CHERYOMUSKI, MOSCOW DISTRICT, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1983

STARIK'S NIECES HAD TAKEN TO TIPTOEING AROUND THE SECOND-FLOOR apartment in the Apatov Mansion as if it were a clinic and Uncle was ailing, which was how he looked. His disheveled appearance—the scraggly white beard tumbling in matted knots to his cadaverous chest, the bloodshot eyes sunken into the waxen face and conveying permanent trepidation, the odor of an old man's secretions emanating from his unwashed carcass—frightened the girlies so much that the bedtime cuddle in the great bed in which the Chechen girl blew out her brains had become a nightly ordeal. Unbeknownst to Uncle, the girlies had taken to drawing lots to see who would be obliged to crawl under the hem of his sweaty peasant's shirt. "If you please, Uncle, do read more quickly," implored the blonde Ossete when he lost his place and started the paragraph over again. Starik absently stroked the silken hair of the newly arrived niece from Inner Mongolia; even now, approaching the age of seventy, he was still moved by the innocence of beauty, by the beauty of innocence. Behind his back the Ossete reached beneath the undershirt of the Latvian and pinched one of her tiny nipples. The girl squealed in surprise. Uncle turned on the Latvian in vexation. "But she pinched my nipple," whined the girl, and she pointed out the culprit.

"Is that the way to treat a cousin?" Starik demanded.

"It was meant to be a joke—"

Uncle's hand shot out and he cuffed her hard across the face. His long fingernails, cut square in the style of peasants, scratched her cheek. Blood welled in the wounds. Sobbing in fright, the Ossete peeled off her sleeveless cotton undershirt and held it against the welts. For a moment nobody dared to utter a word. Then the muffled voice of the Vietnamese girl could be heard from beneath Uncle's shirt, "What in the world is happening up there?"

Adjusting his spectacles. Uncle returned to the book and started the paragraph for the third time. "'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.'"

Starik's voice trailed off and he cleared a frog from his throat. His eyes turned misty and he was unable to continue. "Enough for tonight," he barked, tugging the Vietnamese girl out from under the nightshirt by the scruff of her neck. He slid off the bed and padded barefoot to the door, leaving the room without so much as a "sleep tight, girlies." The nieces watched him go, then looked at one another in bafflement. The Ossete's sobbing had turned into hiccups. The other girls set about trying to scare the hiccups away with sharp cries and hideous expressions on their faces.

In the inner sanctum off the library, Starik poured himself a stiff Bulgarian cognac and sank onto the rug with his back against the safe to drink it. Of all the passages he read to the girls this one unnerved him the most. For Starik—who saw himself as the Knight with the mild blue eyes and the kindly smile, the setting sun shining on his armor—could discern the black shadows of the forest out of which the White Queen had run, and they terrified him. "'There's some enemy after her,' the King said. 'The woods full of them."' Starik had long ago identified the enemy lurking in the woods: It was not death but failure.

When he was younger he had believed with all his heart and all his energy in the inevitability of success; if you fought the good fight long enough you were bound to win. Now the sense of quest and crusade were gone, replaced by the presentiment that there was not even a remote possibility of triumph; the economy of Greater Russia, not to mention the social structure and the Party itself, was coming apart at the seams. Vultures like that Gorbachev fellow were circling overhead, waiting to feast off the pieces. Soviet control over Eastern Europe was unraveling. In Poland, the independent trade union Solidarity was gaining ground, making a joke out of the Polish Communist Party's claim to represent the Polish proletariat. In East Germany, the "concrete heads"—the nickname for the old Party hacks who resisted reform—were clinging to power by their fingertips.

Clearly the genius, the generosity of the human spirit would shrivel, replaced by the rapaciousness of the unrestrained Homo economicus. If there was consolation to be had, it was in the certainty that he would wreck the capitalist edifice even as socialism went down to defeat. The Germans had an expression for it: the twilight of the gods, Gotterdammerung! It was the last gasp of gratification for those who had battled and failed to win.

Andropov had been dozing, an oxygen mask drawn over the lower half of his face, when Starik turned up at the third-floor Kremlin suite earlier in the day. The Venetian blinds had been closed; only low-wattage bulbs burned in the several shaded lamps around the room. The General Secretary had just completed another grueling session of hemodialysis on the American artificial kidney machine. Male nurses bustled around him monitoring his pulse, changing the bedpan, checking the drip in his forearm, applying rouge to his pasty cheeks so that the afternoons visitors would not suppose they were in the presence of a corpse.

"Izvinite, Yuri Andropov," Starik had whispered. "Are you awake?" Andropov had opened an eye and had managed an imperceptible nod. "I am always awake, even when I sleep," he had mumbled from behind his oxygen mask. His left hand had levitated off the blanket and two fingers had pointed toward the door. The nurses had noticed the gesture and departed, closing the door behind them.

Andropov understood what Starik was doing there. This was to be the General Secretary's final briefing before KHOLSTOMER was initiated. All the elements were in place: the accounts in off-shore banks were set to dump 63.3 billion US dollars onto the spot market; at the first sign of the downward spiral of the dollar, KGB's agents of influence in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia, along with a German economist who was close to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, would press their central banks into selling off dollar Treasury bond holdings to protect their positions, resulting in the collapse of the bond market.

Prying away the oxygen mask, breathing hard, Andropov had started firing questions: Had the KGB come up with evidence confirming America's intention of launching a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union? If so, where had the evidence originated? Was there an indication of a time frame?

It had become obvious to Starik that the fate of KHOLSTOMER was intricately bound to Andropov's assumption that the NATO exercise, designated ABLE ARCHER 83, was intended to cover the preemptive strike. If the General Secretary began to have doubts about American hostile intentions, he—like Brezhnev before him—would step back from the brink. The operatives around the world waiting for the final coded message to launch KHOLSTOMER would have to stand down. The CIA might get wind of what had almost happened from a disgruntled agent. Once the secret was out KHOLSTOMER would be dead. And so Starik did what he had never done in his forty-three years of running spies: he fabricated the report from one of his agents in place.

"Tovarish Andropov, I have the response from SASHA to your most recent queries." He held out a sheet filled with typescript, knowing that the General Secretary was too ill to read it for himself.

Andropov's eyes twitched open and something of the old combativeness glistened in them; Starik caught a glimpse of the unflinching ambassador who had put down the Hungarian uprising and, later, run the KGB with an iron hand.

"What does he say?" the General Secretary demanded.

"The Pentagon has asked the CIA for real-time satellite intelligence updates on the twelve trains filled with ICBMs that we keep shuttling around the country. Their Joint Chiefs have also requested a revised estimate of Soviet missile readiness; they specifically wanted to know how long it would take us to launch ICBMs from missile silos once an American attack was spotted and the order to shoot was given and authenticated."

Andropov collapsed back into the pillows of the hospital bed, drained of hope that his analysis of Reagan's intentions had been wrong. "SASHA's information has always been accurate in the past..."

"There is more," Starik said. "We have deciphered a cable to American detachments guarding medium-range nuclear missile bases in Europe cancelling all leaves as of twenty-fifth November. The NATO exercise designated ABLE ARCHER 83 has been advanced two weeks and is now scheduled to commence at three A.M. on December first."

Andropov reached for the oxygen mask and held it over his mouth and nose. The act of breathing seemed to take all his strength. Finally he tugged the mask away from his lips, which were bluish and caked with sputum. "The only hope of avoiding a nuclear holocaust is if KHOLSTOMER can damage them psychologically—if the capitalist system collapses around them Reagan and his people may lose their nerve. The world would accuse them of starting a war to divert attention from the economic crisis. Under these circumstances they may hesitate."

"There could be widespread unrest, even riots," Starik agreed. He was starting to believe the scenario that Andropov had invented and he had confirmed. "It is not out of the realm of possibility that their military establishment will be too preoccupied with maintaining order to wage war."

The General Secretary scraped the sputum off his lips with the back of his arm. "Do it," he wheezed. "KHOLSTOMER is our last hope."

From his corner table near the back of the courtyard restaurant in Dean's Hotel, Hippolyte Afanasievich Fet, the gloomy KGB rezident, kept an eye on the CIA officers drinking bottles of Murree beers at the first table off the seedy lobby. The Americans talked in undertones but laughed boisterously—so boisterously no one would have guessed that there was a war raging beyond the Khyber Pass, half an hour by car down the road. At half past seven, the Americans divided up the bill and counted out rupees and noisily pushed back their chairs to leave. Fet's two table companions—one was the rezidentura's chief cipher clerk, the other a military attache at the Soviet consulate—exchanged smutty comments about the comportment of Americans abroad. You could tell Americans, one of them remarked, the minute they walked into a room. They always acted as if the country they were in belonged to them, the other agreed. Fet said, They throw rupees around as if they were printing them in the back room of the CIA station. Maybe they are, said the military attache. All three Russians laughed at this. Fet excused himself to go to the lavatory. Get the bill and pay it but don't tip like an American—the Pakistanis overcharge as it is, he instructed the cipher clerk.

Fet ambled across the restaurant to the lobby. Walking past the door to the lavatory, he continued on out the front door and made his way to the parking lot behind the hotel. The Americans were lazily climbing into two Chevrolets. Fet walked around to the passenger side of one and motioned for the acting chief of station to roll down the window.

"Well, if it isn't Boris Karloff in the flesh," the American commented. "Got any state secrets you want to sell, Fet?"

"As a matter of fact, I do."

The smile was still plastered across the American's face but his eyes were bright with curiosity. Sensing that something unusual was occurring, he signaled with a hand. The others spilled out of the cars and surrounded the Russian. Two of them walked off a few paces and, turning their backs on Fet, peered into the parking lot to see if there were other Russians around.

"Okay, Fet, what's all this about?" demanded the acting chief of station.

"I wish to defect. Do not attempt to talk me into defecting in place. I will come across here and now, or not at all." He patted his jacket pockets, which were stuffed with thick manila envelopes. "I have all the correspondence between the Centre and the rezidentum for the last month in my pockets. And I have many other secrets in my head—secrets that will surprise you."

"What about your wife?" one of the Americans asked. "Things will go badly for her if you skip out?"

A cruel smile stole across Pet's sunken cheeks; it made him look even more like Boris Karloff. "My wife last night announced to me that she has fallen in love with the young head of our consulate, a prick if there ever was one. She asked me for a separation. I will give her a separation she will never forget."

"I think he's serious," said one of the Americans.

"I am very serious," Fet assured them.

The acting station chief weighed the pros and cons. Inside the kitchen of the restaurant one of the Chinese chefs could be heard yelling at another in high-pitched Mandarin. Finally the American made up his mind; if for some reason Langley didn't like what they had hooked, hell, they could always toss Fet back into the pond. "Quickly, get in the car," he told Fet.

Moments later the two Chevrolets roared out of the parking lot and swung onto Saddar Road, heading at high speed toward the fortress-like American Consulate across town.

Bundled in a sheepskin jacket with a printed Sindhi shawl wound around her neck like a scarf, Maria Shaath sat hunched over the crude wooden table, scratching questions on a pad by the shimmering light of the single candle burning on the table. From time to time she would look up, the eraser end of the pencil absently caressing her upper lip as she stared intently into the yellow-blue flame. As new questions occurred to her, she bent back to the pad to note them down.

Anthony and Maria had been strolling around the compound that morning when Ibrahim emerged from his dwelling. The air was sharp; snow was falling in the mountains, lowering visibility for Russian helicopters that were said to be marauding through the labyrinth of valleys. In the hamlet below, two skinny boys were pulling a hump-backed cow along the dirt trail. A group of fundamentalist fighters back from a three-day patrol, their long shirts and long beards and fur-lined vests caked with dust, could be seen filing up the road, Kalashnikovs casually perched on their shoulders. From a firing range in a hidden quarry came the sound of hollow metallic drumbeats, each one containing its own echo. Just inside the great double doors of the compound, which were open during the day, an old man wearing plastic sunglasses to protect his eyes from sparks was sharpening knives on a stone wheel turned by a girl hidden in a dark brown burqa.

"You are a remarkable man," Maria had said. She looked at him intently. "Why don't you let me interview you?"

"Interview me?"

"Well, that's what I do for a living. You have all this gear around—surely you can come up with a television camera."

Ibrahim seemed interested. "And what would you ask me in such an interview?"

"I would ask you where you come from and where you're going. I would ask you about your religion, your friends, your enemies. I would ask you why you fight the Russians, and what will be your next jihad when the Russians are gone."

"What makes you think there will be another jihad?"

"You are in love with holy war, Commander Ibrahim. It's written on your face. Cease-fire, peace—they bore you. I've met people like you before. You will go from one war to the next until you get your wish—"

"Since you know so much about me, what is my wish?"

"You want to become a martyr."

Maria's comments had amused Ibrahim. "And what would you do with the tape of an interview if I consent," he had asked.

"You could arrange for it to be delivered to my office in Peshawar. Within twenty-four hours it would be on the air in New York—what you say would be picked up and broadcast around the world."

"Let me think about it," Ibrahim had said. And with his Shadow trailing two steps behind him, he had stridden past the knife-sharpener and out of the compound in the direction of the barracks at the edge of the hamlet below.

Maria had turned to Anthony. "Well, he didn't say no, did he?" At dusk Ibrahim had sent word that he consented to the interview, which would take place in the room under the attic at midnight. Included in the note was a list of things he would refuse to talk about: questions concerning his real identity and his past were prohibited, along with anything that might reveal the location of the mountaintop he called Yathrib.

When Maria and Anthony climbed down the ladder at a quarter to midnight, they found that the communal kitchen had been transformed into a crude studio. Two kleig lights, running off a generator humming away outside the house, illuminated the two kitchen chairs set up in front of the chimney. A beardless young man holding a German Leica motioned for the two prisoners to stand with their backs to a poster of the Golden Dome Mosque in Jerusalem and then snapped half a dozen shots of them. (It was this photo that turned up on front pages around the world a few days later.) Maria regarded the camera with an impatient smile; she was eager to get on with the interview. Anthony managed an uncomfortable grin that editorialists later described as sardonic. With the photo op out of the way Ibrahim, wearing an embroidered white robe that grazed the tops of his Beal Brothers boots, appeared at the door and settled onto one of the chairs. His long hair had been combed and tied back at the nape of his neck, his short henna-tinted beard had been trimmed. A bearded mujaheddin wearing thick eyeglasses fiddled with the focus of a cumbersome Chinese camera mounted on a homemade wooden tripod. Maria, pulling the Sindhi shawl over her shoulders, took her place in the second chair. A red light atop the camera came on.

Maria looked into the lens. "Good evening. This is Maria Shaath, broadcasting to you from somewhere in Afghanistan. My guest tonight—or should I say my host, since I am his guest, or more accurately, his prisoner—is Commander Ibrahim, the leader of the commando unit that kidnapped me and the American diplomat Anthony McAuliffe from the streets of Peshawar in Pakistan." She turned toward Ibrahim and favored him with a guileless smile. "Commander, it's hard to know where to begin this interview, since you have given me a list of things you refuse to talk about—"

"Let us start by correcting an error. Anthony McAuliffe is posing as an American diplomat, but he is actually a CIA officer attached to the CIA station in Peshawar at the time of his... apprehension."

"Even if you're correct, its still not clear why you kidnapped him. I thought the American Central Intelligence Agency was helping Islamic fundamentalist groups like yours in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan."

Ibrahim's fingers kneaded the worry beads. "The American Central Intelligence Agency could not care less about Afghanistan. They are supplying antiquated arms to Islamic fundamentalists in order to bleed the Soviet enemy, much as the Soviets supplied arms to the North Vietnamese to bleed their American enemy in Vietnam."

"If the situation were reversed, if you were fighting the Americans, would you accept aid from the Soviet Union?"

"I would accept aid from the devil to pursue the jihad."

"If you drive out the Soviet occupiers—"

"When we drive out the Soviet occupiers—"

Maria nodded. "Okay, will the war be over when you drive out the Russians?"

Ibrahim leaned forward. "We are engaged in a struggle against colonialism and secularism, which are the enemies of Islam and the Islamic state we will create in Afghanistan, as well as other areas of the Muslim world. The war will go on until we have defeated all vestiges of colonialism and secularism and inaugurated a Muslim commonwealth based on the pure faith—the Islam— of the Prophet you call Abraham and we call Ibrahim. Such a state, governed by Koranic principles and the example of the Messenger Muhammad, would be characterized by total submission to God. This I believe."

Casey and his deputy, Ebby, stood in front of the enormous television set in the Director's office on the seventh floor of Langley, drinks in their fists, watching the interview.

On the screen Maria was glancing at her notes. "Let me ask you some personal questions. Are you married?"

"I have two wives and three sons. I have several daughters also."

Casey tinkled the ice cubes in his glass. "Surprised the son-of-a-bitch even bothered mentioning the female children."

Maria could be heard asking, "What is you favorite film?"

"I have never seen a motion picture."

"He's trying to qualify for Islamic sainthood," Casey quipped.

"Which political figures do you admire most?"

"Living or dead?"

"Both. Historical as well as living figures."

"Historically, I admire and respect the Messenger Muhammad— he was not only a holy man who lived a holy life, he was a courageous warrior who inspired the Islamic armies in their conquest of North Africa and Spain and parts of France. Historically I admire, too, Moses and Jesus, both prophets who brought the word of God to the people but were ignored. I also hold in high esteem the sultan of Egypt, Saladin, who defeated the first colonialists, the Crusaders, and liberated the sacred city of Jerusalem."

"Too bad he's holding one of our people," Casey decided. "This is the sort of guy who could really bloody the Russians."

On the television screen Maria asked, "How about living figures?"

"She is certainly a handsome woman," Reagan said as he and his National Security Advisor, Bill Clark, watched TV on the second floor of the White House. "Remind me what her, uh, name is?"

"Maria Shaath," Clark said. "The Ibrahim character is the one who thinks we've agreed to trade Shaath and the CIA fellow for fifty Stingers."

"Living figures," Ibrahim was telling Maria, "are more difficult."

"Why is that?" she inquired.

"Because it will be fifty or a hundred years before you can have enough historical perspective to weigh what a leader has done."

"You take a long view of history?"

"I measure things in centuries."

"Go out on a limb," Maria insisted. "Give it your best shot."

Ibrahim smiled faintly. "I admire Qaddafi for not being intimidated by the colonial powers. I respect Iraq's Saadam Hussein and Syria's Hafez al Assad for the same reasons. On the other hand, I despise Jordan's King Hussein and Egypt's Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's entire royal family for their failure to stand up to the colonial and secular West. They have in fact been co-opted by the secular West. They have become agents of secularism in the Islamic world."

Reagan asked, "What did I, uh, decide about those Stingers, again, Bill?"

"You felt it would be a mistake to supply them to Islamic fundamentalists like this Ibrahim character. So the Stingers we're sending in with the Israeli raiding party have had their firing mechanisms removed."

"You speak often about colonialism and secularism," Maria was asking on the screen. "What about Marxism?"

"I hate Marxism!" Reagan muttered to himself.

"Marxism is as bad as capitalism," Ibrahim replied. "Marxism is colonialism with a secular packaging."

Reagan perked up. "Well, he's not a Marxist!" he decided.

"He certainly isn't," agreed the National Security Advisor.

"I don't see what we have to lose by arming him with, uh, Stingers if he uses them against the Marxists," Reagan said.

"A lot of Senators are saying the same thing," Clark observed.

Reagan stared with troubled sincerity at his National Security Advisor. "Are you suggesting that supplying Stingers to the, uh, Afghan freedom fighters would be popular in Congress?"

"I suppose it would be," Clark conceded.

"Well, maybe we need to take another look at this, uh, Stinger business, after all," Reagan ventured. "I'm not saying we should give them Stingers. On the other hand, if they use them to shoot down Russian planes— Hmmmmmm."

Leo Kritzky had just returned from Baltimore, where he'd personally debriefed Hippolyre Fet, the former KGB rezident in Peshawar who had been spirited out of Pakistan immediately after his defection, flown to America and installed in a Company safe house. Pulling into his Georgetown driveway after dark, Leo was surprised to see a familiar gray Plymouth already parked there. Jack was slouched in the driver's seat, the radio on and tuned to a station that gave the news every hour on the hour. Both drivers emerged from their cars at the same moment.

"Jack," Leo said. "What brings you out at this hour?"

"I badly need a drink," Jack moaned as they headed toward the front door of Leo's home. He glanced at his old Yale roommate and scull-mate. Physically, Leo had pretty much recovered from Angleton's draconian inquisition nine years before; his hair had grown back ash-colored and was worn in a brush cut popular with Army officers. The gauntness had given way to a sturdy leanness. If there were vestiges of the ordeal, they were to be found in Leo's dark eyes, which still looked haunted, more so tonight than usual, or so it seemed to Jack, who said, "You look as if you could use a dose of alcohol, too, old buddy."

"We've both come to the right place," Leo said. He let himself in with a latch key and flicked on lights. The two men threw their coats over the backs of chairs. Leo made a beeline for the bar across the living room. "What's your pleasure, Jack?"

"Whiskey, neat. Don't stint."

Leo half-filled two thick jelly glasses (Adelle had taken the crystal after the divorce) with Glenfiddich. "Any news from the raiding party?" Leo asked, handing one glass to Jack, hiking his own in salute.

"The last we heard they'd transited the Nameh Pass, north of the Khyber." Jack frowned. "They're crossing unmarked mountain trails now and maintaining radio silence, so we won't know more until they've reached Ibrahim's hilltop."

"When's D-day?"

"Hard to say how long it will take them to get over the mountains with pack animals. For the rendezvous with the helicopters, we're calculating a minimum of five, a maximum of eight days."

"Must be tough on Millie," Leo guessed.

"Tough is not the word," Jack said. "On the other hand, if it ends well..."

"It will, Jack."

"Yeah, I keep telling myself that but I haven't been able to convince myself." He took a sip of whiskey and shivered.

"Did you catch the Shaath interview?" Leo asked.

"They supplied us with a preview tape. We ran it in the office."

"I heard it on the radio driving back," Leo said. "The part where Ibrahim says he'll defend Islam from colonial oppression in other parts of the world once the Russians are out of the way—it made my hair stand on end."

"Yeah. The Shaath woman didn't beat around the bush with him, either."

"You mean when she asked him if he was issuing a declaration of war?" Leo said. He waved Jack to the sofa and settled tiredly onto a rocking chair at right angles to him. "Ibrahim's talking about Saudi Arabia, of course," he added. "That's next on the fundamentalists' menu when the Russians cut their losses and pull out of Afghanistan." Leo drank his whiskey thoughtfully. "Its not a pretty picture. About this Fet fellow—"

"Yeah, I meant to ask you. What goodies has he brought with him?"

"Mind you, Jack, we haven't fluttered him yet so we can't say for sure he's not feeding us a load of bull. On the other hand—"

"On the other hand?"

"He claims that the guys who run the KGB are ready to write off Afghanistan. Inside the KGB this information is being closely held. As far as they're concerned the war is lost—its only a matter of time, and casualties, before the Soviet military gets the message and figures out how to wind down the war."

"Wow! If it's true—"

"Fet claims he was under orders to open back-channels to the various fundamentalist splinter groups—the KGB is already looking beyond the war to the postwar period when the fundamentalists will have taken over Afghanistan and turned their attention elsewhere." "Elsewhere being Saudi Arabia?"

"The KGB, according to Fet, thinks it can harness the hatred the fundamentalists have for America and turn it against American interests in the Middle East. If the Saudi royal family is overthrown—"

Jack filled in the blanks. "The Russians are an oil-exporting nation. If the fundamentalists tighten the spigot, Moscow will be able to buy the allegiance of European countries that rely on Saudi oil."

"The possibilities for manipulation are limited only by a lack of imagination," Leo said.

"And the KGB's schemers have never been known to lack imagination."

"No," Leo said, frowning thoughtfully. "They haven't." Something was obviously disturbing him. "They are far more cynical than I imagined."

"When Fet says he was under orders to establish contact with fundamentalists, what exactly does that mean?"

"It means that Fet and the KGB decided that Ibrahim was worth cultivating. It means they fingered Manny and my godson, Anthony. It means they urged Ibrahim to kidnap them—Maria Shaath happened to be in the car, so she was a wild card—and hold them against the delivery of the Stingers that will boost Ibrahim's chances of winding up at the head of the fundamentalist pack."

"But the Stingers will shoot down Russian aircraft," Jack said.

"According to Fet, that's the short term price and the KGB is willing to pay it. Stingers in the hands of fundamentalists, so Fet's superiors told him, will convince the Soviet brass that the war can't be won. The sooner the war ends, the sooner the fundamentalists, with the KGB pulling the strings behind the scenes, can turn their attention to the Saudi oil fields."

Jack polished off his whiskey and went over to the bar to help himself to more. He held the bottle up but Leo waved away a refill. "You're the DD/O's Chief of Operations, pal," Jack said. "Do you swallow this story?"

Leo said carefully, "There was a detail in the Shaath interview that seems to give Fet's story plausibility. Remember where she asks Ibrahim how come, with Soviet planes and helicopters crisscrossing the countryside, his mountaintop fortress hasn't been attacked, at least since she's been there?"

"Yeah, I do remember. His answer was kind of feeble."

"He said they had too many anti-aircraft guns around and the Russians knew it," Leo said. "But you and I know that anti-aircraft guns are almost useless against modern jets or helicopters hugging the ground and coming in fast."

"Which is why they want Stingers," Jack said.

"Which is why," Leo agreed.

"Which could mean," Jack said, "that the KGB—which has a hand in drawing up the target lists, same as we do—has put Ibrahim's real estate off limits."

"That's what Fet says," Leo confirmed.

They concentrated on their drinks for a while, each following his own train of thoughts. Eventually Leo glanced up at his old friend. "When are you going to get around to what really brought you over at this time of night?" he asked.

Jack shook his head in distress. "There's a photo I want you to take a look at."

"What kind of photo?"

"I'm glad you're sitting down," Jack said. He pulled the photograph from the inside breast pocket of his sports jacket and held it out. Leo rocked forward and took it. Fitting on a pair of reading glasses, he held the photograph up to the light.

Jack saw his friend catch his breath.

"So it is Yevgeny," Jack whispered.

"Where did you get this?" Leo demanded.

"We have your girls to thank for it," Jack said, and he explained how Tessa and Vanessa had come up with the Washington phone number of the old Polish woman who was acting as a circuit breaker for a KGB cutout, who went by the name of Gene Lutwidge. "I've always wondered what became of our Russian roommate," Jack said. "Now we know."

Breathing irregularly, Leo rocked back in his chair. The photo of Yevgeny had obviously shaken him.

"I couldn't believe it either, at first," Jack said. "The FBI's assigned a fifty-man task force to Yevgeny. If we're patient enough he'll lead us to SASHA. If we grow impatient we'll pick him up and wring it out of him." Jack leaned forward. "You should be very proud of Tessa and Vanessa... Hey, Leo, you all right?"

Leo managed to nod. "Vanessa told me they had scored a breakthrough but she didn't give me details. I should have guessed it concerned Yevgeny..."

Jack, puzzled, asked, "How could you have guessed that?"

Leo pushed himself to his feet and, dropping the photo onto the rocking chair, made his way to the bar. Crouching behind it, he hunted for something in a cupboard. Then, standing, he splashed some whiskey into a new tumbler and carried it back across the room. This time he settled onto the couch across from Jack.

Leo's anxious eyes were fixed on his oldest friend. He had come to a decision: From here on there would be no turning back. "This is what the bullfighters and the fiction-writers call the moment of truth," he said. His voice was too soft; the softness conveyed menace. "Yevgeny doesn't have to lead you to SASHA," he went on. "You're looking at him."

Jack started to come out of his seat when the automatic materialized in Leo's hand. For an instant, Jack's vision blurred and his brain was incapable of putting the riot of thoughts into words. He sank back onto the cushions in confusion. "Damnation, you wouldn't shoot to kill," was all he could think to say.

"Don't misread me," Leo warned. "I'd shoot to wound. I don't plan to spend the rest of my life in a federal penitentiary."

"You're SASHA!" It began to dawn on Jack that this wasn't a joke or a dream. "Jim Angleton was right all along!"

"Do us both a favor, keep your hands where I can see them," Leo ordered. He tossed a pair of handcuffs onto the couch next to Jack. "Attach one end to your right wrist. Don't make any sudden moves—now sit on the floor with your back against the radiator. Okay, lock the other end of the cuffs onto the pipe at the side of the radiator. Good." Leo came across and sat down where Jack had been sitting. "Now we'll talk, Jack."

"How did you do it—how did you get past all the lie defector tests?"

"Tranquilizers. I was so relaxed I could have told them I was female and it wouldn't have stirred the stylus. The only lie defector test I failed was the one Angleton gave me in his dungeon—and I was able to explain it away because I'd been locked up for so long."

Leo's treachery was starting to sink in. "You bastard! You prick! You betrayed everyone, your country, your wife, your girls, the Company. You betrayed me, Leo—when you drank that water from Angleton's toilet bowl, Jesus H. Christ, I fell for it. I thought you could actually be innocent. It was your old buddy Jack who didn't let the matter drop when Kukushkin was supposed to have been executed. It was me who set the wheels turning to see if he might still be alive."

"I was manning the ramparts of the Cold War, Jack, but on the other side. Remember when I came off the elevator and you were all waiting there to welcome me back after my incarceration? I said something about how I was serving the country whose system of governance seemed to offer the best hope to the world. I wasn't lying. That country, that system of governance, is the Soviet Union."

The air in the room was suddenly charged with emotion. It was almost as if two longtime lovers were breaking up. "So when did you start to betray your country, Leo?"

"I never betrayed my country, I fought for a better world, a better planet. My allegiance to the Soviet Union goes all the way back to Yale. Yevgeny wasn't a KGB agent when he roomed with us but, like all Russians abroad, he was an unofficial spotter. He told his father, who was a KGB agent, about me: about how my family had been ruined by the depression and my father had jumped to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge; about how I had inherited from my father the Old Testament belief that what you own was stolen from those who don't have enough."

"Then what?"

"Yevgeny's father alerted the New York resident, who sent an American Communist named Stella Bledsoe to recruit me."

"Your girlfriend Stella!" Jack gazed across the room at the framed black-and-white photograph hanging on the wall, the one taken after the 1950 Harvard-Yale boat race. He couldn't make out the caption but since he'd written it, he recollected it: "Jack & Leo & Stella after The Race but before The Fall". Now he said with a sneer, "I remember Stella slipping into my room that night—"

"She snuck into your room and screwed you so I would have a plausible explanation for breaking off with her. Moscow Centre wanted to put some distance between Stella and me in case the FBI discovered her connection with the American Communist Party, which is what happened when Whittaker Chambers identified her as a fellow traveler he'd met at Party meetings after the war."

Jack tugged angrily on the handcuff and the metal bit into the skin on his wrist. "What a sap I was to trust you."

"It was Stella who instructed me to go out for Crew when they learned that Coach Waltz was a talent scout for the new Central Intelligence Agency. The idea was for me to get close to him. The rest of the story you know, Jack. You were there when he made his pitch to us."

Jack looked up suddenly. "What about Adelle? Was she planned, too?"

Leo turned away. "Adelle's not the part of the story I'm the most comfortable with," he admitted. "The Centre wanted me to marry into the Washington establishment, both to further my career and to give me other sources of intelligence. The rezidentura more or less picked Adelle out because she worked for Lyndon Johnson, also because her father was rich and powerful and had access to the White House. They arranged for our paths to cross."

"But you met by chance at a veterinarian," Jack remembered.

Leo nodded grimly. "When Adelle was away at work, they broke into her apartment and dropped her cat out a fourth-floor window. I picked up an old dog at the pound and fed him enough rat poison to make him sick. I took him to her vet knowing Adelle would show up with her cat. If that hadn't worked out we would have figured another way to make our paths cross.

Jack, stunned, sat there shaking his head. "I almost feel sorry for you, Leo."

"The truth is I grew to love her," Leo said. "I adore my girls..." Then he blurred out, "I never accepted a penny, Jack. I risked my neck for peace, for a better world. I didn't betray a country—I have a higher loyalty... an international conception of things."

"Just for the record, explain the Æ/PINNACLE caper, Leo. Kukushkin was a dispatched defector—but weren't they taking a big risk accusing you of being SASHA? We might have believed it."

"It's not very complicated," Leo said. "Angleton was slowly narrowing down the list of suspects through a careful analysis of failed and successful operations, and who was associated with them. My name was on all the overlaps. Moscow Centre—or more precisely, my controlling officer— decided Angleton was getting uncomfortably close, so he organized Æ/PINNACLE to lure Angleton into accusing me. Kukushkin would have been unmasked as a dispatched agent even if you hadn't brought the Israelis in. Once Kukushkin was discredited, the case against me would fall apart. And Angleton would be ruined. We killed two birds with one stone."

"Where do you go from here, Leo? Yevgeny is being watched twenty-four hours a day. You'll never get away."

"I'll get away and so will Yevgeny. We have contingency plans for situations like this. All we need is a head start, which is what those handcuffs will buy me. Tomorrow morning I'll phone Elizabet and tell her where you are."

"So this is how it all ends," Jack said bitterly.

"Not quite. There's one more piece of business, Jack. I want to pass some secrets on to you." Leo couldn't restrain a grim smile when he spotted the incredulity in Jack's eyes. "The Soviet Union is coming apart at the seams. If it weren't for oil exports and the worldwide energy crisis, the economy would probably have collapsed years ago. The Cold War's winding down. But there are people on my side who want it to wind down with a bang. Which brings me to the subject of KHOLSTOMER—"

"There is a KHOLSTOMER! Angleton was right again."

"I'll let you in on another secret, Jack. I've had qualms about KHOLSTOMER all along, but I wasn't sure what to do about it until I talked with Fet today. When I learned about the KGB plotting to put Stingers in the hands of people who would shoot them at Russian pilots, not to mention their role in my godson's kidnapping—" Leo, his face contorted, whispered, "For me, it's as if the KGB amputated Anthony's toe. Jack. That was the last straw. Enough is enough. Listen up."

Jack's sense of irony was returning. "Consider me your captive audience," he remarked dryly.

"Andropov is dying. Jack. From what I hear—both from Company sources and from Starik—the General Secretary is not always lucid—"

"You mean he's off his rocker."

"He has periods of lucidity. He has other periods where his imagination takes hold and the world he sees is cockeyed. Right now he's in one of his cockeyed phases. Andropov is convinced that Reagan and the Pentagon are planning to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union—"

"That's preposterous and you know it," Jack burst out.

"I've sent back word that it's not true. But I have reason to believe my reports have been doctored to feed into Andropov's paranoia."

"How could you know that from Washington?"

"I surmise it from the queries I get from Moscow Centre—they're focused on ABLE ARCHER 83, they want to know if the Pentagon could be keeping the CIA in the dark about plans for a preemptive strike. I've told them it's out of the realm of possibility but they keep coming back with the same questions. They say I must be missing something, they instruct me to look again."

"Where does KHOLSTOMER fit in?" Jack asked.

"KHOLSTOMER is Moscow's response to ABLE ARCHER 83. Believing the US is going to launch a preemptive war on December first, Andropov has authorized Starik to implement KHOLSTOMER—they plan to flood the spot market with dollars and cause the American currency, and ultimately the American economy, to crash."

"I'm not an economist," Jack said, "but they'd need an awful lot of greenbacks to make a dent in the market."

"They have an awful lot of dollars," Leo said. "Starik has been siphoning off hard currency for decades. He has slightly more than sixty billion dollars sitting in off-shore banks around the world. On top of that, he has agents of influence in four key countries ready to push the central banks into selling off US bonds once the dollar starts to nosedive. On D-day I'm supposed to monitor the Federal Reserve's reaction and the movement in the bond market. The thing could spiral out of control—the more the dollar goes down, the more people will panic and sell off dollars and US bonds to protect their positions. At least that's what Starik is counting on."

"Can you identify the agents of influence?"

"No. But I know which countries they're supposed to be operating in. Our stations—"

A half smile crept onto Jack's face. "Our?"

Leo grinned back. "I've been leading a double life for a long time. Your stations ought to be able to figure out which one of the people close to the central bank of any given country might be a Soviet agent of influence."

"If in doubt," Jack said, "we could always neutralize the three or four leading candidates. That's how the KGB operates, isn't it?"

Leo exploded, "Don't be so pious, Jack! Your stations trained the secret police in Vietnam, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Iraq, Iran— the list is as long as my arm. You looked the other way when your clients arrested and tortured and assassinated their political opponents. The Phoenix Operation in Vietnam, with its tiger cages on Con Son Island, killed or crippled some twenty thousand Vietnamese suspected—only suspected, Jack, not convicted!—of being pro-Communist."

"The Company was fighting fire with fire—" Jack insisted.

"Fire with fire!" Leo repeated scornfully. " You financed and equipped and trained armies of agents and then abandoned them—the Cubans in Miami, the Khambas in Tibet, the Sumatran colonels in Indonesia, the Meos in Laos, the Montagnards in Vietnam, the National Chinese in Burma, the Ukrainians in Russia, the Kurds in Iraq."

Jack said, very quietly, "You're the last person on earth who ought to climb on a moral high horse, buddy."

Leo rose to his feet. "I've admired you all of my adult life, Jack. Even before you made it off the beach at the Bay of Pigs, you were a hero to me— it didn't matter that we were on different sides of the fence. I still have that mug shot of you in the senior yearbook—'Jack McAuliffe, mad, bad and dangerous to know.' You were always mad, you were sometimes bad— but you were never dangerous to know." Leo shrugged tiredly. "I'm sorry, Jack." His lips tightened and he nodded once. "Sorry that our friendship had to end this way..."

Jack had a vision of Leo filling the tin cup from Angleton's toilet and drinking off the water, and then turning to him to whisper through his raw lips Go fuck yourself. Jack. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell him, "You too, Leo—go fuck yourself, huh?" But he stopped himself and said instead:

"You're eating into your head start, buddy."

"Yeah, I am." Leo retrieved a plastic airline bag from a closet, then switched on the radio and turned up the volume. "Listen up, Jack," he called from the door. "My Russian friends aren't going to publicize my defection if I can help it—I want to protect the girls and my ex-wife. Also, I haven't told Moscow Centre about the Israeli raid. I hope to God it works out."

Jack couldn't bring himself to thank SASHA; he would have gagged on the words if he had tried. But he lifted his free paw to acknowledge this last favor.

The skinny black kid, decked out in a tight red jump suit with the name "Latrell" embroidered over the breast pocket, shook his head emphatically. 'Hell, there couldn't be no mistake,' he insisted. 'No way.' He leafed through the packet of order forms and came up with one. 'Looka here, mister,' he said. 'One Neapolitan without olives. The orderer is—" he named a street in Tysons Corner, a house number. 'The apartment over the garage at the end of the driveway, that's you, ain't it?'

"That's me," Yevgeny admitted. "What's the name on the order?"

The black kid held the form up to the light seeping through the partly open door. "Dodgson," he said. "You Dodgson?"

Yevgeny reached for the pizza. "How much do I owe you?"

"Five-fifty."

Yevgeny came up with a five and two ones and told the kid to keep the change. He shut the door and stood with his back pressed against it until the pounding in his chest subsided. A pizza delivered to Dodgson, the name Yevgeny had abandoned when his identity had been blown twenty-two years before, was SASHA's emergency signal. It meant the world had come to an end. It meant the Americans had somehow managed to identify the cutout who serviced SASHA. FBI agents were probably watching him day and night. Gradually, a semblance of calm seeped back into Yevgeny's thought process. Start with a single fact and follow the logic of it, he told himself. Fact: they hadn't arrested him yet, which was a good omen—it must mean they were hoping he would lead them to SASHA. Which meant that they didn't know who SASHA was. Which in turn suggested that the weak link was between the KGB's Washington resident and Yevgeny: Aida Tannenbaum.

Fortunately for Yevgeny, SASHA had learned about the breakthrough and had now warned Yevgeny the only way he could. Okay. The next thing he had to do was go through the motions of going to bed—leave enough of the window shades halfway up so that anyone watching through binoculars would see that he didn't have a worry in the world.

Yevgeny cut out a wedge of pizza and forced himself to eat it while he watched the end of a movie on the small portable TV set. He changed into pajamas and brushed his teeth and, switching out the lights in the other rooms, retreated to the small bedroom. He sat up in bed for a quarter of an hour going through the motions of reading Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson. The truth of the matter was that his eyes were incapable of focusing on the words; that the pulse throbbing in his forehead made thinking difficult. Yawning, he set the book down, wound his clock and checked the alarm. Almost as an afterthought, he padded over to the window and pulled down the shade. Climbing under the covers, he switched off the light on the night table.

In the total darkness, the sounds from the neighborhood seemed amplified. Every quarter hour or so he could make out the bus coming down Broad Street, two blocks away. Sometime after midnight he caught the scrape of a garage door opening and a car backing down a driveway. At 12:25 he heard the next door neighbor calling to his dog to pee already, for Christ's sake. His brain awash with scenarios, Yevgeny lay there motionless until the luminous hour hand on the alarm clock clicked onto three. Then, moving stealthily, he slipped into his clothing and overcoat and, carrying his shoes, made his way to the bathroom in his stockinged feet. He flushed the toilet—they might have planted a microphone in the apartment—and while the water was gushing through the pipes, eased open the small window that gave out onto the sloping roof of the toolshed attached to the back of the garage. Once on the roof, he let himself down the incline and climbed down the trellis to the ground. Here he put his shoes on and tied the laces and, crouching in the shadows, listened. The night was cold; with each breath he expelled a small cloud of vapor. From the back bedroom of a nearby house came the sound of a hacking cough. A bed lamp flicked on, then was switched off again. After a long while Yevgeny rose to his feet and crossed the yard, moving in the shadow of the high wooden fence that separated the back garden from the next door neighbor's paved basketball court. At the end of the garden he climbed over a wooden fence and, moving sideways, squeezed through the space between two garages. Halfway to the end, under a boarded up window, he felt for the chipped brick and, working it loose, plunged his hand into the cavity to retrieve the package wrapped in layers of plastic.

Twenty minutes later Yevgeny ducked into an all-night drugstore a mile or so up Broad Street. He ordered a coffee and a doughnut and made his way to the phone booths at the back. He had thrown away Aida's new phone number but he remembered the address: 47 Corcoran Street. He dialed information and requested the number of a party named Tannenbaum at that address. He dialed the number and heard the phone ring. After a dozen rings the breathless voice of Aida came on the line. "Who is this?" she demanded.

Yevgeny knew they would be tapping her phone. As long as he didn't remain on the line long enough for the call to be traced, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. "It's me, lovely lady."

He could hear a frightened gasp. "Something must be very wrong for you to call at this hour," Aida whispered.

"Yes. Something is wrong."

"Oh!"

"I have to hang up before they trace the call."

"Is it that bad, then?"

"You are a great lady, a great fighter, a heroine. I hold you in high esteem." Yevgeny hated to break the connection. He blurred out, "I wish there were something I could do for you."

"There is. Hang up quickly. Run fast, dear child. Save yourself. And remember me as I remember you."

Aida cut the line. Yevgeny listened to the dial tone ringing in his ear for several seconds, then hung up and, swaying unsteadily, stumbled back to the counter to nurse his coffee and doughnut. He glanced at his wristwatch. He still had two and a half hours to kill before he met SASHA at the prearranged site.

Aida knew she should have been terrified but the only emotion she could detect was relief. After all these years it was finally going to end. She wedged a chair under the knob of the front door and went down the hallway into the narrow kitchen. She wedged a chair under the knob of that door, too, and stuffed the gap under the door with newspaper, then turned on the four gas burners and the oven. Lifting Silvester out of the basket lined with an old nightdress, she sat at the small linoleum-covered table and began to stroke his neck. She smiled when the old cat started to purr. She thought she heard a car pull up on the street somewhere under the window. It reminded her of the night the Gestapo had raided the warehouse where the Communist underground kept the printing press, and her dear, dear son, Alfred, was torn screaming from her arms. Was that the grind of the elevator starting up or just her imagination? She felt terribly, terribly tired. Fists were pounding on the door of the apartment. She rested her head on one arm and tried to summon an image of her son, but all she saw was her lover, Yevgeny, bending to kiss the back of her gloved hand. With a crash, the front door burst open against its hinges. Savoring the thought that she had finally run out of time, Aida reached for the box of safety matches.

6

YATHRIB, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1983

THE STRING OF CAMELS—THREE OF THEM CARRYING BURLAP SADDLE sacks filled with food, drinking water and ammunition; the twenty-five others loaded with long wooden crates, two to an animal— made their way across the fast-flowing stream. The twelve Arab herdsmen, all heavily armed, all wearing kiffiyeh drawn over their noses against the dust kicked up by the camels, had strung a thick cord from the rusted Russian tank awash in the water to a tree on the far bank and had posted themselves at intervals along the cord to steady any camel that lost its footing. Once on the other side the men paused for a lunch break. The practicing Muslims in the group prostrated themselves in the direction of Mecca and began to pray. The non-practicing among the herders brewed green tea in a beat-up casserole propped over a small fire. Chunks of stale bread, baked the previous day in shallow holes scooped out of the ground, and tins of humus were passed around, along with raw onions. If anyone noticed the two Pashtuns inspecting them through binoculars from a cliff high above, he didn't call attention to the fact. When lunch was finished most of the men sat with their backs to trees, dozing or sucking on cigarettes. Five minutes before the hour the headman, a slim Egyptian wearing khaki fatigues and mirrored sunglasses, climbed to his feet and, calling in Arabic, began rounding up the camels that had wandered off to graze. When the line was formed up and each animal was attached to the one in front, the herders flicked the birch switches against the flanks of the camels and the pack train started up the steep tracks. After several hours the caravan reached the narrow gorge. During another break for prayers, two Pashtuns and an Iraqi came through the gorge on horseback. Speaking in Arabic, the Iraqi exchanged greetings with the herders and chatted up the headman while the Pashtuns pried open several crates attached to the camels at random—each crate contained a spanking-new ground-to-air Stinger with American markings stenciled on the side along with a handbook printed in English. The headman and several of the herders had been trained by the CIA in the working of the weapon and would remain for a week or ten days to instruct the tribesmen after the Stingers had been delivered. Satisfied, the Pashtuns preceded the pack train through the gorge into a long canyon. As the trail widened and flattened out, the herders passed the ruins of hamlets lost in tangles of vines. Toward sundown, they arrived at the walled compound at the bitter end of the trail. A mud-brick minaret rose from the mosque inside; from the top a muezzin was summoning the faithful to evening prayers. Pashtuns emerged from the stone houses built against the cliffs. The ones who were devout crowded into the mosque; the others, along with a swarm of teenage boys, came over to look at the Stinger that had been set out on an Army blanket.

Ibrahim, wearing a sheepskin vest and his Pashtun cap with the amulet to ward off sniper bullets pinned to it, strode across the compound. Behind him, his children watched from a doorway. Smiling jubilantly, Ibrahim greeted the Egyptian headman and offered him the creature comforts of the camp for as long as he and his comrades remained. The headman replied in elaborate Arabic that he appreciated his host's hospitality and would go to great lengths not to abuse it. Ibrahim retorted that his guest need not worry about abusing his hospitality—on the contrary, hospitality needed to be abused in order to measure its depth and the spirit in which it was offered.

Ibrahim turned away to join the fighters squatting around the Stinger. They looked like children inspecting a new toy as they gingerly reached out to caress the fins of the missile that would destroy Russian planes and helicopters so far away you could only hear them, not see them. No one paid attention when, in the gathering darkness, one of the Arab herdsmen swung closed the great double door to the compound. The others unslung their automatic weapons from their shoulders and nonchalantly started to fan out on either side of the men huddled around the Stinger. Several of the Arabs strolled over to a trough facing the door of the mosque. Two others started to meander across the compound toward the building that housed Ibrahim's prisoners.

Suddenly Ibrahim sniffed at the icy air and, threading his worry beads through the fingers of his left hand, rose slowly to his feet. It hit him that the great double doors, normally left open so that mujaheddin praying in the mosque could return to the hamlet, had been closed. Squinting into the
duskiness, he noticed that the Arab herdsmen had spread out around the compound. He muttered something to his Shadow, who stepped behind him and closed his fingers over the hilt of the dagger in his waistband. In ones and twos, the Pashtuns, infected with Ibrahim's edginess, stood and peered into the shadowy stillness of the compound.

From over the rim of the hill came the distinctive thwak-thwak of helicopter rotors. Ibrahim shouted a warning as the Arab herdsmen opened fire. One of the first shots caught Ibrahim in the shoulder, spinning him into the arms of the Shadow. With a flutter of wings the yellow canary scampered free, dragging its leash behind it. Brilliant lights in the bellies of two giant insects overhead illuminated the compound as the helicopters sank straight down. Gatling guns spit bullets from open ports. One of the helicopters settled onto the ground, kicking up a squall of dust, the other hovered above the mosque and bombarded the hamlet below the compound, and me path coming up from the hamlet, with phosphorus shells. From the doorways and windows of the buildings women shrieked in terror. The mujaheddin who bolted out of the dust cloud were cut down by rifle fire. The Egyptian headman knelt and fired and methodically changed clips and fired again at the Pashtuns spilling out of the mosque. Then, calling orders to his commandos in Hebrew, he started toward the fallen Ibrahim. "Take him alive!" someone shouted in English.

The Shadow drew his knife and, leaning over Ibrahim, looked questioningly into his eyes. "Recall your vow," Ibrahim pleaded. There was another staccato burst of automatic fire—to Ibrahim's ear it sounded like a distant tambour announcing his arrival in paradise. Soon he would be sitting on the right hand of the Prophet; soon he would be deep in conversation with the one true God. He could see the Prophet Ibrahim raising the sacrificial knife to the throat of his son Ismail on the black stone at the heart of the Kaaba. The vision instructed him on what he had to do. Murmuring "Khahesh mikonam, lotfi konin—I beg you, do me a kindness," he gripped the bodyguard's wrist with his good hand and coaxed the razor-whetted blade down toward his jugular.

In the attic prison, Anthony had drawn Maria Shaath into a corner when they heard gunfire in the compound. Moments later people broke into the room under their feet. "Its a commando raid," Anthony said. "But who will reach us first—Ibrahim or the raiders?" Someone set a ladder against the wall and began climbing the rungs. Anthony grabbed the small charcoal stove by its legs and positioned himself on the blind side of the trap door as it was pushed up on its hinges. A man fingering the trigger of a stubby Israeli Uzi, his face sheathed in a kiffiyeh, appeared. Maria screamed. Anthony raised the charcoal stove over his head and was about to bring it crashing down on the intruder when he said, in cheerful and flawless English, "Anyone here interested in hitching a helicopter ride to Pakistan?"

At the Company's high-walled villa off Jamrud Road in Peshawar, a young radioman sat in front of the transceiver with a crystal inserted, locking it onto a given frequency. He and his buddies had been monitoring the static twenty-four hours a day for the past week. Now, unexpectedly, what sounded like a human voice seeped through the background noise, repeating a single sentence.

"He promised me earrings but he only pierced my ears. I say again. He promised me earrings but he only pierced my ears."

The radioman ran his thumb nail down the list of code phrases in his notebook until he found the one he was looking for. He raced through the corridors and stuck his head in the door of the chief of station who had replaced Manny Ebbitt after the kidnapping. "The copters have broken radio silence," he blurted out.

"And?"

"They've sent a 'mission accomplished' message. They're in the air and on the way back."

"Encipher the message and send it on to Washington," the chief of station ordered. He sat back in relief. Jesus, the Israelis had pulled it off after all. The Champagne would flow at Langley when they learned that the helicopters were heading home. Thank goodness the naysayers had been wrong—it hadn't ended like Carter's raid to free the American hostages in Teheran after all.

The mujaheddin who had survived the Israeli raid were in for another surprise. When they tried to use the Stingers they would discover that the firing mechanisms had been removed, which made the weapons about as valuable as lengths of piping in a junkyard.

They met at first light in the back row of the First Baptist Church on l6th Street, not far from Scott Circle. There were only three early-morning worshipers in the church when Yevgeny slid into the pew and sat down next to Leo. For a moment neither said a word. Then, glancing at his cutout, Leo whispered harshly, "We always knew it had to end one day."

"It's been a long Cold War," Yevgeny said. He was thinking of Aida Tannenbaum. He could hear her voice in his ear: 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.

Leo reached down, unzipped the airline bag between his feet and handed Yevgeny a small package. "I've had this stashed in a closet for years—it's a Company disguise kit. We'll go out as priests—there are black shirts, white collars, a goatee for me, a gray beard for you, wigs, rimless eyeglasses. Your own brother wouldn't recognize you."

"My own brother barely recognized me when I was in Moscow on home leave," Yevgeny remarked. He took a manila envelope from his overcoat pocket. "Passports, drivers licenses, and cash," he said.

"We'll change in the vestry," Leo said. "With any luck the Company'll concentrate on the hunt for my Chevrolet. We'll go by subway to the Greyhound terminal, take a bus to Baltimore, then a train to Buffalo, where we'll cross into Canada. I have an emergency address in Toronto where we can stay until they can smuggle us onto a cargo ship."

"What did you do with your car?" Yevgeny asked.

"I buried it in the long-term parking lot at Dulles and came back in a shuttle. We'll be far away by the time they find it."

Yevgeny asked, "Any idea how they tagged us?"

Leo didn't see any need to bring his daughters into it, so he answered vaguely. "They got on to your Polish lady," he said.

Yevgeny slapped his forehead. "She's dying of cancer, Leo. She begged me to meet her—"

"What's done is done. They snapped a photograph of you. Jack thought he recognized it. He came over tonight to show it to me."

"What did you do with Jack?"

"I left him handcuffed to a radiator."

"If he came over to show you the photograph," Yevgeny whispered, "he didn't suspect you were SASHA."

"I told him," he said. "I was also getting tired of the game."

"There must be more to it than that..."

"Reagan and the Pentagon aren't planning a preemptive strike, Yevgeny," Leo explained wearily. "Andropov is over the hill if he thinks they are. And I don't want to see Starik and Andropov bring the whole world crashing down around our ears."

"You never could stomach KHOLSTOMER. I could see it in your eyes when we talked about it."

"The Cold War is winding down. Our side is losing—the Soviet economy is rotted to the core. KHOLSTOMER doesn't make sense—ruining economies, pushing the Third World back into the Middle Ages, causing hundreds of millions to suffer. For what? I don't see the point."

"Ours was the best side," Yevgeny said flatly. "We were the good guys, Leo. I still believe the Socialist system, with all its terrible faults, is a better model for the planet earth than anything the West can offer. Capitalism is intrinsically decadent—it brings out the worst in people."

Leo, his eyes burning, turned to Yevgeny. "Did you ever have a shadow of a doubt?"

"Only once," Yevgeny admitted. "It was when I met Philby in Gettysburg to tell him Burgess had run for it with Maclean. Starik wanted Philby to run for it, too, but he refused. He said he could bluff it out. He said as long as he didn't confess they could never lay a glove on him. Those were his exact words. Lay a glove on him. I used to replay this conversation in my skull—it was as if a needle had gotten stuck in a groove. It raised a question that I was afraid to ask, because if I asked it I'd have to answer it."

"Answer it now."

Yevgeny recalled a snatch of the phone conversation he'd had with Aza Isanova the last time he'd been in Moscow. In what ostrich hole have you been hiding your head, she had berated him. Stalin was a murderer of peasants in the early thirties, he murdered his Party comrades in the mid and late thirties, he suspended the killings during the war but resumed them immediately afterward. By then it was the turn of the Jews.

"The system Philby was spying for would not have had a problem getting a confession out of someone like Philby," Yevgeny admitted.

"The system Philby was spying for wouldn't have needed a confession to haul him down to the basement of Lubyanka and put a bullet into the nape of his neck," Leo said.

"The Socialist revolution has been under siege from day one," Yevgeny said. "It was fighting for its life against ruthless enemies—"

Leo cut him off. "We've made too many excuses for ourselves. We justify our shortcomings and condemn those of our opponents." Leo glanced at his wristwatch. "It's going to get light soon. We have the rest of our lives for postmortems. We ought to start moving."

"Yeah," Yevgeny agreed. And he declared bitterly, "Za uspiekb nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!"

Leo, nodding fatalistically, repeated Yevgeny's old Yale slogan in English. "To the success of our hopeless task!"

At midmorning, Leo dialed ' home from a public booth outside the Baltimore Greyhound terminus. Jack's wife answered. "Millie, its me, Leo."

"Oh, Leo, you've heard—"

"Heard what?"

"Ebby called me with the news ten minutes ago. He just rang off. The helicopters have landed in Peshawar. Anthony is safe." Leo could hear Millie's voice breaking on the other end of the phone line. "He's all right, Leo," she added weakly. "He's coming home."

"That's just great. I love that kid of yours. I'm elated he's out of harm's way. I'll tell you something, I hope you remember it in the days ahead: I think this is the happiest moment of my life."

"You've been a swell godfather to him, Leo."

Leo started to say, "I'm not so sure of that," but Millie was rushing on.

"The funny part is that nobody seems to know where Jack is. When he didn't come home last night I just assumed he'd stayed at Langley to monitor the raid, but Ebby said he wasn't there." Millie had a sudden thought. "Should I be worried about Jack, Leo?"

"No, you shouldn't be. Actually, that's why I called—Jack spent the night at my place. He's still there."

"Put him on, for God's sake."

"I'm not calling from home."

"Where are you calling from? Hey, what's going on, Leo?"

"I'm going to tell you something. After which there's no point in your asking questions because I won't answer them."

Millie laughed uncomfortably. "You sound awfully mysterious."

"As soon as I hang up, call Ebby. Don't speak to anyone else, only Ebby. Tell him that Jack's at my house. He's not hurt or anything. But he's handcuffed to a radiator."

"Have you been drinking, Leo? What's all this about?"

Leo said patiently, "You don't have a need to know, Millie."

"Jack'll tell me."

"Jack won't tell you. Chances are nobody will. I got to go. Take care of yourself. Take care of Jack, too. Goodbye, Millie."

"Leo? Leo?"

"Well, how do you like that?"

Jack examined the postmark on the letter. It had been mailed from Baltimore three days before and only just arrived at the apartment the girls shared in Fairfax.

"For heaven's sake, what is he talking about?" Vanessa demanded. She glanced at her sister, than looked back at Jack. "Why in the world is he going to Russia? And why did Dad want us to show the letter to you first?"

Jack cleared his throat. "I'm glad you're both sitting down," he said. "Your father—" What he was going to say seemed so monstrous that Jack had to start over again. "It seems that Leo has been spying for the Soviet Union."

Vanessa gasped. Tessa whispered, "It's not true. You're out of the loop, Jack—they didn't tell you. He must have been sent to Russia on an assignment—"

Jack could only shake his head in misery. "He hasn't been sent to Russia—he's fled to Russia. If he manages to get there—mind you, we're doing everything to stop him, but they have escape routes prepared—it'll be to seek political asylum in the country he's worked for... the country he's loyal to." Jack sank dejectedly into a chair facing the girls. "I got my information from the horse's mouth. Leo himself told me four days ago."

Vanessa blurted out, "What's going to happen to us, Jack?"

"Why should anything happen to you. You haven't done anything wrong."

Tessa said, "How could Dad have done such a thing? You were his oldest and best friend, Jack. How do you explain it?"

"It goes back to the 1929 Crash, to the Great Depression, to his father s suicide. Don't forget your grandfather emigrated from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution—its possible he was a Bolshevik and a Chekist to begin with, or became one in the early 1930s. In any case the son inherited his father's radicalism, this disenchantment with capitalism, this certitude that the socialist model was better than the capitalist model."

"You think Dad actually believed in communism!"

"Leo didn't spy for the Russians for money, Tessa. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I suppose you could say he was an idealist—only his ideals were different from the ones we hold to be self-evident."

Vanessa said, "If what you say is true—"

"Unfortunately, it is."

"When it becomes known—"

"When it hits the newspapers—" Tessa added.

"It's not going to hit the newspapers, not if we can help it. That's why Leo wanted you to show the letter to me. As far as the Company is concerned, Leo Kritzky retired after thirty-odd years of loyal and honorable service. After his retirement he disappeared into the woodwork. Look, the truth is that we don't want to wash our dirty linen in public. If the Company-killers on the congressional oversight committees discover that the one-time head of the Soviet Division, the man in charge of spying on Russia, was actually a Russian mole—Jesus H. Christ, they'll make mincemeat of us, budget-wise and otherwise. We have enough trouble convincing the public that we serve a useful purpose as it is."

"But won't the Russians spill the beans?" Tessa asked.

"We don't think so. We think Leo will oblige them to keep his defection under wraps to protect you guys and your mother. He told me as much—"

Vanessa interrupted. "How will Dad be able to oblige the KGB?"

"For one thing, he'll dose out what he knows over a period of years. They won't have any choice in the matter if they want him to cooperate."

Tessa had a sudden doubt. "Did Dad's going to Russia have any connection with the phone numbers we broke out of the Russian lottery numbers?"

"None whatsoever. The two aren't connected."

"Swear it, Jack," Tessa said.

Jack didn't hesitate. "I swear it." He could hear the Sorcerer, back at Berlin Base in the early '50s, swearing on his mother's grave that SNIPER and RAINBOW hadn't been one of the barium meals he'd used to unmask Philby...how effortlessly lies came to the lips of spies. "You have my word," he added now. "Honestly."

Tessa seemed relieved. "Thank goodness for that. It would have been hard to deal with."

Vanessa turned to her sister and announced, very calmly, "I think I hate him!"

"No, you don't," Tessa said. "You're angry with him. You're angry with yourself because you still love him and you think you shouldn't." A faraway look appeared in Tessa's eyes. "It's as if he died, Vanessa. We'll go into mourning. We'll rend our garments and grieve for what might have been but isn't."

Tears streamed down Vanessa's cheeks. "Nothing will ever be the same."

Jack was staring out a window. "It won't be the same for any of us," he muttered.

Reagan's professional instincts surfaced when he spotted the television cameras. Deftly steering Anthony and Maria Shaath across the Oval Office, he positioned himself and them so that the light from the silver reflectors washed out the shadows under their eyes. "Good lighting can take ten years off your age," he said to no one in particular. Squinting, he glanced around the room. "Can someone close the curtains," he called. "We're getting too much backlight." He turned to his visitors. "For the photo op," he told them, "you'll want to keep your eyes on me and, uh, smile a lot while we chat, and so forth." He turned to the cameras. "All right, boys, roll 'em."

And he grasped Maria's hand in both of his and exclaimed, in that utterly sincere and slightly breathless voice that the entire country loved, "Gosh, are we suckers for happy endings, especially where Americans are concerned."

"Can we have another take, please, Mr. President?" one of the television producers called from the bank of cameras.

"Sure thing. Tell me when you gents are ready."

"Do we have to have so many people in the room?" the line producer complained. "It's distracting to the principals."

The President's press secretary shooed several secretaries and one of the two Secret Service men out of the Oval Office.

"Okay, Mr. President. Here we go."

Reagan's eyes crinkled up and a pained smile illuminated his ruggedly handsome features. "Gosh, are we suckers for happy endings, especially where, uh, Americans are concerned."

"Great!"

"I got what I wanted," the producer told the press secretary.

"Thanks for coming around, fellows," Reagan told the television people as he escorted Anthony and Maria to the door.

Bill Casey caught up with the President in the small room off the Oval Office that Reagan retreated to after photo sessions. "Congratulations, Bill," Reagan said, swiveling toward his Director of Central Intelligence. "You people did a swell job on this raid thing. My pollster tells me that my, uh, positive job rating leaped six points."

"You're only getting your just desserts, Mr. President," Casey said. "It took moxie to sign off on the venture."

Reagan's long term-memory kicked in. "My father, rest his soul, loved the taste of Moxie—he drank a glassful when he got up in the morning, another before going to bed, swore the, uh, gentian root in it was a purgative." He noticed the bewildered glaze in the eyes of his aides. "I, uh, guess Moxie Nerve Food was before your time, boys."

"Bill's come over to brief you on this KHOLSTOMER business," the President's chief of staff, James Baker, reminded Reagan.

Bill Clark said, "KHOLSTOMER's the code designation of the Soviet plot to undermine the US currency and destabilize our economy."

Reagan raised a hand to Casey, inviting him to go on.

"As you know, Mr. President, the CIA worked up intelligence on KHOLSTOMER, so it didn't come as a surprise to us. On D-day, the Federal Reserve was ready and waiting to support the dollar the instant there were signs of a sell-off on the spot market. We knew that the Russians only had sixty-three billion available, and it wasn't difficult for the Fed to sponge it up. The danger was in the panic money that might come in behind the sixty-three billion if fund managers and central banks and foreign entities got the impression that the dollar was in free fall. Importantly, we flooded the media with inside stories of the Federal Reserve's resolve to support the dollar, and its almost unlimited ability to do so. The result was that the panic money the Russians were counting on never materialized."

Reagan nodded solemnly. "So the panic money never, uh, materialized."

"On top of that, we worked up intelligence revealing that Soviet agents of influence close to the central banks of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia, along with an economist close to West German chancellor Kohl, were set to press their central banks into a sell-off of dollar Treasury bond holdings."

Reagan, who tended to become ornery when he was deluged with details, said, "Sounds like one of Hitchcock's McGuffins. Cut to the chase, Bill."

"We managed to neutralize these agents of influence. One was arrested on charges of molesting a minor, the other four were encouraged to go off on vacation for a month or two. All five, I might add, will be job hunting. On D-day, we brought our own pressure to bear on the central banks in question to make sure there would be no panic sell-off. The bottom line, Mr. President, is that Andropov's scheme to destabilize our currency and our economy turned out to be a blind alley for him."

Reagan's eyes narrowed. "You think Andropov was personally behind this, uh, KHOLSTOMER business?"

"We take the view that the KGB would not have gone ahead with it in the absence of a specific order from the General Secretary," Casey said.

"Hmmmmm." Reagan was clearly peeved. "Makes me downright angry when I think that Andropov had the gumption to attack our currency."

Casey, always alert to the possibility of nudging Reagan into action, perked up. "It would be a dangerous precedent," he agreed, "to let him get away with it."

"Can't argue with Bill there," Reagan said.

Casey homed in on the President. "Andropov needs to be reminded that you don't attack the Reagan administration with impunity."

Reagan was still brooding. "My father always said, don't get angry, get, uh, even."

Casey recognized an opening when he saw one. "Getting even—that's the ticket, Mr. President. We could hit Andropov where he's most vulnerable—"

James Baker was on his feet. "Hold on, now. Bill."

"We don't want to do anything rash," Bill Clark chimed in.

But it was Casey who had Reagan's attention. "Where is Andropov vulnerable?" the President asked.

"In Afghanistan. If we supplied Ibrahim's freedom fighters with Stingers, Andropov would hurt."

"This Ibrahim fellow is certainly no Marxist," Reagan remembered. "And Andropov is."

"Ibrahim is dead," Bill Clark noted, but the remark went over the President's head.

"The beauty of it," Casey said, driving home the point, "is that we don't have to deliver Stingers to the freedom fighters. They have them already— fifty of them, to be precise. All we have to do is supply the firing mechanisms that we took out before the Stingers were delivered."

"You'll want to think about this very carefully, Mr. President," James Baker said uneasily.

"It would be a hell of a way to get even for what they did to us in Vietnam," Casey persisted. "We lost more than nine hundred planes there, many of them to Russian SAMs."

Reagan fitted the knuckles of his right hand against his cheek with the little finger extended under his nose as if it were a mustache. "Looking at the big picture," he said, nodding carefully, "I think Bill here may be on to something."

The President glanced at Baker and then at Clark. Each in turn averted his eyes. They had been outmaneuvered by Casey and they knew it.

"If that's what you want, Mr. President—" Clark said.

Casey, who had been trying to get Stingers into the hands of the mujaheddin for months, favored Baker and Clark with one of his famous deadpan stares. "You fellows can leave the details to me."

Before anyone could utter a word he had quit the room.

A nippy wind was sweeping the leaves across Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House as Anthony, walking with a slight limp, and Maria headed for a French restaurant on 17th Street.

"So what was your impression of our President?" Anthony asked. Maria shook her head. "To the naked eye, he looks more like the stand-in for the President than the actual President. He goes through motions, he recites lines of dialogue that have been written for him. God only knows how decisions are made in there. What about you? What did you think?"

For answer, Anthony recited a poem:

Whether elected or appointed

He considers himself the Lord's anointed,

And indeed the ointment lingers on him

So thick you can't get your fingers on him.

"Where's that from?" Maria asked with a laugh.

"Ogden Nash."

She stepped in front of him, blocking his path. "Anthony McAuliffe, are you trying to impress me?"

"I guess you could make a case that I am. Is it having the desired effect?"

The smile evaporated from her face and her eyes turned very solemn. "I think so," she said.

Wearing a threadbare overcoat with its collar turned up and a moth-eaten cashmere scarf wrapped around his gaunt neck, James Jesus Angleton wheeled the chair back so that the sun wouldn't be in his eyes. "Had to happen eventually," he remarked in a feeble voice. "Too many packs of cigarettes a day for too many decades. Gave them up, along with alcohol, but it was too damn late. Death sentence. Cancer of the lungs, that's what they're telling me. They put me on painkilling drugs that seem to work a bit less each day." He wheeled the chair closer to Ebby, who had taken off his overcoat and loosened his tie and pulled over a broken wicker stool. "Funny thing is you get used to pain. Don't remember what it was like without it." Angleton swung his wheelchair left, then right. "I spend a lot of time out here," he went on. "The heat, the humidity, seem to help me forget."

"Forget what?" Ebby asked.

"The pain. How much I miss cigarettes and alcohol and Adrian Philby. The great mole hunt. The Æ/PINNACLE serials that pointed to SASHA. All the mistakes I made, and I made my share, as you no doubt know."

Ebby let his eyes wander around the greenhouse, set in the back yard of Angleton's Arlington home. Clay pots, small jars, gardening tools, bamboo work tables, and wicker furniture had been piled helter-skelter in a corner. Several panes in the roof had been shattered by hailstones the previous winter and left unrepaired. The sun, high overhead, had scorched the half dozen or so orchids still in pots scattered around the floor. The earth in the pots looked bone dry. Obviously nobody was watering them.

"Nice of you to come by," Angleton mumbled. "Don't see many Company people these days. Come to think of it, don't see any. Doubt if the new generation even knows who Mother is."

"I thought someone from Langley ought to come out and brief you," Ebby said.

"Brief me on what?"

"You were right all along, Jim. The KGB did have a mole inside the Company. You identified him but nobody believed you. When Æ/PINNACLE turned out to be alive after his supposed execution, your suspect went free."

Angleton made eye contact with his visitor for the first time. "Kritzky!"

Ebby nodded.

"You've incarcerated him?"

"Like Philby, like Burgess and Maclean, he fled the country before we could get our hands on him."

"Gone home to Soviet Russia, no doubt."

Ebby shrugged. "We don't expect him to surface—the days when the KGB trots out its spies for the press are long gone. Everyone's better off keeping the lid on this kind of thing."

Angleton's lower lip trembled. "Knew it was Kritzky—told him so to his face. You have to hand it to him, he had a lot of balls, bluffing it out until you all swallowed his line. Playing the innocent. A lot of balls."

"You were right about something else, too, Jim. There was a Soviet master plan to undermine our currency and ruin the economy. They called it KHOLSTOMER."

"KHOLSTOMER," Angleton groaned. He brought a hand up to his migraine-scarred forehead. "Warned you about that, too. One of my biggest mistakes—squandered my credibility warning about too many people. When I got it right nobody was listening."

Ebby said, "Well, I thought you ought to know. I thought we owed it to you."

Both men were at a loss for conversation. Finally Ebby said, "Where do you go from here, Jim? Isn't there something you can do about your...?"

"No place to go from here. This is the last stop, the terminus, the ultima Thule. I'm going to go into the woods on my own and deal with the end of my life, like an Apache." Drawing the overcoat around his wasted body, Angleton shut his eyes and began intoning what sounded like an Indian death chant.

He didn't appear to notice when Ebby retrieved his overcoat and got up to leave.

PART SIX

DEAD RECKONING

There would be no harm, she thought, in asking if the game was over. "Please, would you tell me—" she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen.

Snapshot: a glossy Polaroid color print of Jack McAuliffe and Leo Kritzky strolling along the sun-saturated bank of the Rhone River in Basel, Switzerland. Jack, his Cossack mustache and thinning hair ruffled by the breeze blowing off the river, is wearing prescription sunglasses, a khaki safari jacket and khaki chinos. Leo, his face thin and drawn, is dressed in a light Russian windbreaker and a peaked worker's cap. Both men are so absorbed in their conversation they don't appear to notice the street photographer who stepped into their path and snapped the picture. Leo reacted violently. Jack calmed him down and quickly purchased the photograph for twenty Swiss francs, which was twice the normal price. Leo wanted to destroy it but Jack had another idea. Uncapping a pen, he scrawled across the face of the picture, "Jack and Leo before The Race but after The Fall," and gave it to Leo as a memento of what was to be their last encounter.

1
MOSCOW, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1991

LEO KRITZKY COULD NEVER QUITE GET USED TO THE RUSSIAN WINTER. It had taken him seven years and eight winters to figure out why. It wasn't so much the arctic temperatures or the drifts of dirty snow piled against dirty buildings or the permanent film of black ice on the sidewalks or the enormous stripped chimneys spewing chalk-white smoke into the eternal twilight or the fume of humidity trapped between the double windows of his apartment, making you feel as if you were marooned in a pollution-filled cloud chamber. No, it was more the unrelenting bleakness of everybody in sight—the grim expressions frozen onto the faces of pensioners peddling razor blades on street corners to buy a handful of tea, the emptiness in the eyes of the prostitutes selling themselves in metro stations to feed their children, the resignation in the voices of the gypsy cabbies who weren't sure they could make enough working a fifteen-hour shift to repair their battered cars.

In winter every bit of bad news or bad luck or bad temper seemed to take on tragic proportions. Come spring, so went the saw to which all sensible Muscovites (including Leo) subscribed, life had to get better because there was no way it could get worse.

Thirty-two days to go until All Fools' Day, Leo told himself as he made his way across Taganskaya Square in the flatfooted shuffle that veterans of the Russian winter employed to keep from slipping on the ice. He saw the Commercial Club up ahead on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya—the posh watering hole for the nouveau riche (unofficial motto: better nouveau than never) would have been difficult to miss. Pulled up on the curb in brazen illegality were two dozen or so of the latest model BMWs or Mercedes-Benzes or Jeep Cherokees, their motors running to keep the broad-shouldered bodyguards (almost all of them Afghan veterans) warm as they catnapped in the front seats. Once inside the club, Leo checked his wool-lined duffle coat (a birthday present from Tessa) in the cloakroom and walked across the lobby to the visitors desk, where he was politely but firmly invited to produce an identity card, after which his name was checked against a list on a computer screen. "Gospodin Tsipin is waiting for you in the private baths, door number three," a white-jacketed flunkey said as he led Leo down a freshly painted corridor and, using one of the passkeys attached to a large ring, let him into the bath.

Yevgeny, a soggy sheet wrapped around the lower half of his body, was sitting on a wooden bench, flaying his back with a birch branch. "What kept you?" he cried when he caught sight of Leo.

"The Vyhino-Krasnopresneskaja line was down for half an hour," Leo told him. "People said that a man fell in front of a train."

Yevgeny snorted. "This is Gorbachev's Russia," he said. "Which means there's a good chance he was pushed."

"You used to be a stubborn optimist," Leo said. "Has Russia transformed you into an incorrigible cynic?"

"I spent thirty years fighting for Communism," Yevgeny said, "before I returned home to a Mother Russia run by the vorovskoi mir. What's that in English, Leo?

"The thieves' world."

The smile on Yevgeny's lips only served to emphasize his disenchantment. "It's good to see you again after all this time."

"I'm pleased to see you, too, Yevgeny."

The moment turned awkward. "If I'd known you were coming by metro," Yevgeny said, "I would have sent one of my cars around to fetch you."

"Cars, plural?" Leo asked. Feeling self-conscious, he turned his back on Yevgeny and peeled off his clothes, handing them to the attendant who gave him a white sheet, which he quickly wrapped around his waist. "How many cars do you have?"

Yevgeny, who had put on weight during his seven years in Moscow, filled two small glasses with iced vodka. "Nazdorovie," he said, and he threw his back in one brisk gulp. "Personally, I don't own anything more than the shirt on my back. On the other hand, my organization has several BMWs, a Volvo or two and a Ferrari, not to mention the Apatov mansion near the village of Cheryomuski. Beria kept an apartment there until his execution in 1953, Starik used it as a home and office before his illness; it was in the wood-paneled library on the second floor that he first recruited me into the service. I bought the mansion from the state for one million rubles; with inflation being what it is, it turned out to be a steal."

Yevgeny pursed his lips. "So where have you been hiding, Leo? I heard you'd settled in Gorky after we came back, but by the time I persuaded someone to give me your address you'd moved. Two years ago a friend told me you were living on a houseboat without a telephone at the end of the metro line at Rechnoi Vokzal—I sent one of my drivers around half a dozen times but the boat was always deserted. I figured you were out of the city, or out of the country. Finally I got an old KGB colleague at Lubyanka to tell me where your pension check was being sent. Which is how I found the address on Frunzenskaya Embankment—number fifty, entrance nine, apartment three seventy-three."

Leo said quietly, "I had a lot of ghosts to exorcise. I've more or less become a hermit—a hermit lost in a city filled with hermits."

Yevgeny peeled off the sheet and pulled Leo into the steam room. The thermometer on the wall read eighty-five centigrade. The heat scalded Leo's throat when he tried to breath. "I'm not used to this—don't know how long I can stand it."

Yevgeny, his face growing beet-red, splashed a ladle full of cold water onto the hot coals. A haze of vapor sizzled into the moist air. "You become used to it," he whispered. "The trick is to store up enough heat in your body to see you through the winter months."

Leo abandoned the steam room when the sand ran out of the glass. Yevgeny came out behind him and the two dipped in a tiled pool. The water was so icy it took Leo's breath away. Later, wrapped in dry sheets, they settled onto the bench and the attendant wheeled over a cart loaded with zakuski—herring, caviar, salmon, along with a bottle of iced vodka.

"I'm not sure I can afford this on my KGB pension," Leo remarked. "The ruble doesn't go as far as it used to."

"You are my guest," Yevgeny reminded him.

"How did you get so rich?" Leo asked.

Yevgeny looked up at his friend. "You really want to know?"

"Yeah. I see all these characters in their foreign cars and leather coats with bleached blondes clinging to their arms. I'm curious how they do it."

"It's not a state secret," Yevgeny said. "After I returned to Moscow the Centre gave me a job in the USA section of the First Chief Directorate, but I could see I was going nowhere fast. When Gorbachev came on the scene in 1985, I decided to strike out on my own. All those years I spent in the Mecca of free enterprise must have rubbed off on me. I rented a dilapidated indoor pool and gymnasium for a song—ha! my English is still pretty good—and transformed it into a sports center for the new Russian rich. With the profit I organized a financial information center for foreign investors. With the profit from that I bought a Communist Party printing press and started a financial newspaper. Then I branched out. I started buying and selling raw materials in Siberia and trading them for finished products—Japanese VCRs, Hong Kong computers, American blue jeans—which I imported. Tell me if this is boring you."

"On the contrary."

"I sold the VCRs and computers and blue jeans in Russia for a huge profit. All the while I was working out of the back seat of a car and renting a relatively small apartment behind the Kremlin from an opera singer for a thousand US dollars a month—she'd fired the housekeeper and moved into her attic room. I needed a larger apartment and a corporate center, which is why I bought the Apatov mansion. It solved all my problems. Now people come to me with ideas and I give them seed money in return for a fifty percent interest in the bizness. And I'm in the process of setting up my own private bank. I'm calling it the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce. We are opening our doors this week, with branch offices in Leningrad and Kiev and Smolensk, as well as Berlin and Dresden to plug into the international banking scene." Yevgeny helped himself to some herring on a dry biscuit and washed it down with vodka. "Tell me what you've been doing, Leo."

Leo sniggered in derision. "There's not much to tell. The Centre kept me on ice for several years when I came in. The address in Gorky was a decoy—it was supposed to throw off the CIA if they came looking for me, which of course they didn't. I went through endless debriefings. Case officers would bring me questions, area specialists would seek my opinion on this or that senator or Congressman, they'd ask me to read between the lines of the latest Presidential speech. When my conclusions reinforced the views held in the superstructure they were passed on. When they didn't they were shelved."

Yevgeny said, "It's an old story—an intelligence organization functioning in a country that doesn't tolerate dissent has a tendency to ignore dissenting information."

Leo shrugged listlessly. "The middle-level analysts seemed to think I had a magic key that could unlock American mysteries and kept coming back for more. In the last few years, as Gorbachev opened things up and information began to circulate more freely, they finally began to lose interest in my opinions—"

"And the CIA never acknowledged that you'd been a mole?"

Leo shook his head. "They had nothing to gain and everything to lose by revealing that they'd been penetrated, and on such a high level. The press would have had a field day, heads would have rolled, budgets would have been cut, for all I know the CIA might have been broken up. At one point early on the Centre proposed to trot me out in front of the international press to embarrass the Company, but I managed to talk them out of it—I made them understand that they couldn't count on my cooperating with the debriefers if they went public. Since then the CIA has taken in a handful of KGB defectors without publicly rubbing it in, so I suppose it's a standoff."

"Do you hear from your family?"

For a while Leo didn't respond. "Sorry—what did you say?"

"Your family, the twins—have you been in touch with them?"

"Both girls quit the Company in the aftermath of my... retirement. Vanessa flatly refuses to have anything to do with me. My ex-wife became an alcoholic—one winter night, Adelle drank herself senseless and curled up in a hole on a hill in Maryland not far from where we'd buried my dog and her cat the day we met. A farmer found her body covered with snow the next morning. Vanessa said it was all my fault, which it obviously was, and swore she'd never communicate with me again as long as she lived. She married and had a baby boy, which I suppose makes me a grandfather. I wrote her a letter of congratulations but she never replied. Tessa got a job in Washington covering intelligence agencies for Newsweek. She married a journalist and divorced him three years later. She writes me every month or so and keeps me up to date. I've encouraged her to come over for a visit but she says she's not ready for that yet. I keep hoping Tessa will turn up at my door one day." Leo caught his breath. "I miss the twins..."

The two concentrated on the zakuski. Yevgeny refilled their glasses with vodka. "What's your personal life like?" he asked Leo.

"I read a great deal. I became friendly with a woman who illustrates children's books—she's a widow. We keep company, as they used to say in America. When the weather permits we go for long walks. I've gotten to know Moscow quite well. I read Pravda every day, which improves my Russian and instructs me on what Gorbachev's been up to the last twenty-four hours."

"What do you think of him?"

"Gorbachev?" Leo reflected for a moment. "He's made an enormous difference—he was the first person to openly challenge the Communist establishment and eat away at the power of the Party and build up democratic institutions. But I can't figure out whether he wants to reform the Communist Party or eventually do away with it."

"They want to patch it so that it lasts until their careers are over," Yevgeny guessed "They want an office to go to when they wake up in the morning."

"I wish Gorbachev were a better judge of people," Leo said. "He surrounds himself with right-wingers whom I don't trust—Kryuchkov, the KGB chairman, for instance."

"The Minister of Defense, Yazov, the Interior Minister, Pugo—I wouldn't trust them either," Yevgeny said. "For me, for the new class of entrepreneurs, Gorbachev is the lynchpin to economic reform. If he's overthrown it will set Russia back fifty years."

"Someone ought to warn him—"

"He has been warned," Yevgeny said. "I heard that Boris Yeltsin specifically alerted him to the possibility of a right-wing coup, but Gorbachev despises Yeltsin and doesn't believe anything that comes from him."

"Gorbachev doesn't know who his real friends are," Leo said.

"Well, you can't say we don't live in fascinating times," Yevgeny declared with a low laugh. "I heard on the car radio that the Americans are pulverizing Saddam Hussein's army. Do you think they would have gone to war if the principal export of Kuwait was carrots instead of oil?" He raised his glass and clinked it against Leo's. "Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!"

Leo smiled. For an instant he almost seemed happy. "To the success of our hopeless task!"

Later, outside in the street, Yevgeny signalled for his car. Down the block a polished black BMW backed off the sidewalk onto the street and drew up parallel to the curb. A man with a livid scar running from his ear to his jaw jumped out of the passenger seat and held open the back door.

"Let me drop you someplace," Yevgeny offered.

"I think I'll walk back," Leo said. "I lead a very sedentary life. I could use the exercise."

"I hope our paths cross again," Yevgeny said.

Leo studied his friends face. "I never asked you—are you married?"

Yevgeny shook his head. "There was someone once—but too much time has passed, too much water has flowed under the bridge."

"You could try to pick up where you left off. Do you know where she is?"

"I read about her in the newspapers from time to time—she is one of the reformers around Yeltsin. In certain circles—amongst the reformers, in the ranks of the KGB—she is quite well known."

"Get in touch with her."

Yevgeny kicked at a tire. "She wouldn't give me the time of day."

"You never know, Yevgeny."

When Yevgeny looked up, a sad half-smile was disfiguring his lips. "I know."

"Turn onto the Ring Road," Yevgeny told the driver. "There's less traffic at this time of day."

He melted back into the leather of the seat and watched the shabby automobiles and shabby buses and shabby buildings parade past the window. At a red light, the BMW pulled up next to a Saab with a chauffeur and a bodyguard up front and two small boys in the back. The sight of the children liberated a flood of memories. As children, Yevgeny and his brother, Grinka, had often been driven out to the dacha in Peredelkino in his father's shiny Volga. My God, he thought, where have all those years gone to? Nowadays, when he shaved in the morning, he caught himself staring at the image that peered back at him from the mirror. Its face seemed only vaguely familiar, a distant cousin from the Tsipin side of the family tree with a suggestion of his father's high forehead and squint and stubby chin. How was it possible to be sixty-two years old? Leo, who had always appeared younger than his years, had aged. But Yevgeny, to his own eye, had actually grown old.

In the front of the BMW, Yevgeny's driver and the bodyguard were busy trashing Gorbachev. It wasn't his economic or political reforms that annoyed them so much as the sukhoi zakon—the dry laws he'd put into effect to reduce chronic alcoholism in the workplace and boost production. On Gorbachev's orders vodka factories had been shut down, grapevines in Georgia and Moldavia had been bulldozed. "Under Brezhnev," the driver remembered, "the standard half-liter bottle of vodka was three rubles sixty-two. The price never went up and it never went down, not so much as a kopeck. It got so that you didn't use the word vodka—you asked for a three sixty-two and everyone knew what you were talking about. Today people who work in factories can't even afford ersatz vodka—"

Yevgeny asked jokingly, "How can a Russian get through the day without vodka?"

The bodyguard with the livid scar on his face twisted around in his seat. "They concoct substitutes, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," he said.

"Tell him the recipes," the driver insisted.

"In Afghanistan, we used to mix one hundred grams of Zhigulev beer, thirty grams of Sadko the Rich Merchant brand shampoo, seventy grams of a Pakistani anti-dandruff shampoo and twenty grams of insect repellent. The result was rotgut but it would take your mind off the war. The trick was to drink it in quick gulps, otherwise you could burn your throat."

The driver called over his shoulder, "I have a friend in the militia who says the kids have taken to eating shoe polish sandwiches."

"And what is a shoe polish sandwich?" Yevgeny asked.

"You spread shoe polish on a thick slice of white bread—"

"If you can find white bread," quipped the bodyguard.

"You let it sit for fifteen minutes while the bread absorbs the alcohol in the shoe polish. Then you skim off as much of the shoe polish as you can and eat the bread. They say four slices will put you out of your misery for the day."

The bodyguard glanced over his shoulder again. "Brown shoe polish is supposed to be the best," he added.

"Thanks for the tip," Yevgeny remarked dryly.

The two men in the front seats grinned.

Yevgeny leaned forward and tapped the driver on the arm. "Turn right after the light—the clinic is on the right at the end of the block."

The private KGB clinic, set back from the street with a tarnished gold hammer and sickle over the revolving door, was a dingy four-story brick building with a solarium on the roof. Inside, sounds—plaintive cries for a nurse, the shrill ringing of telephones, cryptic announcements on the public address system—echoed through the enormous domed entrance hall. Both elevators were out of order, so Yevgeny climbed the fire staircase to the fourth floor. Two peasant women wearing layers of sweaters and rubber boots were mopping the corridor with filthy water. Yevgeny knocked once on the door with a scrap of paper taped to it marked "Zhilov, Pavel Semyonovich," then opened it and looked inside. The room—there was a metal hospital bed, a night table, mustard-color paint peeling from the walls, a toilet without a lid and two sleet-streaked windows without shades or blinds—was unoccupied. Yevgeny woke the nurse dozing at a desk at the end of the corridor. She ran her painted thumbnail down a list and pointed with her chin toward the roof. "He is taking the sun," she said sullenly.

About thirty or so former KGB employees, all of them old and ill, were scattered around one end of the rooftop solarium—the other end was filled with drafts from the panes that had been broken in a hailstorm the previous winter and never repaired. Yevgeny found Starik slumped in a wheelchair, his wispy white beard on his chest, his eyes closed. A tattered blanket with dried vomit stains had slipped down around his ankles and nobody had bothered to tuck it back up to his gaunt neck. Transparent tubes from an intravenous drip suspended from a jury-rigged bar attached to the back of the wheelchair disappeared through a slit in his sweatshirt into a catheter implanted in his chest. From behind the wheelchair came the soft hum of a battery-powered pump. Nearby, two retired KGB colonels who would have groveled before Starik in his prime played backgammon, slamming the checkers down onto the wooden board, indifferent to the racket they were making.

Yevgeny studied the man in the wheelchair. Whoever took responsibility for the intensive-care patients had stripped him of whatever dignity was left to him after he had been diagnosed with primitive arterial pulmonary hypertension and, barely able to breath as his lungs filled with fluid, rushed to the clinic the previous month. Starik was dressed in a pair of faded red sweat pants and a soiled white sweatshirt. There were fresh urine stains around his crotch. As if mocking his glorious record of services to the Motherland, four medals were pinned to his chest. Yevgeny recognized the rosettes—there was the Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of Alexandr Nevsky, the Order of the Red Star. When his father had been dying in the Kremlin clinic, Yevgeny remembered turning away to hide his lack of emotion. But even in decrepitude, the Tolstoyan figure of Starik managed to stir feelings in him.

Yevgeny squatted next to the wheelchair and pulled the blanket up around his mentor's armpits. "Pavel Semyonovich," he whispered.

Starik's eyes twitched open. He stared at his visitor in bewilderment. His jaw trembled when he realized who it was. "Yevgeny Alexandrovich," he mumbled through one side of his half-paralyzed mouth. Each intake of breath was accompanied by a pained rasp. "Tell me if you can... do cats eat bats... do bats eat cats?"

"Are you feeling any better?" Yevgeny inquired. As soon as he said it he realized what a stupid question it was.

Starik nodded yes but muttered the word no. "Life is torment... since they inject me with this French drug Flolan twenty-four hours a day, I have lost all appetite... unable eat... mealtimes they push carts past my open door... the smell of food nauseates me."

"I will speak to the director—"

"That's not worst." Between phrases, sickening sounds gurgled up from the back of Starik's throat. "I am washed... shaved... diaper changed... ass wiped... by grown women who bathe once a month and menstruate... their body odors are unbearable." A tear welled in the corner of one of his bloodshot eyes. "The night nurse is a zhid... she flaunts her name... Abramovna...Oh, where... where have my girlies gone to?"

"They were put in orphanages when you took sick."

One of the KGB colonels rolled double sixes and roared with triumph as he cleared his last pieces off the board.

Grasping Yevgeny's wrist, Starik swayed toward his visitor. "Is Cold War still being waged?" he demanded.

"It is winding down," Yevgeny said.

"Who will be seen as the victor?"

"History will record that the Principal Adversary, America, won the Cold War."

Startled, Starik tightened his grip on Yevgeny's wrist. "How can this be? We won every battle... beat them at every turn...Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Kritzky—endless list." Starik swung his skeletal head from side to side in dismay. "Tolstoy turning in grave... Communism betrayed by the Jews." He gasped for breath. "Cold War may be winding down... but there is an end game. In Tolstoy's story, the death of the horse KHOLSTOMER serves a purpose—the she-wolf and her cubs feed off of his carcass. We, also, will feed off what is left of KHOLSTOMER. Essential for us to—"

His breath gave out and he wheezed dangerously for a moment. Yevgeny was on the verge of shouting for a doctor when Starik regained control of himself. "Essential to look beyond Communism... to nationalism and purification... must get rid of the Jews once and for all... finish what Hitler started." Starik's eyes blazed with wrath. "I have had contacts with... people have come to see me... messages have been exchanged... I have given out your name, Yevgeny Alexandrovich... someone will be in touch." His slender reserve of energy spent, Starik collapsed back into the wheel chair. "Do you still recall... Tolstoy's last words?"

"The truth—I care a great deal," Yevgeny murmured.

Starik blinked several times, pressing tears out onto his parchment-brittle cheeks. "That will serve as a code phrase... whoever speaks it... comes to you with my blessing."

Looking like a Swiss banker in his three-piece Armani, Yevgeny worked the room.

"Happy you could make it, Arkhip," he told one of the senior economists from the Central Bank, pumping his hand. He lowered his voice. "How determined is Gorbachev to support the ruble?"

"He's going to hold the line as long as he can," the economist said. "The big question mark is inflation."

"Inflation has an upside," noted an aide to the Minister of Finance who overheard the conversation. "It weeds out the factories and businesses and banks that don't have the resources or the will to adapt. It's like Mao's Long March—only the strongest survive. Which means that they are better able to cope with the capitalist reality that is imposing itself on the Socialist model."

"That's one way of looking at it," Yevgeny conceded. "On the other hand, a lot of the new entrepreneurs are struggling to keep their heads above water."

"Congratulations, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," gushed a tall man who kept a forefinger on his hearing aide. He carried the business section of Izvestia folded into his jacket pocket. "My father and I wish you every success with your Greater Russian Bank of Commerce."

"Thank you, Fedya Semyonovich," Yevgeny said. "I am sorry your father could not make it today. I would like to talk to you both about the hard currency services we plan to offer import-export companies."

Several waitresses carrying trays filled with triangles of white bread covered with black caviar from the Caspian Sea threaded their way through the crowded ballroom that Yevgeny had rented for the afternoon. Wondering how many in the room knew about the existence of shoe polish sandwiches, Yevgeny plucked a triangle from a passing doily and popped it into his mouth. He helped himself to another glass of French Champagne from the long table and looked around. In front of the thick curtains drawn across a high window, two very elegant women in low-cut cocktail dresses were holding court, surrounded by semicircle of men. Yevgeny recognized the older of the two women—she was the wife of a notorious press baron, Pavel Uritzky. Making his way across the room, he leaned toward her and grazed the back of her gloved hand with his lips. A painful image rushed to his skull—he could make out the bird-like figure of Aida Tannenbaum peering up at him through watery eyes in the Barbizon lounge some seven years earlier. Shaking off the vision, he shook hands with the other woman and each of the men. "We are all in agreement," one of them told Yevgeny, "Russia must have massive doses of outside investment in order to survive. The problem is how to attract capital, given the political and monetary uncertainty—"

"Gorbachev is responsible for both," the older woman said flatly. "If only we had an iron hand on the helm..."

"If she had her way, Mathilde would have us go back to the Brezhnev era," one of the men said with a laugh.

"As long as we are going back, I would have us return to the Stalin era," the woman maintained. "People conveniently forget that the economy worked under Stalin. The shelves in the stores were filled. Nobody went hungry. Everyone who wanted to work was employed."

"True, nobody in Moscow went hungry," one of the men said. "But it was different in the countryside. Remember the old aphorism: The shortage shall be divided among the peasants"

"Under Stalin there was no dissent," a man said. "Nowadays, there are twenty opinions on every matter under the sun."

"There was no dissent," Yevgeny remarked, "because the Gulag camps were filled with the dissenters."

"Exactly," said the older woman, misunderstanding which side of the issue Yevgeny was on. She focused her bright eyes on him. "I have heard it said, Yevgeny Alexandrovich, that you were a spy for the KGB in America? Is there any truth to this?"

"It is no secret that I was a Chekist for many years," he replied. "You will forgive me if I do not reveal to you what I did, or where I did it."

"Tell us, then, how one goes about opening a private bank these days," the younger woman asked.

"It is not all that difficult," Yevgeny said with a twinkle in his eyes. "First you must convince people that you have a hundred million American dollars. Once you do that the rest is child's play."

"Oh, you are a naughty man," the older woman remarked. "Everyone knows you have much more than a hundred million American dollars."

A young Russian businessman who had made a fortune exporting second-hand Soviet weapons—the word was he could supply everything from a Kalashnikov to a nuclear submarine—pulled Yevgeny aside. "What do you make of the rumors of a coup d'etat against Gorbachev?" he demanded.

"I have heard them, of course," Yevgeny said. "And common sense would suggest that if you and I heard them, Gorbachev has heard them, too. Mikhail Sergeyevich is many things but stupid is not one of them. He will surely take precautions—"

"A coup would be bad for business," the young Russian decided. "What forward dollar rate are you giving against the ruble?"

Smiling, Yevgeny extracted a small embossed business card from his breast pocket. "Call me for an appointment, Paval. I have reason to believe that the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce can be of assistance to you."

Later, as the cocktail party thinned out and the guests were calling for their cars, the wife of the press baron buttonholed Yevgeny in the antechamber off the ballroom. "Yevgeny Alexandrovich, my husband is eager to make
your acquaintance. It appears the two of you have a mutual friend who speaks very highly of you."

"I would be honored to meet your husband." Mathilde slipped a perfumed visiting card from her small embroidered purse and handed it to Yevgeny. An address in Perkhushovo, a village off the Mozhaysk Highway, a date at the end of February, and hour, were written in ink on the back of it. "You are invited to join a select gathering. My husband and a group of his friends and associates are meeting to discuss"—the woman flashed a knife-edged smile—"Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Our mutual friend, the person who speaks of you in glowing terms, has said you were greatly influenced by Tolstoy in your youth—that you once adopted as an alias the name Ozolin, who of course was the stationmaster at Astapovo, where the great Tolstoy died."

Yevgeny hardly dared breath. He had assumed Starik's talk of a code phrase was the ranting of a half-crazed old man. He managed to murmur, "I am stunned by how much you know about me."

The barest trace of a smile vanished from the woman's painted lips. "My husband has been told that you are one of the rare people who remembers the Count's last words: 'The truth—I care a great deal.' Do you, like the immortal Tolstoy, care about the truth, Yevgeny Alexandrovich?"

"I do."

"Then you will share that obsession with my husband and his friends when you honor us with your presence."

Mathilde offered the back of her gloved hand. Yevgeny bent forward and brushed her fingers with his lips. When he straightened and opened his eyes, she was gone.

Room SH219 in the Hart Office Building, home to the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence, was reputed to contain the most secure suite of offices in a town obsessed with security. The unmarked door opened into a foyer guarded by armed Capitol Hill policemen. The conference room was actually a room suspended inside a room so that the walls and floor and ceiling (all made of steel to prevent electromagnetic signals from penetrating) could be inspected for bugs. Even the electrical supply was filtered. Inside, mauve chairs were set around a horseshoe-shaped table. On one wall hung a map of the Intelligence Committees' area of interest: the world. Elliott Winstrom Ebbitt II, the Director of Central Intelligence since Bill Caseys death in 1987, had barely settled into a catbird seat when the assault began.

"Mawning to you, Di-rector," drawled the Texan who chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He had a smile plastered across his jowls but it didn't mislead anyone; the Senator had been quoted in the New York Times the previous week saying there were some in Congress who favored breaking up the Company into component parts and starting over again. "Won't waste your time 'n ours pussyfootin' 'round," he began. He looked through bifocals at some notes he'd scrawled on a yellow legal pad, then peered sleepily over the top of the glasses at the Director. "No secret, folks in Congress are pissed, Ebby. Been almost two years since the last Russian soldier quit Afghanistan. Still can't figure out what the CIA could've been thinkin' 'bout when it delivered Stinger missiles to Islamic fundamentalists. Now that we're bombin' the bejesus out of Saddam Hussein, chances are good some of them-there Stingers will wind up bein' shot at our aircraft."

Ebby said, "I would respectfully remind the Senator that giving Stingers to the mujaheddin was a Presidential decision—"

"Casey recommended it," a Republican Congressman from Massachusetts told the Director. "You could make a case that he talked Reagan into it."

"How many Stingers are still out there and what are you doing to get them back?" another Congressman asked.

"We reckon roughly three hundred and fifty are unaccounted for, Congressman. As for recuperating them, we're offering a no-questions-asked bounty of one hundred thousand dollars a Stinger—"

The Chairman snapped his head to one side to clear the mane of white hair out of his eyes. "I expect an Islamist could get more for a Stinger in the Smugglers' Bazaar in Peshawar. The long an' the short of it, Ebby, is that everyone's patience is wearin' rice-paper thin. Here we are, shellin' out somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-eight billion dollars of the taxpayers' money a year on intelligence. And the single most important event since the end of the Second World War—I'm talkin 'bout the dee-cline 'n fall of the Soviet empire—goes unpredicted. Hellfire, the CIA didn't give us a week's warnin'."

A Senator from Maine rifled through a folder and came up with a report stamped "Top Secret." "A couple of months ago you personally told us, in this very room, Mr. Ebbitt, that—and I'm quoting your words—'the most likely outcome for 1991 is that the Soviet economy will stagnate or deteriorate slightly."'

"It sure as hell deteriorated slightly!" scoffed the Chairman. "The Berlin wall came tumblin' down November of '89; Gorbachev let the satellites in East Europe squirm off the Soviet hook one by one; Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Ukraine are talkin' autonomy— and we're settin' here twenty-eight billion poorer and readin' 'bout these earth-quaking events in the newspaper."

A Democratic Congressman from Massachusetts cleared his throat. "Senator, in all fairness to Mr. Ebbitt, I think we are obliged to acknowledge that he's done a lot to clean up the CIA's act since Director Casey's day. I don't think I need to remind anyone in this room that, in Casey's time, we had him testifying into a microphone and we listened on earphones trying to decipher his mumblings. And we didn't succeed. Mr. Ebbitt, on the other hand, has been very open and straightforward with us—"

"I 'preciate that much as you do," the Chairman said. "But the problem of gettin' a handle on intelligence—the problem of gettin' some early warnin' for our bucks—remains. We woulda been a hell of a lot better off if'n the CIA'd apprised us of Saddam Hussein's dishonorable intentions vis-a-vis Kuwait."

"Senator, Senators, Congressmen, we've been moving in the right direction on these matters," Ebby said, "but Rome wasn't built in a day and the CIA isn't going to be reconstructed in a year or two. We're dealing with a culture, a mindset, and the only thing that's going to change that over the long run is to bring in new blood, which, as you gentlemen know, is what I've been doing. As far as drawing an accurate portrait of the Soviet Union's leadership, I want to remind the Senators and Congressmen that you've put pressure on the CIA over the years to cut back on covert operations—nowadays we run roughly a dozen programs a year, compared with hundreds in the fifties and sixties. One of the results of this policy is that we don't have assets in Moscow capable of telling us what Gorbachev and the people around him are up to. We don't even know what information they're getting. As for the stagnation of the Soviet economy, Gorbachev himself didn't put his hands on reasonably accurate economic statistics until two or three years ago, and it seems unfair to criticize us for not knowing what he himself didn't know. Looking back, we can see that when he finally discovered how bad things really were, he decided the only way to rejuvenate a stagnating command economy was to move to a market-oriented economy. Just how fast and how far he plans to move is something that Gorbachev himself probably hasn't figured out."

"And how does the Company assess his chances of arresting the downward spiral of the Soviet economy?" inquired a Republican Congressman.

"It's a good bet that things will get worse before they get better," Ebby replied. "In Russia there are individuals, communities, organizations, factories, entire cities even, that have no rational economic reason to exist. Pruning them away is as much a social problem as an economic problem. Then there is the challenge of meeting the raised expectations of the workers—coal miners in the Kuzbass or the Don Basin, to give you one example, want to find more on the pharmacy shelves than jars filled with leeches. It's anybody's guess whether Gorbachev, with his talk of perestroika and glasnost, will be able to satisfy their expectations. It's anybody's guess whether he'll be able to buck the vested interests—buck the KGB and the military establishment, buck what's left of the Communist Party which fears Gorbachev will reform them out of existence. It's anybody's guess whether the revolution—and there will be a revolution, gentlemen—will come from below or from above."

"What do you make of all this talk in the papers 'bout a putsch?" the Chairman demanded.

"There are people in the Soviet superstructure who would obviously like to set the clock back," Ebby said. "Speaking frankly, we don't know how serious the rumors of a coup are."

"I think we need to give Mr. Ebbitt credit," the Congressman from Massachusetts remarked. "He doesn't bull his way through these briefings. I for one appreciate that when he doesn't know something, he says he doesn't know."

"I second the motion," said a Republican Congressman.

"Still 'n' all, these rumors need to be checked out," the Chairman persisted. "Is there a clique workin' behind the scenes to undermine Gorbachev? How strong are they? What kind of support can they expect from the military? What can we do to support Gorbachev or undermine his opponents? And what should we make of those rumors 'bout the KGB having large amounts of foreign currencies stashed away somewhere in the West?"

"There is sketchy evidence that sizable amounts of Soviet foreign currency holdings may be finding their way into German banks," Ebby confirmed. "The front man handling the mechanics of the operation is said to be someone in the Central Committee—his identity remains a mystery. Who is giving the orders, to what use this money will be put has yet to be determined."

"What role do you see Yeltsin playing in all this?" asked one of the Congressman who had remained silent up to now.

"Yeltsin is coming at Gorbachev from the other direction," Ebby said. "The two men detest each other—have ever since Gorbachev expelled Yeltsin from the Politburo in '87; in those days the Party was above criticism and Yeltsin made the fatal mistake of ignoring this cast-iron rule. Nowadays, Yeltsin openly attacks Gorbachev for slowing down the pace of reforms. I think it can be said with some assurance that Yeltsin, who was elected Russian President by the Russian Republics Supreme Soviet last year and thus has a strong power base, sees himself as the logical successor to Gorbachev. Our reading is that he wouldn't mind seeing Gorbachev shunted aside on the condition that he's the one doing the shunting."

"Which pretty much pits Yeltsin against the KGB and the military and the Communist Party hacks who are squeamish about reforms," someone said.

"He has more than his share of enemies," Ebby agreed.

The briefing went on for another three-quarters of an hour, with most of the time devoted to a discussion of Saddam Hussein's ability to wage chemical or biological warfare in the wake of his stunning defeat in the Gulf War. At noon, when the meeting finally broke up, even those who tended to be critical of the Company conceded that Ebby had a firm grasp of current events and was doing his level best to shape the CIA into an organization that could cope with the post-Cold War world.

"How'd it go?" Jack asked quietly.

"As well as could be expected," Ebby told his Deputy Director, "all things considered."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that the policy wonks still don't understand the limitations on intelligence gathering. They spend twenty-eight billion a year and they don't feel they're getting their money's worth if questions go unanswered or events go unanticipated."

"They don't give us credit for the ones we call right," Jack griped.

"They give us credit," Ebby said. "But they want us to get it right a hundred percent of the time."

The two stood off to one side in the executive dining room at the Company's Langley headquarters watching as Manny, Deputy Director/Operations since the previous summer, presented gold wristwatches to three veteran case officers who had been encouraged to take early retirement. (Encouraged, in the sense that all three had been offered new assignments, two in listening posts in the Cameroon Republic, the third in a one-man Company station in the Canary Islands.) The chairs and tables had been pushed against one wall to make room for the hundred or so Operations personnel at the ceremony. Manny, at forty-four the youngest DD/0 in memory, blew into the microphone to make sure it was alive. "It's always painful to see old hands take their leave," he began. "John, Hank, Jerry, I speak for everyone in the DD/0 when I tell you that we'll miss not only your expertise but your company. Between the three of you, there's exactly seventy-six years of experience—seventy-six years of manning the ramparts of the Cold War. These wristwatches are a token of our esteem and the country's appreciation for your long and meritorious service."

There was a smattering of applause. Several voices from the back cried "Speech, speech."

"What bullshit," Jack muttered to Ebby. "These jokers were never interested in scoring. They sat around various stations waiting for opportunities to fall into their laps. Even then they always played it safe."

The oldest of the three retirees, a corpulent man with bushy eyebrows fixed in a permanent scowl, stepped up to the microphone. Bitterness was draped across his face like a flag. "Thought I'd pass on a joke that may or may not be about the Central Intelligence Agency," he said. Manny, standing at his side, shifted his weight from one foot to another in discomfort. "Goes like this: A Federal census taker comes across a family of hillbillies living in a shack in Tennessee. Barefoot kids everywhere. The adults have rifles in one hand and moonshine jugs in the other. The father says there are twenty-two in the family. He whistles with his thumb and middle finger and everyone comes a-running."

Some of the DO people began to titter—they had heard the story before.

"The census taker counts heads but finds only twenty-one. Turns out that Little Luke is missing. Then someone shouts from the outhouse—Little Luke has fallen through the privy hole. Everyone runs over to take a look. The father shrugs and wanders off. The census taker can't believe his eyes. Aren't you going to pull him out?' he shouts. 'Shucks no,' the father calls back. 'It'll be easier to have another than clean him up.'"

Half the DO staffers burst into laughter. Others raised their eyebrows. Manny gazed at the floor. The officer who told the joke turned his head and looked across the room directly at the DCI.

"Jesus H. Christ," Jack moaned angrily. He would have strode over to have it out with the retiring officer then and there if Ebby hadn't put a hand on his arm.

"These guys were hotshots when they started, but they're burnt out," Ebby said in a low voice.

"That doesn't give him the right—"

"Getting rid of the deadwood is a painful experience for everyone concerned. Grin and bear it, Jack."

Later, in the DCI's seventh-floor Holy of Holies, Jack flopped into a seat across the desk from Ebby. "What he said back there—there may be some truth to it," he moaned. "There are people in Congress who'd prefer to start from scratch rather man give us a chance to clean up the mess Casey left behind him."

"Ran into several of them when I testified this morning," Ebby said.

Jack leaned forward. "I've given this a lot of thought, Ebby. Fighting Columbian drug lords or Islamic terrorists or Russian arms merchants is too much of a sideshow to justify the twenty-eight billion spent on intelligence every year. Look at it another way: How are we going to recruit the best and the brightest if our archenemy is Cuba?"

"You have another idea of what we should be doing?"

"As a matter of fact, I do." Jack got up and strolled over to the door, which was ajar, and kicked it closed. He came around behind Ebby and settled onto on a windowsill.

Ebby swiveled around to face him. "Spit it out, Jack."

"I nibbled around the edges of the subject with you when Anthony was kidnapped by the fundamentalists in Afghanistan. We were in a no-win situation then, we're in a no-win situation now. Congress ties our hands with oversight and budget restrictions and strict limitations on Presidential Findings—my God, Ebby, it's actually against the law for us to target a foreign leader, it doesn't matter that he may be targeting us."

"I remember that conversation—at the time I told you that the CIA was an endangered species and couldn't afford to get involved in what you had in mind."

"At the time," Jack retorted in annoyance, "I told you that we wouldn't have to get involved. We could get others to do the dirty work for us—"

"It would be a violation of our charter—"

"Take this Gorbachev thing—even if we knew what was going on we'd be helpless to do anything about it."

"I'm not sure I want to have this conversation—"

"You're having the conversation—"

"What do you mean by doing something about it?"

"You know what I mean? We could get Torriti to put a toe in the water. Ezra ben Ezra still runs the Mossad—he could be counted on to contribute resources to an enterprise that keeps Gorbachev in power and Jewish emigration from Russia going."

Ebby turned sarcastic. "Contribute to an enterprise—you make it sound so congenial. You make it sound almost legal."

"Those dollars being stashed in Germany by the Russians—If we could get our hands on some of them, the enterprise could become a self-financing entity operating outside of Congressional appropriations and oversight."

"Casey tried to pull that off by selling arms to the Iranians and using the money to support the contra rebels in Nicaragua. I don't need to remind you that it blew up in his face."

"We're supposed to be a shadowy organization, Ebby. I'm only suggesting that we start to operate in the shadows."

Ebby sighed. "Look, Jack, we've fought the same wars, we bear the same scars. But you're wide of the mark now. Because the enemy doesn't have scruples is no excuse for the Company not having scruples. If we fight the wars their way, even if we win, we lose. Don't you see that?"

"What I see is that ends justify means—"

"That's a meaningless catch phrase unless you weigh each case on its merits. Which ends? Which means? And what are the chances of a particular mean achieving a particular end?"

"If we don't score, and soon, they'll break up the Company," Jack said.

"So be it," Ebby said. "If you want to continue working for me," he added, "you'll do so on my terms. There will be no enterprise as long as I'm running the show. I'm the custodian of the CIA. I take that responsibility very seriously. You read me, Jack?"

"I read you, pal. Like the man says, you're right from your point of view. But your point of view needs work."

2

PERKHUSHOVO, FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 1991

"I HAVE IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE," ASSERTED THE KGB CHAIRMAN, Vladimir Kryuchkov, "that the American CIA has succeeded in infiltrating its agents into Gorbachev's inner circle."

At the end of the table, the Minister of Defense, Marshal Dmitri Yazov, a dull, plodding old soldier with a broad chunky face, demanded, "Name names."

Kryuchkov, happy to comply, identified five figures known to be intimate with the General Secretary. "Any idiot can see that Gorbachev is being manipulated by the CIA—it is part of an American plot to sabotage first the Soviet administration, and after that the economy and scientific research. The ultimate goal is the destruction of the Communist Party and the Union, the crushing of Socialism and the elimination of the Soviet Union as a world power capable of holding American arrogance in check."

The eighteen men and one women seated around the long outdoor picnic table listened in consternation. Yevgeny, taking in the scene from a place half way down the table, decided that the last time he had seen so many VIPs in one place was when the television cameras panned to the reviewing stand atop Lenin's Tomb during Red Square May Day parades. At midmorning, the limousines had started arriving at the stately wooden dacha on the edge of the village of Perkhushovo off the Mozhaysk Highway. The guests had sipped punch and had chatted amiably in a large room overheated by a tiled stove as they waited for the latecomers to turn up. One ranking member of the Politburo secretariat had complained about the cost of sending a daughter to a Swiss boarding school and the people listening had nodded in empathy. Eventually everyone had pulled on overcoats—the last snow of the winter had melted but the air was still chilly—and trooped outside to thwart any microphones that might have been installed inside the dacha. Vladimir Kryuchkov's guests hunted for their nametags and took the places assigned to them around the long picnic table set up under a stand of Siberian spruce. Beyond the trees, the lawn sloped down to a large lake on which several dozen teenagers were racing small sailboats. From time to time shrieks of exaltation drifted up hill as the helmsmen wheeled around the buoys marking the course. To the left, through the trees, armed guards could be seen patrolling the electrified fence that surrounded the property.

Mathilde, sitting directly opposite Yevgeny, dispatched a smile of complicity across the table, then turned to whisper in the ear of her husband, Pavel Uritzky. An austere man who made no secret of his deep aversion for Jews, he nodded in agreement and addressed Kryuchkov, presiding from the head of the table. "Vladimir Alexandrovich, the story of CIA spies within Gorbachev's inner circle may be the drop that causes the bucket to overflow. It is one thing to disagree with Gorbachev, as we all do; to reproach him for abandoning the fraternal Socialist states of Eastern Europe, to criticize him for spitting on our Bolshevik history, to fault him for plunging headlong into economic reforms without having the wildest idea of where he was taking the country. It is quite another to accuse him of being manipulated into doing the dirty work of the American CIA. Have you exposed your charges directly to the General Secretary?"

"I attempted to warn him during our regular briefings," Kryuchkov replied. "I can tell you that he invariably cuts me short and changes the subject. He obviously does not want to hear me out; the few times I have managed to get a word in, he has waved a hand in the air as if to say that he does not believe my information."

"Knowingly or unknowingly, Gorbachev is selling the Soviet Union to the devil," Mathilde declared with great passion.

"The country is facing famine," claimed the Soviet prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, from the other end of the table. "The economy has been reduced to total chaos. Nobody wants to carry out orders. Factories have cut production because they lack raw materials. The harvest is disorganized. Tractors sit idle because there are no spare parts."

"Our beloved country is going to the dogs," agreed Valentin Varennikov, the general in charge of all Soviet ground forces. "Tax rates are so prohibitive no one can pay and remain in business. Retired workers who have devoted their lives to Communism are reduced to brewing carrot peelings because they can no longer afford tea on their miserable pensions."

Mathilde's husband slapped the table with the palm of his hand. "It's the fault of the Jews," he insisted. "They bear collective responsibility for the genocide of the Russian people."

Mathilde said, "I wholeheartedly agree with my husband—I hold the view that Jews must be forbidden to emigrate, and most especially to the Zionist entity of Israel, until a tribunal of the Russian people has had a chance to weigh their fate. After all, these Jews were born and educated here at state expense—it is only fitting that the state be compensated."

One of the foreign ministry apparatchiki, Fyodor Lomov, the great-grandson of a famous old Bolshevik who served as the first Peoples Commissar of Justice after the 1917 revolution, spoke up. "It is well known that Jewish architects designed Pushkin Square so that the great Pushkin had his back turned to the motion picture theater, the Rossiya. The symbolism escaped no one." Lomov, a bloated figure of a man with yellowish liquor stains in his snow-white goatee, added, "The zhids and Zionists are responsible for rock music, drug addiction, AIDS, food shortages, inflation, the decline in the value of the ruble, pornography on television, even the breakdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl."

As the meeting went on, the plotters (as Yevgeny began to think of them) exposed their resentments and fears. Emotions ran high; there were moments when several people were talking at once and Kryuchkov, like a teacher managing an unruly classroom, had to point to someone so the others would give way to him.

"Gorbachev deceived us into thinking he intended to tinker with the Party structure. He never let on that he intended to destroy it."

"Malicious mockery of all the institutions of the state is commonplace."

"I speak from experience—authority on all levels has lost the confidence of the population."

"The state's coffers are empty—the government is regularly late in paying military salaries and pensions."

"The Soviet Union has, in effect, become ungovernable."

"Soviet armies were humiliated by Gorbachev's decision to retreat from Afghanistan."

"The drastic cuts in the military budget, and the inability to come up with the sums that are budgeted, have left us badly positioned to deal with the Americans after their hundred-hour triumph in the Gulf War."

Kryuchkov searched the faces around the table and said, very solemnly, "The only hope is to declare a state of emergency."

"Gorbachev will never consent to a state of emergency," Paval Uritzky observed.

"In that case," Kryuchkov said, "we will have to consent to a state of emergency for him. I ask those who agree with this analysis to raise a hand." Around the table nineteen hands went up.

From the lake far below came the howling of a teenager whose boat had capsized. The other boats closed in on the boy from all directions and dragged him out of the water. One of the young girls watching from the shoreline shouted uphill, "They've got him—he's all right."

"When it comes time to launch our project," remarked Uritzky, "we must not be squeamish about people falling overboard." He arched his brows knowingly. Many around the table chuckled.

Later, when the meeting broke up and the guests began drifting toward the limousines, Kryuchkov took Yevgeny aside. "We have a mutual friend who speaks highly of you," the KGB Chairman said. "Your work in the Centre is known to me, your devotion to our cause is legendary within a closed circle of colleagues."

Yevgeny said, "I did my duty. Comrade Chairman, nothing more." Kryuchkov permitted a humorless smile onto his face. "There are fewer and fewer who use the term Comrade since Gorbachev took power." He steered Yevgeny into the bathroom and turned on the two faucets full blast. "One amongst us—a senior official responsible for the Central Committee finances—has managed over the years to move important sums of foreign currency into Germany and convert them, with the complicity of what the Germans call the Devisenbeschaffer—the currency acquirer—into dollars and gold. If we are to sideline Gorbachev and declare a state of emergency, we will need large amounts of cash to finance our movement. Once we are successful, it will be of paramount importance to immediately stock the shelves of the food and liquor stores in the major cities to demonstrate our capacity to bring order out of Gorbachev's chaos—we'll reduce the prices of staples, and most especially of vodka. We'll also send out back pension checks to retired people who haven't been paid in months. To accomplish this will require an immediate infusion of capital."

Yevgeny nodded. "I am beginning to understand why I was invited—"

"Your Greater Russian Bank of Commerce has a branch in Germany, I am told."

"Two, in fact. One in Berlin, one in Dresden."

"I ask you bluntly—can we count on your help, Comrade?"

Yevgeny nodded vigorously. "I have not fought for Communism my entire life to see it humiliated by a reformer who is manipulated by the Principal Adversary."

Kryuchkov gripped Yevgeny's hand in both of his and, gazing deep into his eyes, held it for a moment. "The Central Committee official responsible for finances is named Izvolsky. Nikolai Izvolsky. Commit his name to memory. He will get in touch with you in the next few days. He will act as an intermediary between you and the German Devisenbeschaffer—together you will organize the repatriation of funds through your bank. When the moment comes you will make these funds available to our cause."

"I am glad to be back in harness," Yevgeny said, "and proud to be working again with like-minded people to protect the Soviet Union from those who would dishonor it."

The day after the meeting in Perkhushovo, Yevgeny stopped off for a drink in the piano bar of the Monolith Club, a private hangout where the new elite met to trade tips on Wall Street stocks and off-shore funds. He was wondering what he had gotten himself into and agonizing over what he should do about it—somehow he had to warn Gorbachev—when an effete man with transparent eyelids and a jaw that looked as if it were made of porcelain turned up at the door. He appeared out of place in his synthetic fiber Soviet-era suit with wide lapels and baggy trousers that dragged on the floor; the regulars who frequented the club favored English flannel cut in the Italian style. Yevgeny wondered how the Homo Sovieticus, as he immediately dubbed him, had made it past the ex-wrestlers guarding the entrance. The man peered through the swirls of cigar smoke in the dimly lit bar as if he had a rendezvous with someone. When his eyes fixed on Yevgeny, sitting at a small table in a corner, his mouth fell open in recognition. He came straight across the room and said, "It is you, Y. A. Tsipin?"

"That depends on who is asking?"

"I am Izvolsky, Nikolai."

The club's young house photographer caught Yevgeny's eye and held up his scrapbook filled with portraits of Sharon Stone and Robert De Niro and Luciano Pavarotti. "Another time, Boris," Yevgeny called, waving him off. He gestured Izvolsky to a seat. "Can I offer you something?" he asked the Homo Sovieticus.

"I never touch alcohol," Izvolsky announced with a certain smugness; being a teetotaler obviously gave him a feeling of moral superiority. "A glass of tea, perhaps."

Yevgeny signalled to the waiter and mouthed the word tchai and turned back to his guest. "I was told you worked for the Central Committee—"

"We must be discreet—the walls here are said to be filled with microphones. An individual of some importance in the superstructure directed me to contact you."

A cup of tea and a china bowl filled with cubes of Italian sugar were set in front of Izvolsky. He pocketed a handful of the sugar cubes and leaned forward to blow on his tea. "I was instructed," he went on, lowering his voice, nervously stirring the spoon around in the cup, "to alert you to the existence of a German nationalist who, in the months ahead, will be depositing sizable sums of US dollars in the Dresden branch of your bank. Like many in our coterie, he is a patriot who has devoted his life to battling the great Satan, international Jewry."

"What is his name?"

"You will know him only by the German sobriquet Devisenbeschaffer— the currency acquirer."

"If you can trust me with the money, you can trust me with the identity of this Devisenbeschaffer."

"It is not a matter of trust, Comrade Tsipin. It is a matter of security."

Yevgeny accepted this with what he hoped was a professional nod.

Izvolsky retrieved a pen from the breast pocket of his jacket and carefully wrote a Moscow phone number on a cocktail napkin. "This is a private number monitored by an answering machine that I interrogate throughout the day. You have only to leave an innocuous message—suggest that I watch a certain program on television, for instance—and I will recognize your voice and contact you. For the present, you are to instruct your Dresden branch to open an account in your name. Communicate to me the number of this account. When we wish to repatriate sums that will be regularly deposited in this account, I will let you know, at which point you will transfer them to the Moscow branch office of your bank."

Izvolsky brought the cup to his lips and delicately tested the temperature of the tea. Deciding it was cool enough, he drank it off in one long swallow, as if he were quenching a thirst. "I thank you for the hospitality, Comrade Tsipin," he said. And without so much as a handshake or a goodbye, the Homo Sovieticus rose from his chair and headed for the door.

Leo Kritzky listened intently as Yevgeny described the visit to Starik in the clinic; the mention of a coded phrase that would put him in touch with a group organizing an "end game," the meeting of the conspirators in Perkhushovo. "I didn't take Starik seriously," Yevgeny admitted. "I thought he was ranting—all that talk about Jews and purification and starting over again. But I was wrong. He hangs onto life by a thread—in his case an intravenous drip into a catheter planted under the skin of his chest—and devises schemes."

Leo whistled through his teeth. "This is a bombshell of a story that you're telling me."

Yevgeny had phoned Leo's number from a public booth late the previous evening to organize a rendezvous. "I could leave a tic-tac-toe code chalked on your elevator door," he had said with a conspiratorial chuckle, "but it would take too long. I must see you tomorrow. In the morning, if possible."

The mention of the coded tic-tac-toe messages identifying meeting places in the Washington area awakened in Leo enigmatic emotions—it transported him back to what now seemed like a previous incarnation, when the dread of tripping up imparted to everyday activities an adrenalin kick that retirement in Moscow lacked. He had agreed at once to the meeting. Yevgeny had said he would start out from the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Kremlin wall and stroll south, and named an hour. Leo immediately understood the implications of the outdoor meeting: Yevgeny wanted to be sure whatever he had to say wouldn't be recorded.

Now the two men drifted past a bank of outdoor flower stalls and, further along, a group of English sightseers listening to an Intourist guide describe how Czar Ivan IV, known as "The Terrible," had murdered his son and heir, as well as several of his seven wives. "A fun guy!" one of the tourists quipped. "I'm not sure I understand you," the Intourist guide replied in puzzlement.

"So what do you make of it all?" Leo asked when they were alone again.

"The meeting I attended was not a discussion group," Yevgeny said. "Kryuchkov is plotting to take power. He is a meticulous man and is slowly tightening the noose around Gorbachev's neck."

"Your list of plotters reads like a who's who of Gorbachev's inner circle. Defense Minister Yazov, the press baron Uritzky, Interior Minister Pugo, Soviet ground forces chief Varennikov, Lomov from the foreign ministry, Supreme Soviet Chairman Lukyanov, Prime Minister Pavlov."

"Don't forget Yevgeny Tsipin," Yevgeny said with a anxious grin.

"They want to use your bank to bring in enormous sums of money from Germany to finance the putsch—"

"As well as stock the empty shelves in the food and liquor stores and send out pension checks. The plotters are shrewd, Leo. If they can take over quickly, with little or no bloodshed, and buy off the masses with cosmetic improvements, they can probably get away with it."

Leo looked at his friend. "Whose side are we on?" he asked, half in jest.

Yevgeny smiled grimly. "We haven't changed sides. We're for the forces that promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit, we're against right-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism and those who would obstruct the democratic reforms in Russia. In short, we're on the side of Gorbachev."

"What do you expect me to do?"

Yevgeny tucked his arm under Leo's elbow. "There is a possibility that I may be watched by Kryuchkov's henchmen—Yuri Sukhanov, the boss of the KGB's Ninth Chief Directorate, the division responsible for Gorbachev's security, attended the Perkhushovo meeting. The Ninth Directorate has plenty of warm bodies available. My phone could be tapped. The people I employ may be bought off and report on my activities."

Leo saw where the conversation was going. "All those years you acted as my cutout. Now you want to flip the coin—you want me to act as your cutout."

"You will be freer—"

"They could be watching us right now," Leo said.

"I drove myself into the city and took some tradecraft precautions before I showed up at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

"Okay. Let's assume I am freer. Freer to do what?"

"For starters, I think you should pass on what I told you—the account of the secret meeting at Perkhushovo, the list of those who attended—to your former friends at the CIA."

"You could accomplish the same thing with an anonymous letter to the Company station in Moscow—"

"We must work on the assumption that the KGB has penetrated the station. If the Americans discuss the letter and their comments are picked up by microphones, it could lead, by a process of elimination, back to me. No, someone should take the story directly to the Company brass in Washington. Logically, that someone has to be you. They'll believe you, Leo. And if they believe you they may be able to convince Gorbachev to clean house, to arrest the conspirators. The CIA has a long arm—they may be able to act behind the scenes to thwart the conspiracy."

Leo scratched at an ear, weighing Yevgeny's suggestion.

"Obviously you can't let them know where your information comes from," Yevgeny added. "Tell them only that you have a mole inside the conspiracy."

"Say I buy your idea. That doesn't exclude your trying to get word to Gorbachev directly—"

"I'm a jump ahead of you, Leo. I know one person I can trust—someone who is close to Yeltsin. I'll see what I can accomplish through her."

The two men stopped walking and stood facing each other for a moment. "I thought the game was over," Leo said.

"It never ends," Yevgeny said.

"Be careful, for God's sake."

Yevgeny nodded. "It would be too ridiculous to survive America and get knocked off in Russia."

Leo nodded in agreement. "Too ridiculous and too ironic."

The auditorium, a drafty factory hall where workers had once dozed through obligatory lectures on the abiding advantages of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was jam-packed. Students sat cross-legged in the aisles or stood along the walls. On a low stage, under a single overhead spotlight, a tall slender woman, whose no-nonsense short dark hair was tucked behind her ears, spoke earnestly into a microphone. Her melodious voice made her sound younger than her fifty-nine years. And she pulled off the orator's hat trick: she managed to convey emotion by playing with the spaces between the words. "When they heard about my index cards," she was saying, "when they discovered that I was collecting the names of Stalin's victims, they hauled me into a overheated room in the Lubyanka and let me know that I was flirting with a prison sentence... or worse. That took place in 1956. Afterward, I learned that I had been branded an SDE. It is a badge I wear with pride—I am, from the point of view of the Communist regime, a Socially Dangerous Element. Why? Because my project of documenting Stalin's crimes—I now have more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand index cards and I've only scratched the surface—threatened to return history to its proper owners, which is to say, return it to the people. When the Communists lose control of history, their party—to borrow Trotsky's expression—will be swept into the dustbin of history."

There was loud applause from the audience. Many of those sitting on the folding chairs stomped on the floor in unison. When the noise subsided the speaker forged on.

"Mikhail Gorbachev has been a leading force behind the return of history to the people—no easy task considering that we, as a nation, never experienced a Reformation, a Renaissance, an Enlightenment. Since Gorbachev came to power in 1985, our television has aired documentaries about Stalin's brutal collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s, the ruthless purge trials in the mid-1930s, along with details of the millions who were purged without trials, who were summarily executed with a bullet in the neck or sent off to the Gulag camps in Kolyma, Vorkuta and Kazakhastan."

The speaker paused to take a sip of water. In the auditorium there was dead silence. She set down the glass and looked up and, surveying the faces in the audience, continued in an even quieter voice. The students leaned forward to catch her words.

"All that is the positive side of Gorbachev's governance. There is a negative side, too. Gorbachev, like many reformers, has no stomach for what Solzhenitsyn termed the work in the final inch; he is afraid to follow where logic and common sense and an impartial examination of history would lead. Gorbachev argues that Stalin was an aberration—a deviation from the Leninist norm. Chepukha!—rubbish! When are we going to admit that it was Lenin who was the genius of state terror. In 1918, when the Bolsheviks lost the election, he shut down the democratically elected Constitutional Assembly. In 1921 he systematically began liquidating the opposition, first outside the party, eventually inside the party. What he created, under the sophism dictatorship of the proletariat, was a party devoted to the eradication of dissent and the physical destruction of the dissenters. It was this Leninist model that Stalin inherited." The woman's voice grew even fainter; in the audience people barely breathed. "It was a system which beat prisoners so badly that they had to be carried on stretchers to the firing squads. It was a system that broke Meyerhold's left arm and then forced him to sign a confession with his right. It was a system that sent Osip Mandelstam to the frozen wastelands of Siberia for the crime of writing, and then reading aloud, a poem about Stalin that fell far short of being an encomium. It was a system that murdered my mother and my father and carted off their bodies, along with the nine hundred and ninety-eight others who were executed that day, to the Donskoi Monastery for cremation. I have been told you could often see dogs in the neighborhood fighting over the human bones that they had scratched out of the fields around the monastery." The speaker looked away to collect herself. "I myself have never gained access to the spetskhran—the special shelves in the Soviet archives where secret dossiers are stored. But I have reason to believe there are somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen million files in the archives dealing with arrests and executions. Solzhenitsyn estimates that sixty million—that is a sixty with six zeroes dragging after it like a crocodile's tail—sixty million people were victims of Stalinism."

The woman managed a valiant smile. "My dear friends, we have our work cut out for us."

There was a moment of silence before the storm of applause broke over the auditorium. The woman shrank back, as if buffeted by the ovation that soon turned into a rhythmic foot-pounding roar of admiration. Eager supporters surrounded her and it was well after eleven before the last few turned to leave. As the speaker collected her notes and slipped them into a tattered plastic briefcase, Yevgeny made his way from the shadows at the back of the auditorium down the center aisle. Expecting more questions, the woman raised her eyes—and froze.

"Please excuse me for turning up suddenly—" Yevgeny swallowed hard and started over again. "If you consent to talk with me you will understand that it might have been dangerous for me, and for you also, if I had phoned you at your home. Which is why I took the liberty—"

"How many years has it been?" she inquired, her voice reduced to a fierce whisper.

"It was yesterday," Yevgeny replied with feeling. "I was catnapping under a tree in the garden of my father's dacha at Peredelkino. You woke me—your voice was as musical yesterday as it is today—with a statement in very precise English: I dislike summer so very much. You asked me what I thought of the novels of E. Hemingway and F. Fitzgerald."

He climbed onto the stage and stepped closer to her. She shrank back, intimidated by the intensity in his eyes. "Once again you take my breath away, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," she confessed. "How long have you been back in the country?"

"Six years."

"Why did it take you six years to approach me?"

"The last time we spoke—I called you from a pay phone—you gave me to understand that it would be better, for you at least, if we never met again."

"And what has happened to make you ignore this injunction?"

"I saw articles about you in the newspapers—I saw an interview with you and Academician Sakharov on the television program Vzglyad—I know that you are close to Yeltsin, that you are one of his aides. That is what made me ignore your injunction. I have crucial information that must reach Yeltsin, and through him, Gorbachev."

At the door of the auditorium a janitor called, "Gospodina Lebowitz, I must lock up for the night."

Yevgeny said, with some urgency, "Please. I have an automobile parked down the street. Let me take you someplace where we can talk. I can promise you, you will not regret it. I am not overstating things when I say that the fare of Gorbachev and the democratic reformation could depend on your hearing me out."

Azalia Isanova nodded carefully. "I will go with you."

Midnight came and went but the bull session in the Sparrow, a coffeehouse downhill from Lomonosov University on the Sparrow Hills (lately residents had taken to calling the area, known as Lenin Hills, by its pre-revolutionary name), showed no sign of flagging. "Capitalist systems have been transformed into Socialist systems but not visa versa," argued a serious young man with long sideburns and a suggestion of a beard. "There are no textbooks on the subject, which is why we need to proceed cautiously."

"We're writing the textbook," insisted the girl sitting across from him.

"It's like swimming in a lake," another girl said. "Of course you can go in slowly but the pain lasts longer. The trick is to dive in and get it over with."

"People who dive into icy lakes have been known to die of heart attacks," a boy with thick eyeglasses pointed out.

"If Socialism dies of a heart attack," the first boy quipped, "who will volunteer to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?"

"Not me," the girls shot back in chorus.

"Another round of coffee," one of the boys called to the waiter, who was reading a worn copy of Newsweek behind the cash register.

"Five Americans, coming up," he called back.

At a small round table near the plate-glass window, Aza mulled over what Yevgeny had just told her. On the avenue outside, the traffic was still thick and the throaty murmur of car motors made it sound as if the city were moaning. "You are certain that Yazov was there?" Aza demanded. "It really would be a stab in the back—Gorbachev plucked him out of nowhere to be Minister of Defense."

"I am absolutely sure—I recognized him from pictures in the newspapers even before someone addressed him as Minister."

"And Oleg Baklanov, the head of the military-industrial complex? And Oleg Shenin from the Politburo?"

"Baklanov introduced himself to me in the dacha before we all trooped out to the lawn for the meeting. He is the one who pointed Shenin out to me."

Aza reread the list of names she had jotted on the back of an envelope. "It is terribly frightening. We knew, it goes without saying, that trouble was coming. Kryuchkov and his KGB friends have not made a secret of their opinion of Gorbachev. But we never anticipated a plot would attract so many powerful people." She looked up and studied Yevgeny, as if she were seeing him for the first time. "They were very sure you would be sympathetic to their cause—"

"I worked for the KGB abroad. They assume that anyone with KGB credentials must be against reforms and for a restoration of the old order. Besides, almost all of the people who have set up private banks are gangsters without any political orientation other than pure greed. The conspirators need someone they can trust to repatriate the money in Germany. And I came highly recommended—"

"Who recommended you?"

"Someone whose name is a legend in KGB circles but would mean nothing to you."

"You are very courageous to come to me. If they were to discover your identity—"

"It is for that reason that I don't want anyone, including Boris Yeltsin, to know the source of your information."

"Not knowing the source will detract from its credibility."

"You must say only that it comes from someone you have known a long time and trust." Yevgeny smiled. "After how I deceived you, do you trust me, Aza?"

She considered the question. Then, almost reluctantly, she nodded. "From the start you have always made me hope—and then you have dashed my hopes. I am afraid to hope again. And yet—"

"And yet?"

"Are you familiar with the American title of Nadezhda Mandelstam's book about her husband, Osip? Hope Against Hope. If I were to write a book about my life, it would also be an appropriate title. I am a sucker for hope."

Yevgeny turned over the check and glanced at the amount and started counting out rubles. "I will not drive you home—we must not risk being seen together. You remember the formula for meeting me?"

"You will ring my number at home or at work and ask to speak to someone with a name that has the letter z in it. I will say there is nobody by that name at this number. You will apologize and hang down. Exactly one hour and fifteen minutes after your call I am to walk west along the north side of the Novy Arbat. At some point a gypsy taxicab will pull up, the driver will wind down the window and ask if I want a ride. We will haggle for a moment over the price. Then I will get into the back seat. You will be the driver of the taxi."

"Each time we meet I will give you a formula for the next meeting. We must vary these signals and meeting places."

"I can see that you have had experience in these matters."

"You could say that I am a maestro when it comes to such things."

Aza said, "There are parts of you I have not yet visited, Yevgeny Alexandrovich." She sensed that the conversation had turned too solemn and attempted to lighten it. "I'll bet you wowed the girls when you were a young man."

"I never had a childhood sweetheart, if that's what you mean."

"I never had a childhood."

"Perhaps when all this is over—"

Blushing, she raised a hand to stop him before he could finish the sentence.

He smiled. "Like you, I hope against hope."

Boris Yeltsin, a hulking man with heavy jowls and a shock of gray hair spilling off his scalp, was on congenial territory; he liked giving interviews because it permitted him to talk about his favorite subject: himself. "The first thing journalists always ask me," he told the London reporter, fixing her with a steely stare, "is how I lost the fingers." He raised his left hand and wiggled the stumps of his pinkie and the finger next to it. "It happened in 1942, when I was eleven," he went on. "Along with some friends, I tunneled under the barbed wire and broke into a church that was being used to store ammunition. We came across a wooden box filled with grenades and took several of them to the forest, and like an idiot I tried to open one with a hammer to see what was inside. The thing blew up, mangling my hand. When gangrene set in the surgeons had to amputate two of my fingers."

Yeltsin spoke Russian with a slurred drawl and the British reporter didn't catch every word. "Why did he want to open the grenade?" she asked Aza, who spoke excellent English and often acted as Yeltsins informal translator.

"To see what was in it," she said.

"That's what I thought he said but it sounded so silly." The journalist turned back to Yeltsin. "Is the story about you being baptized true?"

Yeltsin, sitting behind an enormous desk on the third floor of the White House, the massive Russian parliament building next to the Moscow River, shot a quick look of puzzlement in Aza's direction; he had difficulty understanding Russian when it was spoken with a British accent. Aza translated the question into a Russian that Yeltsin could grasp. He laughed out loud. "It is true I was baptized," he said. "The priest was so drunk he dropped me into the holy water." Yeltsin hefted the bottle of vodka to see if the journalist wanted a refill. When she shook her head no, he refilled his own glass and downed half of it in one gulp. "My parents pulled me out and dried me off and the priest said, "If he can survive that he can survive anything. I baptize him Boris."

The interview went on for another half-hour. Yeltsin walked the journalist through his childhood in the Sverdlovsk region ("All six of us slept in one room, along with the goat"), his rise through the ranks of the apparatchiki to become the commissar in charge of Sverdlovsk and eventually the Party boss of Moscow. He described his break with Gorbachev three years before. "I had just visited America," he recounted. "They took me to a Safeway supermarket and I prowled through the aisles in a daze. I could barely believe my eyes—there were endless shelves stocked with an endless variety of products. I am not ashamed to say that I broke into tears. It struck me that all of our ideology hadn't managed to fill our shelves. You have to remember we were in the early days of perestroika and our Communist Party was above criticism. But I stood up at one of the Central Committee meetings and I did precisely that—I criticized the Party, I said we'd gotten it wrong, I criticized Gorbachev's reforms as being inadequate, I suggested that he ought to step down and transfer power to the collective rule of the republican leaders. Gorbachev turned white with rage. For me it was the beginning of the end of my relationship with him. He had me expelled from the Central Committee and the Politburo. All my friends saw the handwriting on the wall and abandoned me. I can tell you that I almost had a nervous breakdown. What saved me was my wife and my two daughters, Lena and Tanya, who encouraged me to fight for what I believed in. What saved me, also, was my election last year to the Russian Republic's Supreme Soviet, and my election by the Supreme Soviet to the position of President of the Russian Republic."

The London journalist, scrawling notes in a rudimentary shorthand, double-checked several details with Aza. Yeltsin, in his shirt sleeves, glanced at his wristwatch. Taking the hint, the reporter stood up and thanked Yeltsin for letting her have an hour of his precious time. Aza saw her to the door and, closing it behind her, returned to Yeltsin's desk. "Boris Nikolayevich, can I suggest that we go for a stroll in the courtyard."

Yeltsin grasped that she wanted to talk to him about something delicate. His office was swept for microphones every week but the people who did the sweeping worked for Kryuchkov's KGB, so his staffers had taken to holding important conversations in the open inner courtyard of the White House. Draping a suit jacket over his heavy shoulders, Yeltsin led Aza down the fire staircase to street level and pushed through the fire door into the courtyard. A large outdoor thermometer indicated that winter had finally broken, but after several hours in the overheated offices of the White House the air outside seemed quite crisp. Yeltsin drew the jacket up around his thick neck; Aza pulled her Uzbek shawl over her head.

"What do I need to know that you dare not tell me upstairs?" Yeltsin demanded.

"By chance I have an old acquaintance who used to work for the KGB. I believe he served abroad for a great many years. He has since become a successful entrepreneur and has opened one of those private banks that are springing up around Moscow. Because of his KGB background and the existence of his bank, he was invited by the wife of the press baron Uritzky to attend a secret meeting in a dacha at the edge of the village of Perkhushovo."

Yeltsin was one of those politicians who squirreled away a great deal of seemingly useless information—the names of the children of his collaborators, their wedding anniversaries and birthdays and name days, the location of their summer houses. He came up with an item now. "Kryuchkov has a dacha at Perkhushovo."

Aza described the meeting as Yevgeny had described it to her. Producing an envelope, she read off the list of those who had attended. She quoted Kryuchkov's We will have to consent to a state of emergency for him, and recounted how everyone present had raised their hands in agreement with this proposition.

Yeltsin stopped in his tracks and surveyed the sky as if it were possible to read in the formations of clouds clues on how the future would turn out. Moscow was overcast, as usual; it had been overcast for so long people tended to forget what sunlight looked like, or felt like on the skin. "And who is your old acquaintance?" he asked Aza, his eyes still fixed on the sky.

"He specifically forbids me to reveal his identity. And he asks you not to reveal that you received this information from me."

"I will, of course, relay the warning to Gorbachev, but if I cannot identify the source he will shrug it off as another attempt by me to drive a wedge between him and the Party loyalists."

Aza said, "But you believe my story, don't you, Boris Nikolayevich?"

Yeltsin nodded. "To tell the truth, I am somewhat surprised by the quantity, and quality, of the people aligning themselves with the putschists, but I don't doubt for a moment that Kryuchkov would oust Gorbachev if he could. You must bear in mind that Kryuchkov had a hand in planning the Red Army assault on Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. He is certainly someone who thinks in the old style—that the correct dose of force, applied in the right spot at the right moment, can stuff the genie back in the bottle." Yeltsin sighed. "The peasants in the village near Sverdlovsk, where I was raised, used to say that there are fruits which rot without ripening. When I grew older I discovered the same holds true for people. Kryuchkov is an excellent illustration of this axiom. Of course I will not mention your name when I warn Gorbachev. For your part, you must stay in touch with this acquaintance of yours who has penetrated to the heart of the conspiracy. His collaboration will be crucial in the weeks and months ahead."

The after-dinner speeches dragged on and on; Russian bureaucrats, fortified with alcohol, tended to get carried away by emotion. And the emotion that carried them away at the Kremlin state dinner honoring Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first woman in space, was nostalgia. Nostalgia, if you read between the lines, for the days when the Soviet Union was able to give the United States a run for its money; when hardware produced in the Soviet factories actually worked; when the time servers who minded the Soviet store were still looked on as an aristocracy.

"Valentina Vladimirovna," the head of the space agency declared, blotting the beads of sweat glistening on his forehead with a handkerchief, "demonstrated to the entire world what Soviet courage and Soviet technology and Soviet ideology could accomplish in the never-ending struggle to conquer space. To our guest of honor, Valentina Vladimirovna," the speaker cried, raising his glass in her direction for yet another toast.

Around the horseshoe-shaped banquet table, chairs were scraped back as the guests lunged to their feet and held aloft their own glasses. "To Valentina Vladimirovna," they cried in unison, and they gulped down the Bulgarian Champagne that had long since lost any trace of effervescence.

From her place at the bitter end of one of the wings of the table, Aza studied the ruddy face of Tereshkova, flushed from alcohol and the stuffiness of the Kremlin banquet hall. Aza was careful to merely sip her Champagne at each of the endless toasts, but her own head was growing woozy. She tried to imagine what it must have been like to suit up in a silver cosmonaut outfit and squeeze yourself into a Vostok capsule and be shot, as if from the mouth of a giant cannon, into orbit around the planet earth. Surely there were experiences that, if you survived them, changed your life; nothing could ever be the same afterward. No amount of denying the experience, no amount of trying to diminish it by putting it into some kind of perspective, could alter its effect. Perhaps it was the late hour—the great Kremlin clock had just chimed midnight—or the lack of air or the alcohol content in her blood stream, but Aza understood that the occasional intersection of her lifeline with Yevgeny's were life-altering experiences. Looking back, she could see that she had never really given her first and only husband a chance to measure up before she began talking about divorce. Measure up to what? Measure up to the epiphany that comes when soul communes with soul and the body, tagging along behind, communes with body, and the woman doesn't wind up feeling cheated.

Across the room the speeches and the toasts continued. Aza noticed Boris Yeltsin, stifling a yawn with his fist, push himself to his feet and come behind Tereshkova at the head of the table and whisper something in her ear that made her giggle with pleasure. Yeltsin patted her on the shoulder, then casually moved on to where Mikhail Gorbachev was sitting. Stooping so he could funnel words into his ear, he said something that made Gorbachev twist sharply in his seat. Yeltsin gestured with a toss of his large head. Gorbachev considered, then got up and followed him with obvious reluctance to a far corner of the banquet hall. Aza could see Yeltsin talking intently for several minutes. The General Secretary listened impassively, his head tilted to one side, his eyes almost closed. At one point Yeltsin, to emphasize a point, jabbed a forefinger several times into Gorbachev's shoulder. When Yeltsin finished Gorbachev finally opened his eyes; from her place at the end of the banquet table Aza could see that he was furious. The birthmark curling across his scalp seemed to redden and gleam. His head snapped back and forth in short jerks as he muttered a curt reply. Then he spun away abruptly and strode back to join in another toast to Tereshkova.

Yeltsin watched him go, then caught Aza's eye across the room and hunched his heavy shoulders in defeat.

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