running arms into Pakistan and selling them in Peshawar. According to our Kalasha, Ibrahim has made a trip every two months—he bought automatic weapons in Dubai, crossed the Gulf and Iran in trucks, then smuggled the stuff into Pakistan and up to the Tribal Areas on pack animals."

"Did your informant provide a physical description?" Jack asked.

"As a matter of fact, yes. The Kalasha said Ibrahim was tall and thin, with long hair and an amulet on his cap to protect him from sniper bullets. His right arm was partially paralyzed—"

"That's Commander Ibrahim," Manny said excitedly. "He ate, he manipulated his worry beads with his left hand. His right arm hung limply at his side or lay in his lap."

"That's a start," Casey said. "What else did the Kalasha have on this Ibrahim character?"

"He described him as a rabid fundamentalist in search of a jihad," Ebby said. "He dislikes Americans only slightly less than he despises Russians."

"Well, he's found his jihad," Manny commented.

"Which brings us to the fax that landed in the American consulate in Peshawar," Casey said, impatient to move on. His expressionless eyes regarded Ebby through oversized glasses. "Are we sure it came from this Ibrahim character?"

"The fax appears to be authentic," Ebby said. "It was hand-printed in English, in block letters. There were two grammatical mistakes—verbs that didn't agree with their subjects—and two misspellings, suggesting that English was not the writer's native language. There was no way to trace where the fax originated, of course. It came in sometime during the night. Our people found it in the morning. It spoke of three hostages—Manny would have escaped by then but Commander Ibrahim probably thought he'd been killed and didn't want to advertise the fact, which makes sense from his point of view."

"They want Stingers," Jack said.

"Everybody out there wants Stingers," Manny noted.

"Not everybody who wants Stingers has hostages," Jack observed glumly.

Casey said, "I'm all for giving them Stingers—I'm for anything that makes the Russians bleed—but the praetorians around the President are chickenshit. They're afraid to escalate. They're afraid to make the Russians mad." The Director's head bobbed from side to side with the futility of it all. "How is it that we always wind up fighting the Cold War with one hand tied behind our back? Everything we do has to be so goddamned licit. When are we going to fight fire with fire? The Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua are a case in point. I have some creative ideas on the subject that I want to throw at you, Ebby. If we could get our hands on some cash that the Senate Committee on Intelligence doesn't know about—"

The red phone next to the couch purred. Casey snatched it off the hook and held it to his ear. "When'd you get back, Oliver?" he asked. "Okay, let me know as soon as the payment is transferred. Then we'll work out the next step." He listened again. "For Christ's sake, no—you tell Poindexter that the President has signed off on this so there's no need to bring the details to his attention. If something goes wrong he has to be able to plausibly deny he knew anything about it." Casey snorted into the phone. "If that happens you'll fall on your sword, then the Admiral will fall on his sword. If the President still needs another warm body between him and the press, I'll fall on my sword."

"Where were we?" Casey said when he'd hung up. "Okay, let's plug into the Israeli connection to see if Commander Ibrahim's Palestinian accent leads anywhere. Also, let's see if the people who read satellite photos can come up with something—your report, Manny, mentioned two tarpaulin-covered trucks, a bunch of Jeeps and about sixty Islamic warriors. If a snail leaves a trail on a leaf, hell, these guys ought to leave a trail across Afghanistan. To buy time we'll instruct Peshawar Station to respond to the fax—"

"They're supposed to put an ad in the personal column of the Islamabad English-language Times," Jack said.

"Lets establish a dialogue with the kidnappers, however indirect. Let them think we're open to trading Stingers for the hostages. But we want proof that they're still alive. The thing to do is stall them as long as we can and see where this goes."

Nellie cleared the dishes and stacked them in the sink. Manny refilled the wine glasses and carried them into the living room. He sank onto the couch, exhausted both physically and mentally. Nellie stretched out with her head on his thigh. From time to time she lifted her long-stemmed glass from the floor and, raising her head, took a sip of wine. On the radio, a new pop singer named Madonna Louise Ciccone was belting out a song that was starting to make its way up the charts. It was called "Like a Virgin."

"The Mossad guy brought over seven loose-leaf books filled with mug shots," Manny said. 'I saw so many Islamic militants my eyes had trouble focusing."

"So did you find this Ibrahim individual?"

"Nellie?"

Nellie laughed bitterly. "Whoops, sorry. I must have been out of my mind to think that just because my occasional lover and absentee husband was shanghaied by an Islamic crazy he'd let me in on Company secrets, such as the identity of the Islamic crazy in question. I mean, I might go and leak it to the New York Times."

"We live by certain rules—"

"It's a damn good thing I love you," Nellie said. "It's a damn good thing I'm too relieved you're back to pick a fight." She put on a good show but she was close to tears; she'd been close to tears since he returned home. "I hate that fucking Company of yours," she said with sudden vehemence. "One of the reasons I hate it is because you love it."

In fact, Manny had come across Ibrahim in the Mossad books. Two hours and twenty-minutes into the session one mug shot had leapt off the page—Ibrahim was younger and leaner and wearing his hair short but there was no mistaking him. Curiously, this earlier version of Ibrahim had the eyes of someone who was hunted—not the hunter. The Israelis identified the man in the photograph as Hajji Abdel al-Khouri and quickly came up with a profile on him. Al-Khouri, born in September 1944 in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, turned out to be half-Saudi, half-Afghan, the youngest son of Kamal al-Khouri, a Yemeni-born Saudi millionaire who had founded a construction empire that built roads and airports and shopping malls in the Middle East and India. The second of his three wives, the ravishing seventeen-year-old daughter of a Pashtun prince he met in Kabul, was Hajji's mother. In his late teens Hajji, then an engineering student at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jidda, abandoned his studies, assumed the nom de guerre of Abu Azzam and moved to Jordan to join Fatah, the forerunner of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Arrested by the Israelis in Hebron on the West Bank of the Jordan for the attempted murder of a Palestinian suspected of collaborating with the Israeli Shin Bet, Abu Azzam spent two years in a remote Negev prison. After his release (for lack of evidence) in 1970 he broke with the PLO when he became convinced that its leader, Yasser Arafat, was too willing to compromise with the Israelis. In the early 1970s the PLO sentenced Abu Azzam to death in absentia for vowing to kill Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan, at which point the Fatah renegade fled to Baghdad, founded the Islamic Jihad and masterminded a series of terrorist actions against Israeli and Arab targets, including the 1973 occupation of the Saudi Embassy in Paris. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 Abu Azzam assumed still another identity—henceforth he was known as Ibrahim—and moved the Islamic Jihad to the Hindu Kush Mountains east of the Afghan capitol of Kabul. Making use of an estimated hundred million dollars that he had inherited from his father he established secret recruiting and training centers around the Arab world and forged links with Pakistan's radical Islamic Tablighi Jamaat, Gulbuddin Hekmatyars Hezb-i-Islami and other extremist Islamic splinter groups in the Middle East. What all these groups shared was a fanatic loathing of both the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan and the Americans who were using Islamic warriors as cannon fodder to oppose them; Ibrahim and the others associated Westernization with secularization and a rejection of Islam's dominant role in defining the cultural and political identity of a country. Ibrahim in particular looked beyond the Soviet defeat and the Afghan war to the establishment of strict Koranic rule in Afghanistan and the overthrow of the feudal Saudi ruling family; if oil rich Saudi Arabia were to fall into the hands of the fundamentalists, so Ibrahim reasoned, Islam— by controlling the quantity of petrol pumped out of the ground, and the price—would be in a strong position to defend the faith against Western infidels.

Jack was exultant when he learned that Manny had succeeded in identifying Ibrahim. "Jesus H. Christ, you're one hundred percent sure?" he demanded on a secure intra-Company line, and Manny could hear the sigh of relief escape Jack's lips when he told him there was no doubt about it. Jack raced down one flight to Millie's suite of offices—she was now, in addition to her regular public relations chores, the Company's senior spokesperson—and pulled his wife into the corridor to share the hopeful news out of earshot of the half-dozen assistants and secretaries in her shop. "It's the first step in the right direction," he told her, grasping her clammy hand in both of his giant paws, nodding stubbornly as if he were trying to convince himself that the story would have a happy ending. Thanks to the Israelis, he whispered, the Company now had a mug shot to go with Manny's description. A top-secret Action Immediate was on its way to all Stations, signed by the DCI himself, William Casey, and countersigned by the Deputy Director/ Operations, yours truly, John J. McAuliffe, using my middle initial, which is something I never do, to emphasize its importance. The Company, it said, considered the identification and eventual infiltration of Islamic Jihad's recruiting and training centers in the Middle East to be of the highest priority. A Company officer's life was on the line. Any and all potential sources with ties to Islamic groups should be sounded out, IOU's should be called in, the expenditure of large sums of money was authorized. No stone should be left unturned. The quest to find Commander Ibrahim and his two hostages should take priority over all other pending business.

"What do you think, Jack?" Millie asked. She could see how drawn he looked; she knew she didn't look much better. "Is there any possibility of getting Anthony out of this alive?"

"I promise you, Millie... I swear it..."

Millie whispered, "I know you'll do it, Jack. I know you'll succeed. You'll succeed because there is no alternative that you and I can live with."

Jack nodded vehemently. Then he turned and hurried away from the woman whose eyes were too full of anguish to look into.

Jack buttonholed Ebby at the end of the workday. The two sat knee to knee in a corner of the DDCI's spacious seventh-floor office, nursing three fingers of straight Scotch, talking in undertones. There was a hint of desperation in Jack's hooded eyes; in his leaden voice, too. "I stumbled across an Israeli report describing how the Russians dealt with a hostage situation," he said. "Three Soviet diplomats were kidnapped in Beirut by a Hezbollah commando. The KGB didn't sit on their hands, agonizing over what they could do about it. They abducted the relative of a Hezbollah leader and sent his body back with his testicles stuffed in his mouth and a note nailed— nailed, for Christ's sake—to his chest warning that the Hezbollah leaders and their sons would suffer the same fate if the three Soviets weren't freed. Within hours the three diplomats were released unharmed a few blocks from the Soviet embassy." Jack leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Look, Ebby, we've identified the kidnapper—this Ibrahim character has to have brothers or cousins or uncles—"

There was an embarrassed silence. Ebby studied his shoelaces. "We're not the KGB, Jack," he finally said. "I doubt if our Senate custodians would let us get away with employing the same tactics."

"We wouldn't have to do it ourselves," Jack said. "We could farm it out—Harvey Torriti would know who to go to."

Ebby said, "I know how scared you must be, Jack. But this is a nonstarter. The CIA is an endangered species as it is. There's no way I'm going to sign off on something like this." He looked hard at Jack. "And there's no way I'm going to let my Deputy Director/Operations sign off on it, either." Ebby climbed tiredly to his feet. "I want your word you won't do anything crazy, Jack."

"I was just letting off steam."

"Do I have your word?"

Jack looked up. "You have it, Ebby."

The DDCI nodded. "This conversation never took place. Jack. See you tomorrow."

Keeping one eye on the odometer, Tessa jogged along the treadmill in the Company's makeshift basement gymnasium at Langley. "I prefer to run down here," she told her twin sister, Vanessa, "than on the highway where you breathe in all those exhaust fumes."

Vanessa, an IBM programmer who had been hired by the Company the previous year to bring its computer retrieval systems up to date, was lying flat on her back and pushing up a twenty-pound bar to strengthen her stomach muscles. "What's new in the wide world of counterintelligence?" she asked.

A stocky woman wearing a sweat suit with a towel around her neck, something of a legend for being the first female Station Chief in CIA history, abandoned the other jogging machine and headed for the shower room. Tessa waited until she was out of earshot. "Actually, I stumbled across something pretty intriguing," she said, and she proceeded to tell her sister about it.

In part because she was the daughter of Leo Kritzky, Jack McAuliffe's current Chief of Operations, in part because of an outstanding college record, Tessa had been working in the counterintelligence shop since her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1975. Her most recent assignment had been to pore through the transcripts of English-language radio programs originating in the Soviet Union, looking for patterns or repetitions, or phrases or sentences that might appear to be out of context, on the assumption that the KGB regularly communicated with its agents in the Americas by passing coded messages on these programs. "Seven months ago," she said, "they gave me the transcripts of Radio Moscow's nightly shortwave English-language cultural quiz program, starting with the first broadcast made in the summer of 1950."

Sliding over to sit with her back against a wall, Vanessa mopped her neck and forehead with a towel. "Don't tell me you actually found a coded message in them?" she said.

"I found something in them," Tessa said. She glanced at the odometer and saw that she'd run five miles. Switching off the treadmill, she settled down next to her sister. "You remember how I adored Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass when I was a kid. I read them so many times I practically knew both books by heart. Well, at the end of every quiz program they give a line from some English-language classic and ask the contestant to identify it. In the thirty-three years the program has been on the air—that's something in the neighborhood of twelve thousand fifteen-minute broadcasts—they used Lewis Carroll quotations twenty-four times. They naturally caught my eye because they were the only questions I could personally answer." Tessa cocked her head and came up with some examples. '"The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.' Or 'If I'm not the same, who in the world am I?' Or 'Whiffling through the tulgey wood.' And 'I don't like belonging to another person's dream."'

Vanessa said, "I don't really see how you could decode these sentences—"

"I studied Soviet and East European code systems at the NSA school in Fort Meade," Tessa said. "Some KGB codes are merely recognition signals— special sentences that alert the agent to something else in the program that is intended for him."

"Okay, for argument's sake let's say that the twenty-four references to Alice or Looking Glass are intended to alert an agent," Vanessa said. "The question is: Alert him to what?"

"Right after the quotes they always announce the winning lottery number," Tessa said.

"How many digits?"

"'Ten."

"That's the number of digits in a telephone number if you include the area code." Vanessa thought a moment. "But the lottery number itself couldn't be a phone number—it would be too obvious."

"At the NSA code school," Tessa said, "they taught us that East German agents operating in West Germany in the early 1950s were given American ten-dollar bills—they used the serial numbers on the bill as a secret number, which they subtracted from the lottery number broadcast from East Germany to wind up with a phone number."

Vanessa looked puzzled. "You said there were twenty-four references to Alice and Looking Glass—if you're right about all this, it means there were twenty-four lottery numbers that translated into twenty-four phone numbers over a period of thirty-three years. But why would a Soviet agent have to be given a new phone number to call all the time?"

Tessa said, "KGB tradecraft calls for cutouts to keep on the move. So the agent might be getting in touch with a cutout who periodically changes his phone number."

"Did you show your boss what you'd found?"

"Yeah, I did. He said it could easily be a coincidence. Even if it wasn't, he didn't see how we could break out a phone number from a lottery number, since there were an infinite number of possibilities for the secret number."

Vanessa said, "Hey, computers can deal with an infinite number of possibilities. Let me take a crack at it."

Vanessa, who was programming an IBM mainframe, stayed after work to play with the twenty-four lottery numbers that had been broadcast after the Lewis Carroll quotations. She checked with the CIA librarian and found out that area codes had been introduced in the early 1950s, about the time the Moscow Radio quiz program began, so she started with the assumption that the ten-digit lottery number hid a ten-digit phone number that included a low-numbered East Coast area code. She began with the winning lottery number broadcast after the first use of an Alice quotation ('And the moral of that is—the more there is of mine, the less there is of yours') on April 5, 1951: 2056902023. Running a series of equations through the computer, she discovered there was a high probability that an eight-digit secret number beginning with a three and a zero, subtracted from the ten-digit lottery number, would give you a ten-digit phone number that began with the 202 area code for Washington, DC, which was where the girls assumed a cutout would live. Using an eight-digit secret number that began with a three and a zero, Vanessa was also able to break out the 202 area code from the other twenty-three lottery numbers.

The results were hypothetical—but the statistical probability of this being a fluke were slim.

Starting with a three and a zero still left six digits in the secret number. The problem stymied Vanessa for the better part of a week. Then, one evening, she and her lawyer boyfriend happened to be eating at a Chinese restaurant two blocks from the apartment the sisters shared in Fairfax outside the Beltway. The boyfriend went off to pay the cashier with his Visa card and asked her to leave the tip. Vanessa pulled two dollar bills from her purse and flattened them on the table. Her head was swimming with the numbers that the computer had been spitting out for the past ten days. As she glanced at the dollar bills the serial numbers seemed to float off the paper. She shook her head and looked again. Tessa's story of how East Germans spies operating in the West had used the serial numbers on American ten-dollar bills to break out telephone numbers came back to her. The first Moscow quiz lottery number had been broadcast on April 5, 1951, so the Soviet agent on the receiving end of the code would have been in possession of a ten-dollar bill printed before that date. The serial numbers on American bills ran in series, didn't they? Of course they did! What she needed to do now was find out the serial numbers that were in circulation from, say, the end of the war until April 1951, and run them through the computer.

First thing next morning, Vanessa made an appointment with a Treasury Department official and turned up at his office that afternoon. Yes, serial numbers on all American bills did run in series. No problem, he could supply her with the series that were in circulation from 1945 until April 1951, it was just a matter of checking the records. If she would care to wait he could have his assistant retrieve the log books and photocopy the appropriate pages for her.

That evening, with a very excited Tessa looking over her shoulder, Vanessa went down the list of ten-dollar bill serial numbers in circulation before April, 1951 until she found one that began with the telltale three and zero. In 1950, the Treasury had printed up $67,593,240-worth of ten-dollar bills with serial numbers that started with a letter of the alphabet, followed by 3089, followed by four other numbers and another letter of the alphabet.

Going back to her mainframe, Vanessa started to work with the number 3089; subtracting 3089 from the first winning lottery number broke out a Washington area code and exchange that existed in the early 1950s: 202 601. And that, in turn, left a mere 9,999 phone numbers to check out.

"What we're looking for," Tessa reminded her sister, "is someone who had a phone number corresponding to 201 601 and then moved out of that house or apartment in the week after April 5, 1951."

Tessa was almost dancing with excitement. "Boy, oh boy," she said. "Do you think this is actually going to work?"

KGB housekeepers had drawn the Venetian blinds and transformed the third-floor Kremlin suite into a working clinic. It was staffed around the clock by doctors and nurses specially trained in hemodialysis, and fitted with an American-manufactured artificial kidney machine to deal with acute kidney failure. Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov—the former Soviet Ambassador to Budapest at the time of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, and since the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union's undisputed leader—was the clinic's only patient. Ten months in power, Andropov, at 69, was suffering from chronic kidney disease and kept alive by regular sessions of hemodialysis that filtered noxious waste out of his blood stream. Living on borrowed time (doctors gave him six months at most), pale and drawn, capable of concentrating for only relatively short periods, Andropov sat propped up in bed, an electric blanket tucked up to his gaunt neck.

"I'm fed up with the bickering," he told Starik. "The Army brass, their chests sagging under the weight of medals, come here every day or two to swear to me that the war is winnable, it is only a question of having the stamina to stick with it despite the losses."

Starik said something about how his particular service concentrated on the Principal Adversary but Andropov rushed on. "Then the KGB people drop by with their latest assessment, which is the same as the previous assessment: the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, the Islamic fundamentalists can never be defeated, the Army must be instructed to cut its losses, at which point the fundamentalists can be manipulated in such a way as to turn them against US interests." Shaking his head in frustration, Andropov glanced at the yellow appointments card. "It is written here you requested an appointment to talk about KHOLSTOMER."

"The Politburo's Committee of Three has split down the middle, Yuri Vladimirovich," Starik explained. "One member is for the project, one against, one undecided."

"And who is against it?" Andropov inquired.

"Comrade Gorbachev."

Andropov snickered. "Mikhail Sergeyevich is supposed to be a specialist on agricultural questions, though even that is not sure—all he mumbles about lately is the need for glasnost and perestroika, as if openness and restructuring were magic potions for all of our economic troubles." He waved for the male nurse sitting next to a window to leave the room. Once they were alone he said to Starik, "This KHOLSTOMER project of yours—is it the same as the one I signed off on when I ran the KGB? The one that Brezhnev subsequently vetoed?"

"There have been slight modifications since Comrade Brezhnev's time—the project has been fine tuned to take into account the ability of the American Federal Reserve Board to allocate currency resources and deal with a massive attack on the dollar."

Andropov reached with trembling fingers to turn up the heat on the electric blanket. "Refresh my memory with the details," he ordered.

"Since the middle 1950s the KGB has been siphoning off hard currency from the sales of our national gas company, GazProm, as well as armament and oil sales abroad. We quietly created what are called shell companies in various tax havens—on the Isle of Man, on Jersey and Guernsey in the Channel Islands, in Switzerland and the Caribbean. Typically, a shell company is owned by two other companies, which in turn is owned by a Geneva- or Bermuda-based company, which in turn— Andropov waved a hand listlessly. "I get the point." "At the present moment we control roughly sixty-three billion in American dollars in these shell companies. The beauty of KHOLSTOMER is that all the dollars are physically held in corresponding banks in the city of New York. These New York banks are unable to identify the ultimate owner of the dollars. Now, on any given day, somewhere between five and six hundred billion United States dollars change hands in New York on what currency traders call the spot market—which means that the sales of these dollars are executed immediately."

"How can you expect to undermine the American dollar if you only have a fraction of the six hundred billion available?"

"We calculate that if we handle the affair shrewdly, which is to say if we plant articles in the world's newspapers about the intrinsic weakness of the dollar and then manipulate the market cleverly, the sudden sale of our sixty-three billion will suck in people and institutions—speculators, insurance companies, private banks, retirement funds and, most especially, European and Asian Central Banks—in the general panic of the moment. We estimate that the panic money will be ten times the original sixty-three billion, which will mean that the total sum of dollars dumped onto the market will be the neighborhood of six hundred billion dollars—and this will be in addition to the regular sale of dollars on that day. A movement of this nature will inevitably have a snowball effect. The American Central Bank, which is called the Federal Reserve Bank, would naturally intervene to buy up dollars in an effort to stabilize the American currency. But our guess is that, on the condition that we catch them by surprise, this intervention will come too late and be too little to prevent the dollar from spiraling downward. We estimate that seventy percent of the foreign currency holdings of the Central Banks of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia are in US dollars; we are talking about a sum in the neighborhood of one thousand billion. Ninety percent of this one thousand billion is held in the form of US Treasury bonds and bills. We have agents of influence in these four territories, people in key posts in the Central Banks, as well as a German agent close to the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. At the first sign of a steep downward spiral of the US dollar our agents will push their respective Central Banks, as a hedge against further deterioration of their holdings, to sell off twenty percent of their Treasury bond dollar assets. At that point, in addition to the downward spiral of the American currency, the American bond market would collapse and this, in turn, would lead to panic and collapse on Wall Street; one could expect the Dow Jones industrial average, now in the twelve hundred range, to plummet. The European stock markets would plunge in turn. Europeans who hold dollar assets would join the panic, selling off their American holdings in their haste to switch personal and corporate assets into gold."

Andropov's right eyelid twitched. "Can you predict the long term effects of KHOLSTOMER on the Principal Adversary?"

"Interest rates in the United States, and then Europe and Asia, would climb sharply in response to the collapse of the bond market. As interest rates soar prices would rise, which would mean that American companies would sell less, both domestically and abroad, leading to a dramatic increase in the American trade deficit. This would result in inflationary pressures, an economic slowdown, a sharp rise in unemployment. The chaos in the American economy would, it goes without saying, have political repercussions, most especially in France and Italy, where the powerful Communist parties could offer alternatives that freed their countries from American economic domination and led to closer cooperation and eventually alignment with the Soviet bloc. West Germany, Spain and Scandinavia could be expected to follow suit to avoid being isolated."

There was a soft knock on the door. A young male nurse wheeled a stainless steel cart to the side of the bed. "Time for your vitamins, Comrade Andropov," he said. The General Secretary pulled the blanket away from his left arm and shut his eyes. The nurse rolled back the left sleeve of the patient's bathrobe and pajama top and deftly injected 20 cc of a milky solution into a vein. After his arm was safely back under the heated blanket and the nurse gone from the room, Andropov kept his eyes closed. For a few moments Starik wondered if he had dozed off. Then Andropov eyes drifted open and he broke the silence. "For the past six months I have been obsessed with the American President's Strategic Defense Initiative—what the American press has called 'Star Wars.' I have never believed Reagan seriously imagined that the United States, at a staggering cost, could build and position satellites capable of shooting down one hundred percent of the incoming missiles with lasers. Which led me to conclude that he has one of two motives. First, he may think that by escalating the arms race and moving it into outer space, he will oblige us to commit enormous sums to keep up with the Americans, both in terms of offense and defense. This would have the effect of sabotaging our already delicate economic situation, which would undermine the power and prestige of our ruling Communist Party."

Andropov gazed hard at his interlocutor and it appeared as if he had lost the thread of the conversation.

"And the second motive, Yuri Vladimirovich," Starik prompted.

"Yes, the second motive... which I consider the more likely, is that Reagan's Star Wars proposals of last March were designed to prepare the American people psychologically for nuclear war, and more specifically, for what our military planners refer to as Raketno yadenoye napadeniye—an American nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union."

Startled, Starik looked up to find the anxious eyes of the General Secretary fixed on him. "Army intelligence has broken a NATO cipher system and discovered," Andropov continued, his voice barely audible, "that a secret NATO exercise, designated ABLE ARCHER 83, is scheduled to be held before the end of the year. Its stated purpose is to practice nuclear release procedures. It is apparent to me that this so-called NATO exercise could well be a cover for the imperialist powers to launch a nuclear first strike."

"If what you say is true—"

"It is a worst-case scenario," Andropov said, "but I believe that the imperial ambitions of Reagan, aggravated by his tendency to view us as an evil empire, to use his own words, justify a worst-case conclusion." Andropov's right hand appeared from under the blanket. He leaned over the bedside table and scratched the words "Approved and sanctioned," and, in a clumsy script, his full name on the bottom of the six-line authorization order designated, 127/S-9021, that Starik had prepared. "I consent to KHOLSTOMER," he announced in a gruff whisper. "I instruct you to launch the operation before the end of November."

The General Secretary's head sank back into the pillow in exhaustion. Starik said, softly, "I will do it, Yuri Vladimirovich."

3

SOMEWHERE IN AFGHANISTAN, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 23, 1983

IBRAHIM'S BAND, SOME SIXTY IN ALL, TRAVELED BY NIGHT, SOMETIMES ON foot, sometimes on donkeys, occasionally in canvas-covered trucks driving without headlights not only as a matter of security, but because Afghans believed vehicles used less gasoline when they ran without headlights. Everywhere they went, peasants offered them shelter and shared the meager rations of food left to them after the passage of Russian commando units. Everyone recognized Ibrahim and he seemed to know dozens by name. The group would turn off the trail as soon as the first silver-gray streaks of light transformed the tops of the mountains high above them into murky silhouettes. Closely guarded by the mujaheddin, Anthony and Maria were led along narrow tracks marked by whitewashed stones. Scrambling up footpaths, they would reach one of the half-deserted, half-destroyed hamlets clinging to the sides of steep hills. Each hamlet had its mosque, surrounded by the stone houses that had not been destroyed in Russian air raids, and the rubble of those that had been hit. Inside common rooms fires blazed in soot-blackened chimneys. Calendars with photographs of the Kaaba at Mecca or the Golden Dome Mosque in Jerusalem were tacked to unpainted plastered walls next to the mihrab—the niche that marked the direction of Mecca. Pistachios and nabidth, a mildly alcoholic drink made of raisons or dates mixed with water and allowed to ferment in earthenware jugs, would be set out on linoleum-covered wooden tables. One morning, after a particularly arduous night-long march, a boy set a porcelain bowl filled with what looked like cooked intestines in front of Maria. She made a face and pushed it away. When Ibrahim taunted her, Maria—who had been raised in Beirut by her Lebanese-American father—retorted with an old Arab proverb, "Yom asal, yom basal"—"One day honey, one day onions."

Ibrahim, a moody man who could explode in rage if he thought Islam was being mocked, spit out, "What do you Westerners know of onions? Here everyone has suffered, and deeply, at one time or another."

Hoping to draw biographical details out of Ibrahim, Anthony asked, "Are you speaking from personal experience?"

His eyes clouding over, Ibrahim stared out a window; clearly the story was distressing to him. "It was in the middle seventies," he recounted. "The Iranian SAVAK arrested me when I was transiting Tehran in the mistaken belief that I worked for Iraqi intelligence. This was before the start of the Iran-Iraq war when tension between the intelligence services ran high. The terrible part was that I did not know the answers to their questions so I was powerless to stop the torture, which lasted for three days and three nights. There are still moments when I feel the pliers biting into the nerves on my right arm and the pain shooting to my brain, and I must clamp my lips shut to keep from screaming." Beads of sweat materialized on Ibrahim's upper lip as he sipped nabidth from a tin cup. "I live with the memory of searing pain," he continued. Ibrahim retreated into himself for some time. Then, almost as if he were talking to himself, he picked up the thread of the story. "Believe me, I do not hold it against the Iranians. In their place I would have done the same. I have been in their place, here in Afghanistan, and I have done the same. When I convinced the SAVAK of my innocence they again became my comrades in the struggle against imperialism and secularism."

A thin boy who had lost a leg to a mine hobbled in on one crude wooden crutch deftly balancing a straw tray filled with small cups of green tea. Ibrahim distributed the cups and sat down cross-legged on a frayed mat to drink one himself. From high above the hamlet came the whine of jet engines. A mujaheddin darted into the room and reported something to Ibrahim. He muttered an order and his men quickly extinguished all their gas lamps and candles, and the small fire in the chimney. From another valley came the dull thud of exploding bombs. In the darkness Ibrahim murmured a Koranic verse. From the corners of the room, some of the fighters joined in.

On the evening of the tenth day of the journey, Ibrahim led his band and the two prisoners to the edge of a riverbed that cut through a valley. A rusted Soviet tank lay on its side, half submerged in the water. In twos and threes, the mujaheddin crossed the gushing torrent in a bamboo cage suspended from a thick wire and tugged across by hand. Maria clutched Anthony's arm as the two of them were pulled over the raging river. Once on the other side, Ibrahim set out in the pale light cast by a quarter moon clawing up steep tracks filled with the droppings of mountain goats. After hours of relentless climbing they reached a narrow gorge at the entrance to a long canyon. Steep cliffs on either side had been dynamited so that the only way into and out of the canyon was on foot. Inside the gorge, the trail widened and the terrain flattened out. Hamlets of one-story stone houses lay half-hidden in the tangle of vines that grew over the slate roofs. Vintage anti-aircraft cannon covered with camouflage netting could be seen in the ruins of a mosque and the courtyard of a stable. In the pre-dawn murkiness men holding gas lamps emerged from doorways to wave scarfs at Ibrahim. The Pashtun headman of one hamlet buttoned a Soviet military tunic over his Afghan shirt, buckled on an artificial leg and hobbled over to shake hands with the mujaheddin as they passed in single file. "Your courage is a pearl," he intoned to each. Further up the trail, the group reached a mud-walled compound with a minaret rising from a mosque in the middle and a line of mud-brick houses planted with their backs against a sheer cliff. Smoke spiraled up from chimneys, almost as if Ibrahim and his warriors were expected. A young woman appeared at the doorway of one of the houses. When Ibrahim called to her, she lowered her eyes and bowed to him from the waist. Two small children peeked from behind her skirt.

"We are arrived at Yarhrib," Ibrahim informed his prisoners.

Lighting a gas lamp, Ibrahim led Anthony and Maria up to an attic prison. "This will be your home until the Americans agree to deliver missiles in exchange for your freedom. Food, tea, drinking and washing water will be brought to you daily. The ceramic bowl behind the curtain in the corner is to be used as a toilet. You will lack for nothing."

"Except freedom," Maria said scornfully.

Ibrahim ignored the comment. "For one hour in the morning and another in the afternoon you will be permitted to walk in the compound. Guards will accompany you at a distance. If you hear the wail of a handcranked siren, it means Russian planes or helicopters have been spotted so you must take shelter. I wish you a good nights sleep." He looked hard at Anthony. "Tomorrow, God willing, we will begin your interrogation," he said softly. "Prepare yourself." With that Ibrahim backed down the ladder, lowering the trapdoor behind him.

Anthony looked across the room at his companion. Her collarless shirt was soaked with sweat and plastered against her torso just enough for him to make out several very spare ribs. Maria removed her boots and stretched her feet straight out and, unbuttoning the top two buttons of her shirt, absently began to massage the swell of a breast. Shivering in her damp clothes, she shed for the first time the tough exterior that she had gone to great pains to project—the ballsy female journalist who could hold her own in a male-dominated profession. Out of the blue she said, "We're fooling ourselves if we think we're going to get out of this alive."

Anthony watched the flame dancing at the end of the wick in the gas lamp. The truth was that the mention of an interrogation had shaken him. He remembered Ibrahim's account of being tortured by the Iranian intelligence service. In their place I would have done the same. I have been in their place, here in Afghanistan, and I have done the same. Anthony wondered how much pain he could stand before he cracked; before he admitted to being a CIA officer and told them what he knew about the Company's operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Glancing again at Maria, he saw how miserable she was and tried to raise her spirits. "Man is a victim of dope in the incurable form of hope," he recited.

He smiled in embarrassment. "I had a lit teacher at Cornell who made us memorize Ogden Nash—he said it would come in handy when we were trying to impress girls."

She smiled weakly. "Are you trying to impress me, Anthony?"

He shrugged.

She shrugged back. "If we ever get out of here—"

"Not if. When. When we get out of here."

"When we get out of here we'll start from scratch. You'll quote Ogden Nash and I'll be suitably impressed, and we'll see where it goes."

As Ibrahim made his way across the compound toward the two prisoners the next morning, a beardless young man wearing a dirty white skullcap fell in behind him. He had a dagger wedged into the waistband of his trousers and an AK-47 with spare clips taped to the stock slung from a shoulder. A yellow canary, one of its legs attached to a short leash, perched on his forearm.

Anthony had noticed the lean young man hovering near Ibrahim on the long trek across the mountains and had nicknamed him the Shadow. "Why do you need a bodyguard in your own village?" he asked him now.

"He is not here to guard my body," Ibrahim replied, "He is here to make sure that it does not fall alive into the hands of my enemies." He gestured with a toss of his head. "Come with me."

Maria and Anthony exchanged anxious looks. He tried to smile, then turned to follow Ibrahim and his Shadow toward the low building at the far end of the compound. Pushing through a narrow door, he found himself in a whitewashed room furnished with a long and narrow wooden table and two chairs. A 1979 Disneyland calendar was tacked to one wall. Three of Ibrahim's young fighters, scarves pulled across their faces so that only their eyes were visible, leaned impassively against the walls. Ibrahim's Shadow closed the door and stood with his back to it next to a pail filled with snow that had been brought down from the mountains earlier that morning. Ibrahim settled onto one of the chairs and motioned for Anthony to take the other one. "Do you have any distinguishing marks on your body?" he asked his prisoner.

"That's a hell of a question."

"Answer it. Do you have any tattoos or scars from accidents or operations or birth marks?"

Anthony assumed Ibrahim wanted to be able to prove to the world that the diplomat named McAuliffe was really in his custody. "No tattoos. No scars. I have a birthmark—a dark welt in the form of a small cross on the little toe of my right foot."

"Show me."

Anthony stripped off his sock and Clark boot and held up his foot.

Ibrahim leaned over the table to look at it. "That will serve nicely. We are going to amputate the toe and have it delivered to your American Central Intelligence Agency in Kabul."

The blood drained from Anthony's lips. "You're making a bad mistake," he breathed. "I'm not CIA. I'm a diplomat—"

Ibrahim's Shadow drew the razor-edged dagger from his waistband and approached the table. Two of the warriors came up behind the prisoner and pinned his arms against their stomachs.

Anthony started to panic. "What happened to that famous Pashtun moral code you told us about?" he cried.

Ibrahim said, "It is because of the moral code that we brought snow down from the heights. We do not have anesthetics so we will numb your toe with snow. That's how we amputate the limbs of wounded fighters. You will feel little pain."

"For God's sake, don't do this—"

"For God's sake, we must," Ibrahim said.

The last of the warriors brought over the pail and jammed Anthony's bare foot into the snow. Ibrahim came around the table. "Believe me, when the thing is accomplished you will feel proud of it. I counsel you not to struggle against the inevitable—it will only make the amputation more difficult for us and for you."

Anthony whispered hoarsely, "Don't hold me down."

Ibrahim regarded his prisoner, then nodded at the two warriors pinning his arms. Very slowly, very carefully, they loosened their grip. Anthony filled his lungs with air. Tears brimmed in his eyes as he turned away and bit hard on his sleeve. When it was over Ibrahim himself pressed a cloth to the open wound to stop the bleeding. "El-hamdou lillah," he said. "You could be Muslim."

Five days later, with Anthony hobbling on a makeshift crutch next to Maria during one of their morning walks, Ibrahim's prisoners witnessed the arrival of the gun merchant. A swarthy-skinned man with a long pointed beard, he wore opaque aviator's sunglasses and a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap with a handkerchief hanging off the back to protect his neck from the sun. He and two black Bedouins drove a line of mules charged with long wooden crates through the main gate and began unpacking their cargo onto woven mats. In short order they had set out rows of Chinese AK-47 assault rifles, American World War II bazookas, German Schmeisser MP-40s, as well as piles of green anti-tank mines with American designations stenciled on them. As the morning wore on, mujaheddin drifted up to the compound from the hamlets spread out below it and began to inspect the weapons. Some of the younger fighters looked as if they had stumbled into a candy store. Calling to his friends, a teenager wearing camouflage fatigues rammed a clip into an AK-47 and test fired a burst at some tin cans atop the back wall, causing the mules to bray in fright. Ibrahim, followed by his everpresent bodyguard, appeared from one of the stone houses set against the cliff to talk with the gun merchant. Tea was brought and they settled onto a mat to haggle over the prices, and the currency in which they would be paid. The two men came to an agreement and shook hands on it. Rising to his feet, the gun merchant noticed the two prisoners watching from a distance and apparently asked his host about them. Ibrahim looked across the compound, then said something that caused the gun merchant to turn his head in Anthony's direction and spit in the dirt.

"I don't think Ibrahim's visitor likes us," Anthony told Maria.

"He's a Falasha, judging from the look of him," Maria said. "I wonder what an Ethiopian Jew is doing so far from home."

The delicate woman who spoke English with a thick Eastern European accent kept Eugene on the phone as long as she dared. He had to understand, she said, that his calls were moments of grace in an otherwise bleak existence. Aside from her friend, Silvester, she was utterly alone in the world. When the phone rang and Eugene's voice came over the line, well, it was as if the sun had appeared for a fraction of a second in a densely overcast sky and you had to squint to keep the light from hurting your eyes. Oh, dear, no, she didn't mind having to find another furnished apartment after every phone call. Over the years she had more or less become used to the routine. And she understood that, to protect Eugene, it was important for him never to reach her at the same number twice. Thank you for asking, yes, she was well enough, all things considered... What she meant by that was: considering her age and the dizzy spells and nausea that followed the radiation treatments and her miserable digestion and of course the tumor eating away at her colon, though the doctors swore to her that cancers progressed very slowly in old people... Oh, she remembered back to some hazy past when men would say she was exceptionally attractive, but she no longer recognized herself when she looked at the curling sepia photographs in the album—her hair had turned the color of cement, her eyes had receded into her skull, she had actually grown shorter. She didn't at all mind his asking; quite the contrary, Eugene was the only one to take a personal interest in her... Please don't misunderstand, she didn't expect medals but it would not have been out of place, considering the decades of loyal service, for someone to drop a tiny word of appreciation from time to time... Alas, yes, she supposed they must get down to business... She had been instructed to inform Eugene that his mentor required him to organize a face-to-face meeting with SASHA... the sooner, the better... He would discover why when he retrieved the material left in SILKWORM one seven... Oh, how she hoped against hope that he would take care of himself... Please don't hang down yet, there was one more thing. She knew it was out of the realm of possibility but she would have liked to meet him once, just once, only once; would have liked to kiss him on the forehead the way she had kissed her son before the Nazi swines hauled him off to the death camp... Eugene would have to excuse her, she certainly hadn't intended to cry... He would! Why, they could meet in a drug store late at night and take tea together at the counter... Oh, dear child, if such a thing could be organized she would be eternally grateful... It could be a week or so before she found a suitable furnished apartment so he could ring back at this number... She would sit next to the phone waiting for him to call... Yes, yes, goodbye, my dear.

They came to the rendezvous marked as

O X X

X X O

OXO

in the tic-tac-toe code from opposite directions and met just off the Mall between 9th and 10th Streets under the statue of Robert E Kennedy. "There were people in the Company who broke out Champagne and celebrated when he was gunned down," SASHA recalled, gazing up at Bobby, who had been assassinated by a Palestinian in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel just after winning the 1968 California Democratic Presidential primary.

"You knew him, didn't you?" Eugene asked.

The two men turned their backs on the statue and on the woman who was setting out the skeletons of fish on newspaper for the wild cats in the neighborhood, and strolled down 10th street toward the Mall. "I don't think anybody knew him," SASHA said. "He seemed to step into different roles at different periods of his life. First he was Black Robert, Jack Kennedy's hatchet man. When JFK was assassinated he became the mournful patriarch of the Kennedy clan. When he finally threw his hat into the ring and ran for President, he turned into an ardent defender of the underprivileged."

"From Black Robert to Saint Bobby," Eugene said.

SASHA eyed his cutout. "What's your secret, Eugene? You don't seem to grow older."

"Its the adrenalin that runs through your veins when you live the way we do," Eugene joked. "Every morning I wonder if I'll sleep in my bed that night or on a bunk in a cell."

"As long as we're vigilant, as long as our tradecraft is meticulous, we'll be fine," SASHA assured him. "What Starik has to tell me must be pretty important for you take the trouble—"

"You mean the risk."

SASHA smiled faintly. "—for you to take the risk of personally meeting me."

"It is." Eugene had deciphered the document he'd retrieved from SILKWORM one seven, and then spent a long time trying to figure out how to come at the subject with SASHA. "It's about your recent replies to Starik's query of September twenty-second—you left messages in dead drops at the end of September and the first week of October. Comrade Chairman Andropov is absolutely positive that he has analyzed the situation correctly. He was furious when Starik passed on your reports—he even went so far as to suggest that you had been turned by the CIA and were feeding Moscow Centre disinformation. That was the only explanation he could see for your failing to confirm that ABLE ARCHER 83 is covering an American first strike."

SASHA burst out, "We're really in hot water if Andropov has become the Centre's senior intelligence analyst."

"Don't get angry with me. I'm just the messenger. Look, Comrade Andropov is convinced the Americans are planning a pre-emptive first strike. With final preparations for KHOLSTOMER being put in place, it's only natural that Andropov and Starik want to pin down the date of the American attack—"

SASHA stopped in his tracks. "There is no American preemptive strike in the works," he insisted. "The whole idea is pure nonsense. The reason I can't come up with the date is because there is none. If there were a preemptive strike on the drawing boards I'd know about it. Andropov is an alarmist."

"Starik is only suggesting that you are too categoric. He asks if it isn't possible for you to report that you are unaware of any plans for a preemptive strike, as opposed to saying there are no such plans. After all, the Pentagon could be planning a strike and keeping the CIA in the dark—"

SASHA resumed walking. "Look, it's simply not possible. The Russians have a mobile second-strike capacity on board railroad flatcars—twelve trains, each with four ICBMs, each ICBM with eight to twelve warheads, shuttling around the three hundred thousand miles of tracks. Without real-time satellite intelligence, the Pentagon couldn't hope to knock these out in a first strike. And the CIA provides the guys who interpret the satellite photographs." SASHA shook his head in frustration. "We have a representative on the committee that selects targets and updates the target list. We keep track of Soviet missile readiness; we estimate how many warheads they could launch at any given moment. Nobody has shown any out-of-the-ordinary interest in these estimates."

An overweight man trotting along with two dogs on long leashes overtook them and then passed them. Eugene kept an eye on the occasional
car whizzing down Pennsylvania Avenue behind them. "I don't know what to tell you," he finally said. "Starik obviously doesn't want you to make up stories to please the General Secretary. On the other hand, you could make his life easier—"

"Do you realize what you're saying, Eugene? Jesus, we've come a long way together. And you're out here asking me to cook the intelligence estimates I send back."

"Starik is asking you to be a bit more discreet when you file reports."

"In another life," SASHA remarked, "I'm going to write a book about spying—I'm going to tell the fiction writers what it's really all about. In theory, you and I and the rezidentura have enormous advantages in spying against the Principal Adversary—Western societies, their governments, even their intelligence agencies are more open than ours and easier to penetrate. But in practice, we have enormous disadvantages that even James Angleton, in his heyday, wasn't aware of. Our leaders act as their own intelligence analysts. And our agents in the field are afraid to tell their handlers anything that contradicts the preconceptions of the leaders; even if we tell the handlers, they certainly won't put their careers on the line by passing it up the chain of command. Stalin was positive the West was trying to promote a war between the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany, and any information that contradicted that—including half a hundred reports that Hitler was planning to attack Russia—was simply buried. Only reports that appeared to confirm Stalin's suspicions were passed on to him. At one point the Centre even concluded that Kim Philby had been turned because he failed to find evidence that Britain was plotting to turn Hitler against Stalin. Our problem is structural—the intelligence that gets passed up tends to reinforce misconceptions instead of correcting them."

"So what do I tell Starik?" Eugene asked.

"Tell him the truth. Tell him there isn't a shred of evidence to support the General Secretary's belief that America is planning a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union."

"If Andropov believes that, there's a good chance he may cancel KHOLSTOMER."

"Would that be such a bad thing?" SASHA demanded. "If KHOLSTOMER succeeds hundreds of millions of ordinary people are going to lose their life's savings." After a while SASHA said, "A long time ago you told me what Starik said to you the day he recruited you. You remember?"

Eugene nodded. "I could never forget. He said we were going to promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit. It's what keeps me going."

SASHA stopped in his tracks again and turned to face his comrade in the struggle against imperialism and capitalism. "So tell me, Eugene: what does KHOLSTOMER have to do with promoting the genius and generosity of the human spirit?"

Eugene was silent for a moment. "I'll pass on to Starik what you said— ABLE ARCHER 83 is not masking an American preemptive strike."

SASHA shivered in his overcoat and pulled the collar up around his neck. "It's damn cold out tonight," he said.

"It is, isn't it?" Eugene agreed. "What about KHOLSTOMER? You're still supposed to monitor the Federal Reserve preparations to protect the dollar. What do we do about that?"

"We think about it."

Eugene smiled at his friend. "All right. We'll think about it."

Tessa was incoherent with excitement so Vanessa did most of the talking. Tessa's unit supervisor, a saturnine counterintelligence veteran appropriately named Moody, listened with beady concentration as she led him through the solution. It had been a matter, she explained impatiently, of plying back and forth between the lottery numbers, various telephone numbers and the serial number on a ten-dollar bill. Tessa could tell Mr. Moody was perplexed. If you start with the area code 202, she said, and subtract that number from the lottery number broadcast with the first Lewis Carroll quotation on April 5, 1951, you break out a ten-dollar bill serial number that begins with a three and a zero. You see?

I'm not sure, Moody admitted, but Vanessa, caught up in her own story, plunged on. Using a three and a zero, I was also able to break out the 202 area code from the other twenty-three lottery numbers broadcast by Radio Moscow after an Alice or Looking Glass quotation. There was no way under the sun this could be an accident."

"So far, so good," Moody—one of the last holdovers from the Angleton era—muttered, but it was evident from the squint of his eyes that he was struggling to keep up with the twins.

"Okay," Vanessa said. "In 1950 the US Treasury printed up $67,593,240 worth of ten-dollar bills with serial numbers that started with a three and a zero, followed by an eight and a nine."

Moody jotted a three and a zero and an eight and a nine on a yellow pad.

Vanessa said, "Subtracting the 3089 from that first lottery number gave us a telephone number that began with 202 601, which was a common Washington phone number in the early 1950s."

Tessa said, "At which point we checked out the 9,999 possible phone numbers that went with the 202 601."

"What were you looking for?" Moody wanted to know. He was still mystified.

"Don't you see it?" Vanessa asked. "If Tessa's right, if the quotations from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass alerted the Soviet agent to copy off the lottery number, and if the lottery number was a coded telephone number, the fact that they were changing it all the time meant that the cutout was moving all the time."

Moody had to concede that that made sense; when the agent being contacted was important enough, counterintelligence knew of instances where KGB tradecraft required cutouts to relocate after each contact.

"So," Vanessa continued, "what we were looking for was someone whose phone number began with 202 601, and who moved out soon after April 5th, 1951."

Tessa said, "It took us days to find anyone who even knew that old telephone records existed. We eventually found them buried in dusty boxes in a dusty basement. It turns out there were one hundred and twenty-seven phones that started with the number 202 601 that were taken out of service in the week following April 5th, 1951."

"After that it was child's play," Vanessa said. "We subtracted each of the hundred and twenty-seven phone numbers from that first lottery number, which gave us a hundred and twenty-seven possible eight-digit serial numbers for the Soviet agent's ten-dollar bill. Then we went to the second time the Moscow quiz program used a Lewis Carroll quote, and subtracted each of the hundred and twenty-seven possible serial numbers from it, giving us a hundred and twenty-seven new phone numbers. Then we waltzed back to the phone records and traced one of these phone numbers to an apartment rented by the same person who had been on the first 202 601 list."

Tessa came around the desk and crouched next to the unit supervisor's wooden swivel chair. "The serial number on the agent's ten-dollar bill is 30892006, Mr. Moody. Five days after Radio Moscow broadcast the second coded lottery number, which is to say five days after the Soviet agent in America phoned that number, this person relocated again."

Vanessa said, "We tested the serial number on all the lottery numbers broadcast by Radio Moscow when an Alice or a Looking Glass quote turned up in the quiz. Every time we subtracted the eight-digit serial number from the winning lottery number, it led to a Washington-area phone number in an apartment rented by the same woman. In every case the woman relocated within a week or so of the Moscow Radio broadcast."

"So the cutout's a woman!" Moody exclaimed.

"A Polish woman by the name of—" Tessa retrieved an index card from the pocket of her jacket "—Aida Tannenbaum. We got our hands on her naturalization papers. She is an Auschwitz survivor, a Jewish refugee from Poland who emigrated to America after World War II and became an American citizen in 1951. She was born in 1914, which makes her sixty-nine years old. She never seems to have held a job and it's not clear where she gets money to pay the rent."

Vanessa said, "She's changed apartments twenty-six times in the past thirty-two years. Her most recent address—which we traced when we broke out the most recent lottery signal from Moscow Radio—is on 16th Street near Antioch College. If she sticks to the pattern she'll move out in the next two or three days."

Mr. Moody was beginning to put it all together. "She moves out a week or so after she's contacted by the Soviet agent in America," he said.

"Right," Tessa said.

Vanessa said, "When she moves, all we have to do is get the phone company to tell us when someone named Aida Tannenbaum applies for a new phone number—"

Tessa finished the thought for her: "Or wait for the Moscow quiz program to come up with an Alice or a Looking Glass quotation, then subtract the serial number from the lottery number—"

Moody was shaking his head from side to side in wonderment. "And we'll have her new phone number—the one that the Soviet agent will call."

" Right. That's it."

"It looks to me," Moody said, "as if you girls have made a fantastic breakthrough. I must formally instruct both of you not to share this information with anybody. By anybody I mean any-body, without exception."

As soon as the twins were gone, Moody—who, like his old mentor Angleton, was reputed to have a photographic memory—opened a four-drawer steel file cabinet and rummaged through the folders until he came to an extremely thick one marked "Kukushkin." Moody had been a member of the crack four-man team that Angleton had assigned to work through the Kukushkin serials. Now, skimming the pages of the dossier, he searched anxiously for the passage he remembered. After a time he began to wonder whether he had imagined it. And then, suddenly, his eye fell on the paragraph he'd been looking for. At one point Kukushkin—who turned out to be a dispatched agent but who had delivered a certain amount of true information in order to establish his bona fides—had reported that the cutout who serviced SASHA was away from Washington on home leave; the summons back to Russia had been passed on to the cutout by a woman who freelanced for the Washington rezidentura.

A woman who freelanced for the rezidentura!

In other words, SASHA was so important that one cutout wasn't sufficient; the KGB had built in a circuit breaker between the rezidentura and the cutout who serviced SASHA. Could it be this circuit breaker that the Kritzky twins had stumbled across? He would get the FBI to tap Aida Tannenbaum's phone on 16th Street on the off-chance the cutout who serviced SASHA called again before she moved on to another apartment, at which point they would tap the new number.

Barely able to conceal his excitement, Moody picked up an intra-office telephone and dialed a number on the seventh floor. "This is Moody in counterintelligence," he said. "Can you put me through to Mr. Ebbitt ... Mr. Ebbitt, this is Moody in counterintelligence. I know it's somewhat unusual, but I'm calling you directly because I have a something that requires your immediate attention..."

4

WASHINGTON, DC, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1983

TWO MEN IN WHITE JUMP SUITS WITH "CON EDISON" PRINTED ON THE backs showed laminated ID cards to the superintendent of the apartment building on 16th Street off Columbia, within walking distance of Antioch College. Quite a few Antioch undergraduates lived in the building, three or four to an apartment. The old woman with the heavy Eastern European accent in 3B had given notice, so the super said. She was obliged to move in with a sister who was bedridden and needed assistance; the old woman, whose name was Mrs. Tannenbaum, didn't seem overly concerned when she discovered that she would lose the two-months' security she had deposited with the real estate company. No, the super added, she didn't live alone; she shared the furnished apartment with someone named Silvester. Using penlights, the two technicians found where the telephone cable came into the basement and followed it along the wall to the central panel near a wire mesh storage space filled with baby carriages and bicycles. The shorter of the two men opened a metal tool kit and took out the induction tap and cable. The other man unscrewed the cover on the central panel. Inside, the connections were clearly labeled by apartment number. He touched 3B and, following the wire up with a fingertip, separated it from the others. Then he attached the induction clamp to the line; the device tapped into a phone without touching the wire, which made it difficult to detect. The two men wedged a small battery-powered transmitter between a metal beam and the ceiling, then ran the black cable from the induction tap up behind a pipe and plugged the end into the transmitter. They connected one end of an antenna wire to the terminal and, unreeling it, taped it to the side of the beam, then activated the transmitter and hit the "Test" button.

Inside the white panel truck with "Slater & Slater Radio-TV" printed on the side, a needle on a signal reception meter registered "Strong." The two FBI agents manning the truck, which was parked in front of a fire hydrant further down l6th Street, gave each other the thumb's up sign. From this point on, all incoming and outgoing calls to 3B would be picked off the phone line by the induction clamp and broadcast to the white panel truck, where they would be recorded on tape and then rushed over to a joint command post staffed by FBI agents and Moody's people from counterintelligence.

The President was extremely proud of his long-term memory. "I recall, uh, this grizzly old sergeant looking out at the new recruits, me among them," he was saying, "and he growled at us, you know, the way sergeants growl at new recruits: 'I'm going to tell you men this just once but trust me—it'll stay with you for the rest of your lives. When you come out of a brothel the first thing you want to do is wash your, uh, private parts with Dial soap. The way you remember which soap to use is that Dial spelled backwards is laid."' Reagan, who liked to think of himself as a stand-up comic manque, grinned as he waited for the reactions. They weren't long in coming. "Dial spelled backward is laid!" one of the White House staffers repeated, and he and the others in the room howled with laughter. Reagan was chuckling along with them when his chief of staff, James Baker, stuck his head in the door of the second-floor office in the Presidential hideaway, the four-story brick townhouse on Jackson Place that Reagan had worked out of during the transition and still used when he wanted to get away from the darned goldfish bowl (as he called the Oval Office). "Their car's arriving," Baker snapped. He looked pointedly at the aides. "You have five minutes before I bring them up." With that, he disappeared.

"Remind me who's, uh, coming over," Reagan said amiably. A young aide produced an index card and hurriedly started to brief the President. "Bill Casey is coming to see you with two of his top people. The first person he's bringing along is his deputy director, Elliott Ebbitt II, Ebby for short. You've met him several times before."

"Did I, uh, call him Elliott or Ebby?"

"Ebby, Mr. President. The second person is the Deputy Director for Operations, Jack McAuliffe. You've never met him but you'll pick him out immediately—he's a six-footer with reddish hair and a flamboyant mustache. McAuliffe is something of a legendary figure inside the CIA—he's the one who went ashore with the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs."

"Ashore with the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs," Reagan repeated.

"McAuliffe's boy, Anthony, is the CIA officer who is being held hostage in Afghanistan, along with the Shaath woman."

Reagan nodded in concern. "The father must be pretty, uh, distressed."

"You were briefed about the boy's toe being amputated and delivered to the CIA station in Kabul."

"I remember the business with the toe," Reagan said cheerily. "They were able to identify it because of a birthmark."

"They're coming to see you," another aide added, "because they've discovered where this Commander Ibrahim is holding the hostages. They want a Presidential finding to mount a commando-style raid to free them."

Bill Clark, the Presidents National Security Advisor, came over to Reagan, who seemed lost in an enormous leather chair behind the large mahogany desk. Photographs of Nancy and himself, along with several of his favorite horses, were spread across the desk. "There are pros and cons to a commando raid," Clark said. "The one your predecessor, President Carter, mounted to free the hostages in Iran went wrong. US servicemen were killed. And of course the raiders never got anywhere near the hostages. Carter looked inept—the press was very critical. On the other hand, the Israelis mounted a commando raid to free the Jewish hostages being held by airline hijackers in Entebbe and pulled it off. They got a terrific press. The whole world applauded their audacity."

An appreciative smile worked its way onto Reagan's tanned features. "I remember that. Made quite a splash at the time."

There were two quick raps on the door, then Baker came in and stepped aside and three men walked into the room. Reagan sprang to his feet and came around the side of the desk to meet them half way. Grinning, he pumped Casey's hand. "Bill, how are you?" Without waiting for a response, he shook hands with Casey's deputy director, Elliott Ebbitt. "Ebby, glad to see you again," he said. The President turned to the DD/0, Jack McAuliffe and gripped his hand in both of his. "So you're the famous Jack McAuliffe I've, uh, heard so much about—your reputation precedes you. You're the one who went ashore with the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs."

"I'm flattered you remember that, Mr. President—"

"Americans don't forget their heroes. At least this American doesn't." He pulled Jack toward the couch and gestured for everyone to sit down. The aides hovered behind the President.

"Can I offer you boys something to wet your whistles?"

"If you don't mind, Mr. President, we're in a bit of a time bind," Casey said.

Reagan said to Jack, "I was briefed about the toe with the birthmark— you must be pretty distressed."

"Distressed is not the word, Mr. President," Jack said. "This Ibrahim fellow is threatening to cut off more of his toes unless the negotiations—" He couldn't continue.

Reagan's eyes narrowed in sincere commiseration. "Any father in your situation would be worried sick."

"Mr. President," Bill Casey said, "we've come over because there have been new developments in the hostage situation."

Reagan turned his gaze on Casey and stared at him in total concentration. "Our KH-11 has come up with—"

The President leaned back toward an aide, who bent down and whispered in his ear, "Sir, KH-11 is a photo reconnaissance satellite."

"Our KH-11 has come up with some dazzling intelligence," Casey said. "You'll remember, Mr. President, that the Russians and everyone else fell for the disinformation we put out—they think the KH-11 is a signals platform. As they don't suspect there are cameras on board, they don't camouflage military installations or close missile silo doors when the satellite passes overhead. The KH-11 has an advanced radar system to provide an all-weather and day-night look-down capability—using computers, our people are able to enhance the radar signals and create photographs. Thanks to this we've been able to track the Ibrahim kidnappers across Afghanistan. We've traced them to a mountain fortress two hundred and twenty miles inside Afghanistan." Casey pulled an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph from a folder and handed it to Reagan. "We even have a daytime shot of the Shaath woman and Jack's son, Anthony, walking inside the compound."

The President studied the photograph. "I can make out the two figures but how can you, uh, tell who they are."

"We determined that one is a woman by her chest. And as neither is dressed the way the tribesmen dress, we concluded that they are Westerners."

Reagan handed the photograph back. "I see."

Ebby said, "Mr. President, we have independent confirmation that Anthony McAuliffe and Maria Shaath are, in fact, being held in Ibrahim's stronghold. We arranged for our Israeli friends to send in an agent masquerading as a gunrunner. This happened four days ago. The Mossad's report reached us this morning. The gunrunner saw the two prisoners with his own eyes and subsequently picked out the young McAuliffe and Maria Shaath from a group of photographs that we faxed to the Israelis."

"While this was going on, Mr. President," Casey said, "we've been buying time by negotiating with this fellow Ibrahim by fax. As you know, he originally wanted a hundred and fifty Stinger ground-to-air missiles. In the course of the negotiations we've managed to talk him down to fifty—"

Reagan was shaking his head in disagreement. "I don't see why you're being so stingy," he said. "Far as I'm concerned Afghanistan's the right war at the right time. I told Jim Baker here that the, uh, money you boys allocated to the freedom fighters was peanuts." The President repeated the word "peanuts." The others in the room dared not look at each other. Reagan slapped a knee. "By gosh, there were fifty-eight thousand Americans killed in Vietnam. Afghanistan is payback time."

The National Security Advisor coughed into a palm and Reagan looked up at him. "Mr. President, you decided some time ago that giving Stingers to the Islamic fundamentalists could backfire on us, in the sense that after the Russians leave Afghanistan the fundamentalists could turn the Stingers on the West. Perhaps you would like to review this policy—"

"Well, I just, uh, hate to see the gall darn Commies squirm off the hook, and so forth."

"It's a piece of policy I could never understand," Casey said, hoping to sway the President. He avoided looking at Baker, whom he suspected of badmouthing him behind his back; the two were barely on speaking terms. "Putting Stingers into the hands of the mujaheddin," Casey added, "would tilt the scales against the Russians—"

"We could have the National Security shop take another look at the Stinger question," Baker told the President. "But I don't see what's changed since you made your determination that it was too risky."

"We're not afraid of taking risks," Reagan said, searching for a formulation that would accommodate everyone's point of view. "On the other hand, we certainly wouldn't want the Islamists turning the Stingers on us when this war is, uh, over."

Baker, who organized Reagan's schedule and controlled what paperwork reached his desk, took his cue from the last thing the President said. "Until the President changes his mind," he instructed the aides, "we'll leave the Stinger decision stand."

Casey shrugged; another skirmish lost in the behind-the-scenes infighting that went on around the disengaged President. "Now that we know where the hostages are," Casey mumbled, "we'd like to explore with you the possibility of organizing a commando-style raid to free them."

Jack said earnestly, "What we have in mind, Mr. President, is to farm out the operation to the Israelis. We've already sounded out the Mossad's deputy director, Ezra Ben Ezra, the one they call the Rabbi—"

Reagan looked bemused. "That's a good one—a Rabbi being deputy director of the Mossad!"

"The Israelis," Jack rushed on, "have an elite unit known as the Sayeret Matkal—it was this unit that pulled off the Entebbe raid, Mr. President."

"I'm, uh, familiar with the Entebbe raid," Reagan said.

"The game plan," Ebby said, "is for us to agree to exchange the hostages for fifty Stingers. Then a dozen or so members of this Israeli unit—Jews who were born in Arab countries and look like Arabs— "

"And speak perfect Arabic," Jack put in.

"The Sayeret Matkal team," Ebby continued, "would go in with a string of pack animals carrying crates filled with Stingers that have been modified to make them unworkable. Once they're inside Ibrahim's compound—"

Baker interrupted. "What's in it for the Israelis?"

Casey talked past Reagan to Baker. "They're willing to lend a helping hand in exchange for access to KH-11 photos of their Middle East neighbors."

The aides studied the patterns in the carpet underfoot. Baker kept nodding. Clark chewed pensively on the inside of his cheek. Their underlings were waiting to see which way the wind would blow. Finally the President said, very carefully, "Well, it, uh, sounds interesting to me, boys."

Later, waiting outside number 716 Jackson Place for the Company car to pick them up, Jack turned on Casey. "Jesus, Bill, we came away without an answer."

Casey smiled knowingly. "We got an answer."

Ebby said, "If we got an answer it went over my head."

"We all heard him say the idea was interesting, didn't we? That was his way of saying okay."

Ebby could only shake his head. "It's a hell of a way to run a government!"

Aida Tannenbaum snatched the phone off the hook after the first ring.

"Yes?"

When no one responded, Aida became anxious. In her heart she knew who was breathing into the phone on the other end of the line. "Is that you, Gene?" she whispered, hoping to lure his voice through the miles of wire and into her ear. "If it is, please, please say so."

"Its me," Eugene finally said. His voice was strained; he obviously felt uneasy. "I promised I'd call back—"

"Dear child," Aida said, "I knew you would."

"It violates basic tradecraft but I'll do it—I will meet you for a drink if you like."

"Where?" she asked impatiently. "When?"

"How about the bar of the Barbizon, on Wyoming off Connecticut? At eleven if that's not too late for you."

"The Barbizon at eleven," she said. "You don't mind if I bring Silvester?"

Eugenes voice turned hard. "If you are with anyone, I won't show up."

"Dear, dear Gene, Silvester is a cat."

He laughed uneasily. "I didn't understand... sure, bring Silvester if you want to. It'll be a recognition signal—I'll look for a woman with a cat. You look for an overweight middle-aged man with hair the color of sand carrying a copy of Time under his left arm—"

"Even without the magazine I would know you immediately. Until tonight, then?"

"Until tonight."

Eugene made his way across the half-empty lounge to the bird-like woman sitting next to a small table at the back. She was wearing clothing that he'd seen in old black-and-white motion pictures: a square hat was planted atop her silvery hair and a black lace veil fell from it over her eyes, a paisley form-fitting jacket with padded shoulders hugged her delicate rib cage, a heavy black satin skirt plunged to the tops of sturdy winter walking shoes. Her eyes were watering, whether from age or emotion he couldn't tell. A wicker shopping basket containing a ratty old cat with patches of pink skin where his hair had fallen out was set on the chair next to her.

"I don't even know your name," Eugene said, looking down at the woman.

"I know yours, dear Eugene."

A skeletal hand encased in a white lace glove floated up to him. Eugene took hold of it and, recalling the etiquette lessons his mother had given him when he was twelve years old, bent from the waist and brushed the back of her hand with his lips. He removed his overcoat and threw it across the back of a chair and settled onto a seat across from her.

"I will have a daiquiri," the woman informed him. "I had one immediately after I arrived in America in 1946 in a very elegant cocktail lounge the name of which has since slipped my mind."

Eugene signaled to the waiter and ordered a daiquiri and a double cognac. The old woman appeared to sway on her seat, then steadied herself by gripping the edge of the table. "My name," she said, "is Aida Tannenbaum."

"It is an honor to make your acquaintance," Eugene told her, and he meant every word. He knew of few people who had given as much to the cause.

The waiter set two drinks on the table and tucked a check upside down under an ashtray.

Eugene said, "So this is Silvester."

Aida lifted the veil with one gloved hand and sipped the daiquiri. She swallowed and winced and shuddered. "Oh, dear, I don't remember the daiquiri being so strong. Yes, this is Silvester. Silvester, say hello to a comrade-in-arms, Eugene." She swayed toward Eugene and lowered her voice. "I was instructed to live alone and never told anyone about Silvester. I found him on the fire escape of an apartment I rented in the early 1970s. You don't think they would mind, do you?"

"No. I'm sure its all right."

She seemed relieved. "Tell me about yourself, Eugene. How did an American—I can tell from your accent that you are from the East Coast; from New York in all probability—how did you become involved in the struggle..."

"I was led to believe that I could contribute to the fight to defend the genius and generosity of the human spirit."

"We are doing exactly that, dear child. Of course I don't know what it is that you do with the messages I pass on to you, but you are a Socialist warrior on the front line."

"So are you, Aida Tannenbaum."

"Yes." Her eyes clouded over. "Yes. Though I will admit to you I am fatigued, Eugene. I have been fighting on one or another front line as far back as I can remember. Before the war, there were some who believed that only the creation of a Zionist state in Palestine could shield the Jews, but I was in the other camp—I believed that the spread of Socialism would eradicate anti-Semitism and protect the Jews, and I joined the struggle led by the illustrious Joseph Stalin. If I were a religious person, which I am not, I would certainly think of him as a saint. During the war I fought against the Fascists. After the war—" She sipped the daiquiri and shuddered again as the alcohol burned her throat. "After the war I was mystified to find myself still alive. In order to make what life I had left worth living, I joined the ranks of those battling alienation and capitalism. I dedicated the fight to the memory of my son, assassinated by the Nazis. His name was Alfred. Alfred Tannenbaum, aged seven at the time of his murder. Of course I don't believe there is a word of truth in the things they have said about Stalin since—I am absolutely certain it is all capitalist propaganda."

Three young men in three-piece suits and a young woman, all slightly inebriated, entered the lounge. They argued over whether to sit at the bar or a table. The bar won. Sliding onto stools, depositing their attache cases on the floor, they summoned the bartender and loudly ordered drinks. At the small table Eugene inspected the newcomers, then turned back to Aida. "You are what Americans would call an unsung heroine. The very few people who know what you do appreciate you."

"Perhaps. Perhaps not." Aida dabbed a tear away from the corner of an eye with the paper napkin. "I have rented a furnished apartment at number forty-seven Corcoran Street off New Hampshire, not far from Johns Hopkins University. I am moving there tomorrow. I prefer to live in buildings with college students—they are always very kind to Silvester. And they often run errands for me when I am too nauseous or too dizzy to go out in the street." She managed a tight-lipped smile. "Perhaps we could meet again from time to time."

"This was probably a bad idea. We must not take the risk again."

"If they haven't found us out during all these years I doubt they will do it now," she said.

"Still—"

"Once every six months, perhaps? Once a year even?" Aida sighed. "What we do, the way we do it, is terribly lonely."

Eugene smiled back at her. "At least you have Silvester."

"And you, dear child. Whom do you have?"

When he didn't answer she reached across the table and rested her fingers on the back of his hand. She was so frail, her hand so light, he had to look down to be sure she was touching him. She pulled back her hand and, opening a small snap purse, took out a minuscule ballpoint pen and scratched a phone number on the inside of a Barbizon Terrace matchbook. "If you change your mind before—" She laughed softly. "If you change your heart before our friends broadcast a new lottery number you can reach me at this number."

Outside, a cold wind was seeping in off the Tidal Basin. Aida was wearing a cloth coat with an imitation fur collar. Eugene offered to flag down a taxi for her but she said she preferred to walk home. She tucked the thick piece of cloth in the basket around Silvester and buttoned the top button of her overcoat. Eugene held out his hand. Ignoring it, she reached up and placed her fingers on the back of his neck and, with a lover s gesture perfected fifty years before, gently pulled his head down and kissed him on the lips. Spinning quickly away, she walked off into the night.

As soon as she was out of sight Eugene pulled the matchbook from his pocket and ripped it so that the phone number was torn in half. He dropped half of the matchbook in the gutter and the other half in a garbage pail he found two blocks up the street.

He would never again set eyes on Aida Tannenbaum.

Casey, bored to tears, was auditing a high-level symposium that had been convened to reconcile the differences between CIA forecasts for the Soviet Union and those from a "B" team panel of outside economists. CIA specialists maintained that Soviet per capita income was on a par with Britain's; the "B" team had calculated that it was roughly equal to Mexico's. To make matters more complicated, the "B" team insisted that the Company's projections of Soviet strategic forces was also on the high side. The argument raged back and forth across the table as economists on both sides of the divide dredged up statistics to support their conclusions. Swallowing each yawn as it bubbled up from the depths of his weary soul, Casey gazed listlessly out the window. Darkness had fallen and the lights that illuminated the security fence around Langley were flickering on. Casey knew what the number crunchers didn't: that the CIA had in fact detected signs of a slowdown in the Soviet economy but continued to overstate its size and the growth rate to appease Reagan's people, who grew livid when anyone raised the possibility that the Soviet economy and Soviet military spending were flattening out. Team players, so the Reagan people contended, didn't challenge the logic behind the President's decision to build the B-1 bomber or recommission two World War II battleships and budget for a 600-ship navy: military-wise, the Soviet Union was nipping at our heels and we had to throw immense amounts of money at the problem to stay ahead. Period. End of discussion.

"The Soviet Union," one of the independent economists was arguing, "is an Upper Volta with rockets." He waved a pamphlet in the air. "A French analyst has documented this. The number of women who die in childbirth in the Soviet Union has been decreasing since the Bolshevik Revolution. Suddenly, in the early seventies, the statistic bottomed out and then started to get worse each year until the Russians finally grasped how revealing this statistic was and stopped reporting it."

"What in God's name does a statistic about the number of women who die in childbirth have to do with analyzing Soviet military spending?" a Company analyst snarled across the table.

"If you people knew how to interpret statistics, you'd know that everything is related—"

Elliott Ebbitt, Casey's DDCI, appeared at the door of the conference room and beckoned the Director with a forefinger. Casey, only too happy to flee the debate, slipped out into the corridor with Ebby.

"Will Rogers once said that an economist's guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's," Casey grumbled, "but I'm beginning to have my doubts."

"I thought you'd want to be in on this," Ebby told him as they started toward the DCI's suite of offices. "There's been a breakthrough in the SASHA affair."

Moody from counterintelligence, along with two FBI agents, were waiting in the small conference room across from the DCI's bailiwick. Waving a paw at the others to go on with the conversation, Casey flopped into a seat.

Moody picked up the thread. "Director, thanks to the ingenious work of Leo Kritzky's daughters, we've identified what we call the circuit breaker between the Soviet rezidentura and the cutout that runs SASHA."

"What makes you think the cutout runs SASHA?" Casey wanted to know.

Moody explained about the Kukushkin serial involving the woman who freelanced for the rezidentura and the cutout who worked SASHA. "Kukushkin was a dispatched agent," he said, "but he gave us true information in order to convince us he was a genuine defector. It looks as if the tidbit about the woman freelancer and the cutout could have been true information."

The FBI agent wearing a nametag that identified him as A. Bolster said, "We're not a hundred percent sure why, but the circuit breaker, an old Polish woman by the name ofAida Tannenbaum, met the cutout late last night at the Barbizon Terrace."

Casey nodded carefully. "How can you be sure the person Tannenbaum met was not simply a friend?"

Bolster said, "We have a tap on her phone. The person who called her earlier in the evening told her: "It violates basic tradecraft but I'll do it—I will meet you for a drink, if you like."'

"He said that?" Casey inquired. "He used the word tradecraft?"

"Yes, sir."

Moody said, "It was short notice but we managed to get a team into the lounge when they were halfway through their little tete-a-tete. One of our people had a directional mike hidden in an attache case, which he put on the floor pointing at them. The sound quality wasn't very good but our technicians enhanced it and we came up with a transcript of their conversation." Moody passed two typed sheets across to the Director, then read aloud from his own copy. "We can hear him saying, and I'm quoting: 'You are what Americans would call an unsung heroine. The very few people who know what you do appreciate you.' And she answers, and again I'm quoting: 'Perhaps. Perhaps not.' Then she can be heard saying: 'I have rented a furnished apartment on number forty-seven Corcoran Street off New Hampshire, not far from Johns Hopkins University. I am moving there tomorrow. I prefer to live in buildings with college students—they are always very kind to Silvester. And they often run errands for me when I am too nauseous or too dizzy to go out in the street. Perhaps we could meet again from time to time.'"

"Who's Silvester?" Casey asked.

The second FBI agent, F. Barton, said, "We think it's the woman's cat, Director."

Jack McAuliffe turned up at the door, a preoccupied frown etched onto his forehead; he'd been over at the Pentagon laying in the plumbing for the Israeli commando raid on Ibrahim's mountain compound, and was worried sick they weren't assigning enough helicopters. "Director, Ebby, gentlemen," he said, sliding into a free seat next to Moody, "what's this I hear about a breakthrough in the SASHA business?"

While Moody brought the Deputy Director for Operations up to date in a hurried whisper, Ebby said, "Director, taken together, the phone conversation and the conversation in the Barbizon seem to suggest that, in violation of standard tradecraft precautions, the Polish woman talked the cutout into a face-to-face meeting. If, as we suspect, she's been acting as his circuit breaker for decades, she may have fantasized about him; may have even fallen in love with him. As for the cutout—"

"Maybe he felt sorry for her," Moody suggested.

"What do you think. Jack?" Ebby asked.

Jack looked up. "About what?"

"About why the cutout violated standard tradecraft precautions."

Jack considered this. "He's been leading a dreary life," he guessed. His eyes were heavy lidded, his face pale and drawn; it wasn't lost on Ebby and the Director that the DD/0 could have been describing himself. "Maybe he just needed to talk to someone to get through one more night," Jack added.

"Either way," Ebby said, "he agreed to meet her this one time." Bolster said, "On Moody's recommendation we laid on a tiered surveillance. Twelve vehicles—six private automobiles, three taxis, two delivery vehicles, one tow truck—were involved, one peeling off as another came on line. The cutout flagged down a taxi and took it to Farragut Square, then caught a bus to Lee Highway, where he got off and changed to another bus going up Broad Street to Tysons Corner. He got off there and walked the last half-mile to an apartment over the garage of a private home—"

Barton said, "When he emerged from the Barbizon he tore up a matchbook and threw the different halves in different places. Our people recovered them—the phone number of the apartment the Polish woman moved into today was written inside."

Casey, always impatient, snapped, "Who is the cutout?"

Moody said, "He's renting the apartment under the name of Gene Lutwidge, which is obviously an operational identity."

Bolster said, "We've put a tap on Lutwidge's line from the telephone exchange. And we've created a special fifty-man task force—he'll be tailed by rotating teams every time he leaves the apartment. With any luck, it'll only be a matter of time before he leads us to your famous SASHA."

Casey asked, "What does this guy do for a living?"

Barton said, "He doesn't go to an office, if that's what you mean. People in the neighborhood are under the impression that he's some kind of writer—"

"Has Lutwidge published anything?" Casey demanded.

"We checked the Library of Congress," Barton said. "The only thing that surfaces when you look up the name Lutwidge is Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass—"

"They're by Lewis Carroll," Casey said.

"Lewis Carroll was the pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson," Bolster explained.

"Did you say Dodgson?" Moody exclaimed.

Everyone turned to stare at Moody. Bolster said, "What do you remember that we don't?"

Moody said, "In 1961—that was before your time, Archie—the FBI arrested a man named Kahn who ran a liquor store in the Washington area. You also arrested the girl who worked for him, name of Bernice something-or-other. Both Kahn and Bernice were American communists who had gone underground, and were providing infrastructure for the Soviet agent who was the cutout between Philby and his controlling officer. We think this same cutout serviced SASHA after Philby was no longer operational. The FBI agents who raided the liquor store came across evidence of the cutout's presence: ciphers and microfilms, a microdot reader, lots of cash and a radio that could be calibrated to shortwave bands, all of it hidden
under the floorboards of a closet in the apartment above the store, which is where the cutout lived. The cutout smelled a rat and assumed another identity before he could be apprehended. The name he was operating under was Eugene Dodgson."

Casey was starting to see the connection. "Dodgson. Lutwidge. The Alice or Looking Glass quotes on the Moscow quiz program. Someone in the KGB is obsessed with Alice in Wonderland."

Bolster asked Moody, "Do you remember what the man posing as Dodgson looked like?"

"The FBI report described him as a Caucasian male, aged thirty-one in 1961—which would make him fifty-three today. He was of medium height, with a sturdy build with sandy hair. There will be photographs of him in your files taken during the weeks he was under surveillance."

Bolster extracted an eight-by-ten photograph from an envelope and handed it across the table to Moody. "This was snapped by a telephoto lens from the back of a delivery vehicle as Lutwidge passed under a street light. The quality is piss-poor but it'll gives you a rough idea of what he looks like."

Moody studied the photograph. "Medium height, what looks like light hair. If this is the man we knew as Dodgson, his hair has grown thin and his body has thickened around the middle."

Moody passed the photo on to Ebby, who said, "It's been twenty-two years since the FBI described him as sturdy. All of us have thickened around the middle."

"The trick," Casey quipped, "is not to thicken around the brain."

Ebby handed the photograph on to Jack, who fitted a pair of reading glasses over his ears and peered at the photograph. His mouth fell open and he muttered, "It's not possible—"

Ebby said, "What's not possible?"

"Do you recognize him?" Moody asked.

"Yes... Maybe... It couldn't be... I'm not sure... It looks like him but he's changed..."

"We've all changed," Ebby commented.

"It looks like whom?" Casey demanded.

"You're not going to believe this—it looks like the Russian exchange student I roomed with my senior year at Yale. His name was Yevgeny Tsipin. His father worked for the United Nations Secretariat..."

Moody turned to Casey. "The Tsipin who worked for the UN Secretariat in the 1940s was a full-time KGB agent." He fixed his eyes on Jack. "How well did your Russian roommate speak English?"

Jack, still puzzled, looked up from the photograph. "Yevgeny graduated from Erasmus High in Brooklyn—he spoke like a native of Brooklyn."

Moody flew out of his chair and began circling the table. "That would explain it—" he said excitedly.

"Explain what?" Casey asked.

"The Eugene Dodgson who worked at Kahn's Wine and Beverage spoke English like an American—there was no trace of a Russian accent. But Jim Angleton never ruled out the possibility that he was a Russian who had somehow perfected his English."

Shaking his head in amazement, Jack gaped at the photograph. "It could be him. On the other hand it could be someone who looks like him." He stared at the photograph. "I know who'll know," he said.

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