BASEL, SATURDAY, JUNE 15, 1991

"I WASN'T SURE YOU WOULD SHOW UP."

"I almost didn't. I must have changed my mind twenty times before I booked a ticket, and another twenty times before I boarded the plane."

"Well, for what it's worth, I'm glad to see you, Jack."

Currents of moist air from the Rhone ruffled what was left of the once flamboyant mustache on Jack McAuliffe's upper lip and the strands of ash-red hair on his scalp as he sized up his companion through prescription sunglasses. Leo, clearly ill at ease in the presence of his one-time friend and former Company colleague, looked pallid and thin and dog-tired; he had been plagued by insomnia since Yevgeny alerted him to the impending putsch. Now he tugged the collar of the windbreaker up around his neck and the peaked workers cap down to his ears, and squinted at the two coxed eights skidding on their inverted reflections along the surface of the river. "I loved Crew," Jack remarked. For the space of a moment the two men, gazing at the rowers coiling and uncoiling their limbs inside the sleek sculls, were transported back to that last race on the Thames and the triumph over Harvard. "I loved the blisters and the splinters of pain where my rib had mended and broken and mended again," Jack added. "You knew you were alive."

The faint cries of the coxes counting strokes came to them on the breeze. Leo sniggered. "Coach Waltz used to say that rowing was a metaphor for life." with a wistful smile, he turned on Jack. "What a lot of crap—rowing wasn't a metaphor for life, it was a substitute. It took your mind off of it for the time you spent rowing. But as soon as you were finished, reality was waiting in ambush."

The two men resumed walking along the path that ran parallel to the Rhone. "And what was your reality, Leo?"

"Stella. Her Soviet handler who gave me my first lesson in one-time pads and dead letter drops and ordered me to stay close to Waltz because he was a talent scout for the Company."

"Did the son of a bitch actually call it the Company?"

Leo smiled grimly. "He called it glavni protivnik, which is Russian for principal adversary." He walked on for some moments in silence. Then he said, "All that's water under the bridge."

"No it's not, pal. It's not water under my bridge. Just because you sign your letter Gentleman-Ranker doesn't make you one. You're still a lousy traitor in my book and nothing's going to change that."

"When will you get it into your head that I didn't betray anybody. All along I was fighting for my side."

"Jesus H. Christ, you were fighting for Stalinism. Some side."

"Fuck you, too."

Jack wouldn't let go. "I suppose they gave you a medal when they brought you in."

"They gave me two, as a matter of fact."

The two men, close to blows, glared at each other. Jack stopped in his tracks. "Look, you asked for this meeting. You want to call it off, fine with me."

Leo was still angry. "There are things I need to pass on to you."

"Pass, buddy, and then we'll go our separate ways." Jack dropped his chin and looked at Leo over the top of his sunglasses. "You were pretty goddamn sure we wouldn't have you arrested and extradited when you showed up in Switzerland, weren't you?"

"Who are you kidding, Jack? If you ever brought me in, you'd have to explain why you didn't inform the Congressional oversight committees about me seven and a half years ago."

"You think of all the angles."

Leo shook his head. "Not all. I didn't expect that Adelle would curl up in a ditch on a hill in Maryland to sleep off a hangover."

"A bunch of us attended her funeral," Jack said.

"The twins must have been..."

"They were. Sad and bitter and embarrassed, all rolled into one." Leo's chest heaved. Jack gave an inch. "All things considered," he said, "your girls were brave troopers."

Up ahead, a street photographer positioned herself on the path and, raising a Polaroid to her eye, snapped their picture. Leo strode forward and caught the woman by the arm. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he cried.

The photographer, a thin young woman wearing torn jeans and a faded sweatshirt, angrily jerked free. Leo lunged for the camera but the woman was too quick for him. Jack rushed up and grabbed the collar on Leo's wind-breaker. "Simmer down, pal," he said. To the photographer, who was backing away from them both, he said, "How much?"

"Usually it is ten francs. For you and your crazy friend it is double."

Jack pulled a crisp bill from his wallet and, advancing slowly so as not to frighten the woman, held it out. She snatched the twenty out of his fingers, flung the snapshot at his feet and scampered off down the path. "American bastards," she shouted over a shoulder. "Yankee pricks."

Jack retrieved the photograph and looked at it. Leo said, "Burn it."

"I have another idea," Jack said. He produced a pen and wrote across the faces on the picture, Jack and Leo before The Race but after The Fall, and handed it to Leo.

Leo remembered the original only too well. "Another memento of our friendship," he said sarcastically.

"Our friendship ended long ago," Jack shot back. "This is a memento of our last meeting."

The two of them entered a cafe and made their way to the glassed-in veranda cantilevered over the river. Jack draped his safari jacket over the back of a chair and sat down facing Leo across a small table. He ordered an American coffee, Leo a double espresso. After the coffees arrived Jack waited until the waitress was out of earshot, then announced, "Time to get down to the famous brass tacks."

Leaning over the table, his voice pitched low, Leo said, "I have reason to believe—" and he went on to tell Jack about the plot being hatched against Gorbachev.

When Leo finished, Jack sank back into his chair and stared sightlessly at the river. "To know what you know, to name the names you name, you must have a source inside the conspiracy," he finally said.

Leo shrugged noncommittally.

"I take it you won't identify him."

"Or her."

Jack bristled. "Don't play games with me, Leo."

"I'm not playing games. I have a source but the CIA is the last organization I'd confide in. The KGB had you penetrated in my day. For all I know it still does. And the head of the KGB is masterminding the plot."

"What do you expect me to do with this information? Go to the New York Times and say that a guy I know has a guy he knows who says Moscow is heading for the waterfall in a barrel. Fat chance."

"For starters we thought—"

"We?"

"I thought you could warn the President, and the President could warn Gorbachev. Coming from George Bush, the word that there is a putsch afoot might impress him."

"You ought to be able to get word to Gorbachev inside Russia."

"Yeltsin has been warning him in a very general way for months. I've been told that he has now warned him in a very specific way, which is to say he's described meetings and named names. The trouble is that if Yeltsin told Gorbachev it was nighttime, he'd assume he was lying and it was really daytime." Leo turned his espresso cup round and round in its saucer. "Am I wrong in assuming that the United States has a vested interest in seeing Gorbachev stay in power?"

"This is a side of you I'm not familiar with—looking out for the vested interests of the United States."

Leo kept a rein on his temper. "Answer the question."

"The answer is evident. We prefer Gorbachev to Yeltsin, and Yeltsin to Kryuchkov and his KGB chums."

"Then do something about it, dammit."

"Aside from warning Gorbachev I don't see what we can do. Unlike the folks you worked for we don't knock off people."

"What about Salvador Allende in Chile? What about General Abdul Karim Kassem in Iraq?"

"Those days are over," Jack insisted.

"They don't have to be. When the Company wanted to eliminate Castro, it brought in the Sorcerer and he farmed the contract out to freelancers outside the Company. This is important, Jack—a lot is hanging on it."

"The Sorcerer is drinking himself into a grave in East of Eden Gardens." He spotted the puzzled narrowing of Leo's eyes. "That's a retirement village in Santa Fe."

Leo sipped his espresso; he didn't appear to notice that it had grown cold. "What about the Devisenbeschaffer? If the putschists don't get Gorbachev on the first try, they'll still have the bankroll in Dresden. They can cause a lot of pain with that amount of money."

Jack brightened. He obviously had an idea. "Okay, I'll see what I can concoct. Give me a meeting place in Moscow. Let's say six P.M. local time one week from today."

"I won't talk to anyone from your Moscow Station—the embassy is riddled with microphones."

"I was thinking more along the lines of sending in someone from the outside."

"Does the person know Moscow?"

"No."

Leo thought a moment, then named a place that anybody ought to be able to find.

Jack and Leo stood up. Jack glanced at the bill tucked under the ash tray and dropped five francs onto the table. Once outside the cafe, both men looked at the river. The sculls were gone; only a gray skiff with two fishermen in it was visible on the gray surface of the water. Leo held out a hand. Jack looked down at it and slowly shook his head. "There's no way I'm going to shake your hand, pal. Not now. Not ever."

The two men eyed each other. Leo said softly, "I'm still sorry, Jack. About our friendship. But not about what I did." With that he turned on his heel and stalked off.

His shoes propped up on the desk, one thumb hooked under a striped suspender, Ebby heard Jack out. Then he thought about what he'd said. Then he asked, "You believe him?"

"Yeah, I do."

The DCI needed to be convinced. "To our everlasting grief, he's demonstrated his ability to deceive us," he reminded his deputy.

"I don't see what he'd have to gain," Jack said. "He used to work for the KGB—he still may be carried on their books in some sort of advisory capacity. That's what happened to Philby after he fled to Moscow. So it's hard to see why he'd tell us about a KGB plot to oust Gorbachev unless..."

The green phone on Ebby's desk rang. He raised a palm to apologize for the interruption and, picking it up, listened for a moment. "The answer is no," he said. "If a Soviet Oskar-II sub had sortied from Murmansk into the Barents, we would have picked up its signature on our underwater monitors... No way, Charlie—the Barents is a shallow sea so there'd be no possibility of running deep... Anytime. Bye." Ebby looked up. "Pentagon received a report that a Norwegian fishing boat saw a submarine snorkel in the Barents yesterday." He picked up the thread of the conversation. "You don't see why Kritzky would tell us about a KGB plot to oust Gorbachev unless what?"

"I racked my brain for possible motives for hours on the plane home," Jack said. "Here's my reading of Leo Kritzky: in part because of his roots, in part because of what happened to his father, in part because of that eternal chip on his shoulder, he was taken in, like a lot of others, by the Utopian rhetoric of Marxism and enlisted in the struggle against capitalism out of a kind of misplaced idealism. His problems began when he reached the Soviet motherland and discovered that it was more of a hell-hole than a workers' paradise. You can imagine his disenchantment—all those years on the firing line, all those betrayals, and for what? To support a Stalinist dictatorship, even if Stalin was no longer alive, that babbled endlessly about equality and then quietly and quickly silenced anyone who suggested that the king was parading through the streets in ratty underwear."

"So the bottom line is that Kritzky feels guilty. That's what you're saying?"

"He feels betrayed, even if he doesn't put it into so many words. And Gorbachev is the last, best hope that he may have been fighting all his life for something worthwhile after all."

"In other words, Kritzky's telling the truth."

"For sure."

"Could the conspirators have taken him into their confidence—is that how he knows what he knows?"

"Not likely. First off, Leo was a KGB agent but the chances are good that, like Philby before him, he was never a KGB officer, which means he was never an insider."

"And he is a foreigner."

"And he is a foreigner, right. In the back of their minds the KGB people must be haunted by the possibility that he might have been turned."

"Who's feeding Kritzky the information on the conspiracy, then?"

"Search me," Jack said. "We can assume that it's someone who trusts him with his life."

"All right. We have true information. I take it to George Bush and I say, Mr. President, there's a putsch being hatched against Gorbachev. Here are the names of some of the plotters. Bush was a director of the CIA back in the seventies, so he knows enough not to ask me how we got our hands on this stuff. He knows I wouldn't tell him if he did ask. If he believes it—a big if—the best he can do is to write a letter to Gorbachev. Dear Mikhail, some information fell into my lap that I want to share with you. Blah-blah-blah. Signed, Your friend, George B." Ebby swung his feet to the ground and pushed himself off the swivel seat and came around to settle onto the edge of desk. "See anything else we can do, Jack?"

Jack avoided his friend's eye. "Frankly, I don't, Ebby. Like you always say, we more or less have our hands tied."

Jack checked the little black notebook that he always kept on his person, then pulled the secure phone across the desk and dialed a number. He reached a switchboard that put him through to the clubhouse. The bartender asked him to wait a minute. It turned out to be a long minute, which meant that the Sorcerer had been drinking heavily. When he finally came on the line, his speech was slurred. "Don'tcha know better than to interrupt someone while he's communing with spirits?" he demanded belligerently.

"I'll bet I can give you the brand name of the spirits," Jack retorted.

"Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle! If it isn't the man his-self, Once-down-is-no-battle McAuliffe! What's up, sport? Is the Sorcerer's Apprentice in over his head again? Need the old Sorcerer to pitch you a lifesaver?"

"You got something to write with, Harvey?"

Jack could hear the Sorcerer belch, then ask the bartender for a pen. "Shoot," Torriti bellowed into the phone.

"What are you writing on?"

"The palm of my hand, chum."

Jack gave him the number of his secure line and then had Torriti read it back. Miraculously, he got it the first time.

"Can you get to a pay phone in Santa Fe?"

"Can I get to a pay phone in Santa Fe?"

"Why are you repeating the question, Harvey?"

"Matter of being sure I have it right."

"Okay, drink a thermos of strong coffee, take a cold shower, when you're dead sober find a pay phone and call this number."

"What's in it for yours truly?"

"A break from the drudgery of retirement. A chance to get even."

"Even with who?"

"Even with the bad guys, Harvey, for all the shit they threw at you over the years."

"I'm your man, sport."

"Figured you would be, Harv."

It was already dark out by the time Jack and Millie picked up Jack's car in the underground garage at Langley and drove over (running two red lights) to Doctors Hospital off 20th Street. Anthony, all smiles, was waiting for them in the lobby, a dozen long-stemmed red roses in one hand and a box of cigars in the other. "It's a boy," he blurted out. "Six pounds on the nose. We're arguing about whether to call it Emir after her father or Leon after my...well, my godfather."

"The baby's not an it," Millie said. "How's Maria?"

"Tired but thrilled," Anthony said, leading them toward the staircase. "Oh God, she was absolutely fantastic. We did the Lamaze thing until the end. The doctor offered her a spinal but she said no thanks. The baby came out wide awake and took one look at the world and burst into tears. Maybe he was trying to tell us something, huh, Dad?"

"The laughter will come," Jack promised.

Maria, now a network anchorwoman, was sitting up in bed breast-feeding. Millie and Maria tried to figure out which of the baby's features had been inherited from the mother's side of the family and which from the father's. Anthony claimed that the only person the baby resembled was Winston Churchill. Jack, a bit flustered at the sight of a woman openly breast-feeding an infant, made a tactical retreat to the corridor to light up one of his son's cigars. Anthony joined him.

"How are things at your shop?" Jack asked his son.

The State Department, impressed by Anthony's experiences in Afghanistan, had lured him away from the Company three years before to run a hush-hush operation that kept track of Islamic terrorist groups. "The White House is worried sick about Saddam Hussein," he said.

"In my shop we're walking a tightrope on this one," Jack said. "Nobody quite knows what we're supposed to be doing about Saddam, and we're not getting guidance from State or the White House."

"It figures," Anthony said. "They'd like to get rid of him, but they're afraid that Iraq will break apart without him, leaving the Iranian fundamentalists with a free hand in the region." Anthony looked curiously at his father. "Were you out of town at the beginning of the week, Dad? I tried to call you a few times to tell you about the countdown but your secretary handed me the standard He's away from his desk at the moment routine, and you never called back."

"I had to jump to Switzerland to see a guy."

"Uh-huh."

"What does un-huh mean?"

"It means I'm not about to ask any more questions."

Jack had to smile. "I'll answer one of them—but you have to keep it under your hat. Even from Maria. Come to think of it, especially from Maria. The last thing we need is for some journalist to nose around trying to sniff out a story."

Anthony laughed. "I am a tomb. Whatever you tell me goes to the grave with me."

Jack lowered his voice. "I went to Switzerland to meet your godfather."

Anthony's eyes opened wide. "You saw Leo? Why? Who initiated the meeting? How did you know where to find him? What did he have to say? How is he? What kind of life does he lead?"

"Whoa," Jack said. "Simmer down. I only wanted to tell you that he is alive and more or less well. I know how attached you were to him."

An attendant pushing a laundry cart came down the hallway. "This here is a no smoking zone," he said. "Whole hospital is, actually. You have to go outside to smoke."

"Oh, sorry," Jack said, and he stubbed out the cigar on the sole of his shoe and then slipped it back into its wrapper so he could smoke it later.

Anthony asked, "How did Leo get out of Russia?"

"Don't know. He could have gone out to Sofia or Prague, say, on his Russian passport, and then flown to Switzerland on a phony Western passport—they're a dime a dozen in Moscow these days."

"Which means he didn't want the KGB to know he was meeting you."

"You're one jump ahead of me, Anthony."

"In my experience, Dad, whenever I reach someplace interesting, you've already been there."

"Flattery will get you everywhere."

"Are you going to see him again?"

"No."

"Never?"

"Never."

"Did he... express any regrets?"

"He's sorry about Adelle. He's sorry about not seeing the twins." Jack took off his eyeglasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and middle finger. "I suspect he's sorry he spent thirty years of his life fighting for the wrong side."

"Did he say something to make you think that?"

Jack put his glasses back on. "No."

"So how do you know it?"

"You can't live in the Soviet Union—especially after having lived in the Unites States—and not realize it's the wrong side."

Anthony looked hard at his father; he could see the pain in his eyes. "He hurt you a lot, didn't he?"

"He was my coxswain when I crewed at Yale. He was my best friend then and afterward. He was the best man at my wedding and the godfather of my son. What the hell—I loved the guy, Anthony. And I hate him for betraying the bond that was between us, not to mention his country."

Anthony gripped his father's arm hard, then did something he hadn't done since childhood. He leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. "I was attached to Leo," he said quietly. "But I love you. Dad. You are one great guy."

Jack was rattled. "Jesus H. Christ."

"You can say that again," Anthony agreed.

Laughing under his breath, Jack did. "Jesus H. Christ."

Walking with the aid of two canes, his bad hip thrusting forward and around and back with each painful step, Ezra Ben Ezra, known to various intelligence services as the Rabbi, approached the fence. Harvey Torriti ambled up behind him and the two stood there inspecting the bombed-out ruins of the Fravenkirche, the Church of Our Lady. "Fire and brimstone was the malediction of Dresden," the Rabbi mused. "The city was burned to the ground in fourteen hundred something, again during the seven year war in seventeen hundred something, then Napoleon had a go at it in eighteen hundred something. In February of '44 the allies transformed the city into a burning fiery furnace with their fire bombs. The Germans, being German, built everything in Dresden back up after the war except this church. This they left as a reminder."

"So what does a Jew feel when he looks at the reminder?" the Sorcerer asked his old comrade-in-arms.

Leaning on his canes, the Rabbi considered the question. "Glee is what he feels. Ha! You expected remorse, maybe. Or worse, forgiveness. The reminder reminds me of the six million who perished in German death camps. The reminder reminds me of the churches that did nothing to stop the killing factories. You see before you a man weighted down with more than bad hips, Harvey. I travel with baggage. It's called the Torah. In it there is a formula that instructs victims on how to survive emotionally. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a burning for a burning."

Ben Ezra cranked his body into a hundred and eighty degree turn and started toward the black Mercedes that was circled by Mossad agents busily scrutinizing the rooftops across the street. Torriti winced as he watched his friend struggling with the canes. "I'm sorry to see you in such pain," he said.

"The physical pain is nothing compared to the mental. How many people you know live in a country that may not exist in fifty years? Genug shoyn!—enough already! What am I doing here?"

"You're here," the Sorcerer said, "because Israel is getting some fifteen thousand Jews out of the Soviet Union every month. You're here because you don't want this emigration and immigration to dry up. Which it would if Gorbachev is kicked out by a gang of right-wing nationalist thugs, some of whom happen to be anti-Semites to boot."

Torriti walked the Rabbi through the details of the plot to oust Gorbachev. From time to time Ben Ezra interrupted with pointed questions. Why wasn't the CIA approaching the Mossad on a service-to-service basis? What should the Rabbi read into the fact that the Sorcerer, languishing in spirituous retirement, had been summoned back to the wars? Was the Company, or an element inside it, contemplating an operation that was outside the CIA's charter?

"Ha!" snorted Ben Ezra. "I thought so—how far outside?"

The two men reached the limousine and the Rabbi, with considerable difficulty, managed to lower his buttocks onto the rear seat and then swing his legs in, one after the other. The Sorcerer went around to the other side and, wheezing from the exertion, maneuvered his carcass in alongside Ben Ezra. The Mossad agents remained outside, their backs turned to the car, sizing up through opaque sunglasses the people and cars passing on the avenue.

The Rabbi (only months away from retirement; his successor as head of the Mossad had already been designated) sighed. "They are scraping the bottom of the barrel when they recruit us."

"The alcohol at the bottom of the barrel is the most potent," Torriti pointed out.

"Correct me where I have gone wrong," the Rabbi said. "You want us to identify and eventually neutralize a German national known to you only as Devisenbeschaffer.

"For starters, yeah."

"You want us to somehow get a foot in the door of the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce in order to take possession of the assets the Devisenbeschaffer may have deposited there."

"There's a pretty penny in the bank," Torriti said.

"What do you call a pretty penny?"

"Somewhere between three hundred and five hundred million, give or take."

"Dollars?"

"Would I have come out of retirement for yen?"

The Rabbi didn't blink. "If I succeed in looting the bank we will split the money fifty-fifty, my share going into a fund to finance the continuing immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel via Austria, your share to be deposited in a series of secret Swiss accounts, the numbers of which will be supplied in due time."

One of the Mossad agents rapped his knuckles on the window, pointed to his wristwatch and said something in Hebrew. Ben Ezra wagged a fatherly finger at him. The agent turned away in frustration and barked into a tiny microphone on the inside of his right wrist. "This new generation—they are too impatient," Ben Ezra told Torriti. "They confuse motion with movement. In my day I used to stake out houses in Berlin for weeks on end in the hope of catching a glimpse—a mere glimpse, Harvey, nothing more—of a German on Israel's ten most wanted list. Where were we?"

"We are where we always were, my friend," Torriti said with a gruff laugh. "We're trying to figure out how to save the world from itself. There's one more thing you can do for me, Ezra."

"You have arrived at what Americans call your last but by no means least," the Rabbi guessed.

"I hear on the grapevine that there's an underworld in Moscow—a sort of Russian mafia. If it's anything like the mafia in America, which is to say if it's an equal opportunity employer, some of them have got to be Jewish. I figure you could put me in touch with one."

"Exactly what are you're looking for, Harvey?"

"I'm looking for a Russian gangster of Jewish persuasion who is connected with other Russian gangsters who are not afraid of getting their hands dirty."

"Dirty as in dirty or dirty as in bloody?"

"Dirty as in bloody."

The Rabbi attempted to shift his weight on the seat. Grimacing in pain, he murmured, "It is Berlin 1951 redux, Harvey." He tapped a ring against the window to get the attention of the bodyguards and motioned for them to come aboard. "Once again we are neighbors with a common ground— your ceiling is my floor."

After a lifetime of battling against the evil empire from the cortex, Harvey Torriti had finally slipped across the frontier into the heart of darkness. Only just arrived from the airport, he was determined to discover the Russian macrocosm by inspecting the Russian microcosm: in this case, room 505 in one of Moscow's Stalin Gothic monstrosities, the thousand-room Hotel Ukraine on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Room service (if that was the correct job description for the harassed lady who turned up at the door) had finally gotten around to delivering the bottle of Scotch ordered an hour and a quarter earlier. (The frazzled waitress had forgotten ice but the Sorcerer—passing himself off as a pleasantly inebriated John Deere salesman from Moline, Illinois named T. Harvey—told her to forget it; he had visions of her returning with a block of ice in the middle of the night.) He carefully filled a cracked tumbler just shy of overflowing and, wetting his whistle, began his survey of Socialism in the bathroom.

The toilet seat, made of thin plastic, declined to remain up unless it was blocked by a knee. The once-transparent shower curtain had turned opaque with a film of yellowish scum. Sitting on the pitted sink was the smallest bar of soap the Sorcerer had even set eyes on. The taps on the sink and the bathtub worked but what emerged, with an unsettling human gurgle, was a feces-brown liquid that bore only a passing resemblance to water. In the bedroom the under sheet wasn't large enough to tuck beneath the mattress; the mattress itself looked remarkably like a miniature cross-country terrain for toy four-wheel drive cars. There was a television set that tuned in snow when it was switched on, an inverted bowl-like overhead light fixture which served as a cinerarium for cremated insects and an armoire that opened to reveal—nothing. Not a rod. Not a hanger. Not a hook or a shelf of any shape or kind. Against one wall, next to a desk with nothing in its drawers except mildew, stood a small refrigerator with an extremely large and very dead waterbug in residence. Torriti, crawling on all fours, was unable to locate anything resembling an electrical cord coming out of the refrigerator, which he supposed accounted for its lack of refrigeration. (In the end he flushed the waterbug down the toilet after three tries and used the refrigerator shelves to store his socks and underwear.) On the back of the door to the room were instructions in Russian and English about what to do in case of fire, and a series of arrows showing how the hapless resident of 505 might navigate through the maze of flaming corridors to a fire door. It was easy to see that if you didn't actually have the map in your hand—an unlikely possibility, since it was behind a pane of plexiglass screwed to the back of the door—escape was inconceivable.

"I have seen the future," Torriti muttered aloud, "and it needs work!" The Sorcerer was still digesting his first impressions—could this really be the Socialist prototype that had threatened to "bury" (to use Khrushchev's term) the Western democracies?—when he thrust his arms into an Aquascutum and ventured out into the cool Moscow evening. He went through some basic tradecraft drills—the KGB was demoralized and underfunded but it was still there!—ducking between two buildings on the Arbat and waiting in the shadows of the garbage bin behind one of them to see if he was being followed, then trudging through labyrinthian alleyways crammed with corrugated private garages until he came to a wide boulevard. He stepped off the curb and raised a forefinger. Sure enough a gypsy cab screeched to a stop within seconds. Torriti had a hard time fitting his bulk through the narrow rear door of the Russian-manufactured Fiat; once inside he produced the index card with an address written in Cyrillic, along with a recently minted ten-dollar bill. The driver, a young man who looked as if he were suffering from terminal acne, turned out to be a Russian kamikaze; he snatched both items out of Torriti's fingers and, cackling at the fury he aroused in other drivers as he corkscrewed through traffic, took his passenger on as wild a ride as the Sorcerer had ever experienced. Jammed into the back seat, he shut his eyes and fought the queasiness that comes when the viscera slush like bilge water through the abdominal cavity. After what seemed like an eternity, he heard the screech of brakes and felt the automobile skid to a stop. Pushing open the back door, abandoning ship with an adroitness that came from terror, he sniffed at the burnt rubber in the air. It took a minute or two before he got his land legs back. He heard the faint sound of Vienna waltzes booming from loudspeakers a football field away. Pulling a moth-eaten scarf up around his neck, he started toward the brilliant lights illuminating the Park of Rest and Culture, an immense amusement mall on the outskirts of the city where, during the winter months, whole avenues were flooded so that ice skaters could skim along for kilometers on end.

Even after the spring thaw, so Torriti had been informed, there were barnfires blazing on the edge of the avenues every so often. His insteps were aching by the time he shambled over to the fourth fire from the right, burning in an enormous industrial drum. A handful of joggers and roller skaters stood around it, warming their hands, passing around a flask, chatting amiably. On the avenue, under the blinding lights, teenage girls in thigh-length skirts and woolen stockings strolled in lock step with other girls, boys walked backward before their girlfriends, small children tottered along hand in hand with a parent. A thin man of medium height, wearing a windbreaker and a peaked worker's cap, came over from the avenue and held his hands over the fire, toasting one side and then the other. After a moment he looked hard at Torriti. Then, turning, he walked away from the drum. The Sorcerer pulled a flask from the pocket of the Aquascutum and fortified himself with a shot of cheap Scotch. Warmed by the alcohol, he backed away from the group and nonchalantly trailed after the figure in the windbreaker. He caught up with him in the penumbra between a stand of pitch-dark fir trees and the blaze of incandescence from a spotlight atop a crane.

"So that you, Kritzky?" Torriti demanded.

Leo was put off by his tone. "You haven't changed," he shot back.

"I've changed, sport. Fatter. Older. Wiser. Lonelier. Nervouser. More afraid of dying. Less afraid of death."

"I remember you in your heyday," Leo said. "I remember you tearing some secret stuff that came over the ticker out of Bobby Kennedy's hand—it was right after the Bay of Pigs. I remember you telling him where he could shove it."

The Sorcerer blew his nose between two fingers onto the ground. "Made a big mistake," he allowed.

"How's that?"

"Bobby was his brother's son of a bitch, okay, but he wasn't a spy for the Russians. You fucking were. I must have been slowing down not to see it. Ought to have told you where to shove it."

"Yeah. Well, here we are."

"Here is where we are," Torriti acknowledged.

"You still drink your way through the day?"

"You still lie your way through the day?"

Leo managed a forlorn smile. "You always treat your sources this way?"

"My Apprentice said you got ahold of a mole inside this Gorbachev thing. He told me to milk you. He didn't say nothing about climbing into bed with you."

From the loud speakers fixed to telephone poles came the sound of the Red Army chorus bellowing out "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" in what might have been English. Leo stepped closer to the Sorcerer and handed him an old envelope with a grocery list on one side. "I have seven more names to add to the ones I gave Jack," he hollered over the music. "They're written on the inside of the envelope in lemon juice. You pass an iron over it—"

Torriti was offended. "I wasn't born yesterday, sport. I was developing lemon juice before you went to work for the Russians."

"One of the new conspirators is the commander of the elite paratrooper unit in the Ryazan Airborne Division," Leo went on. "Another is the commander of the KGB's Dzerzhinsky Division."

"The plot sickens," Torriti shouted back with a sneer.

"There's more. It's written inside facing the list of names. Are you sober enough to remember—this is important?"

The Sorcerer leaned toward Leo and exhaled into his face. "I was sober enough to make it to this workers' paradise. Sober enough to find you here."

"The plotters have made contact with right-wing nationalist movements across Europe. For starters there's something called the August 21 Group in Madrid. There's Le Pens National Front in France. There are splinter groups in Germany and Italy and Austria and Serbia and Croatia and Rumania and Poland. They plan to dole out money to these groups, once all the funds have been transferred to the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce. The idea is to orchestrate a wave of international support for the coup against Gorbachev. They plan to present Gorbachev as a bungler who was running Russia into the ground, and the putsch as a patriotic effort to put the country back on its feet. If enough voices across Europe repeat this line the public may begin to think there's some truth in it."

The Sorcerer crumpled the envelope in his fist and stashed it in a pocket. "Where, when do we meet again?" he wanted to know.

"Where are you staying?"

Torriti told him.

"What's your cover?"

"I came armed with a briefcase full of John Deere brochures. Between drinks I'm trying to find someone who wants to import American tractors."

Leo thought a moment. "Okay. If I think we need to meet I'll have a bottle of Scotch delivered to room 505, along with a note thanking you for the John Deere material. The note will be written in ink. Between the lines, in lemon juice, I'll name a time and a place you can find easily."

Torriti started to walk away, then turned back with an afterthought. "Don't send up any of those imported Scotches. I prefer the cheap shit that disinfects the throat."

"Worried about germs?" Leo asked.

"Been inoculated against germs," Torriti snapped. "It's the traitors who make me sick to my stomach."

The Druzhba Hotel made the Ukraine look like the Ritz, or so the Sorcerer decided as he pushed through the mirrored door into the shabby lobby filled with tarnished mirrors and ceiling-to-floor window drapes that must have been put up before the Revolution and hadn't been dry cleaned since. Faded didn't begin to describe them. Pity the poor visitor who might be allergic to dust! Slaloming between ashtrays overflowing with everything but ashes, Torriti approached the main and only desk. "You probably speak English," he told the pasty platinum blonde copying off passport numbers onto a ledger.

The woman, wearing a skin-tight dress made of Army surplus camouflage material, replied without looking up. "Not."

The Sorcerer turned to the half dozen men sitting around the lobby. They were all dressed in identical ankle-length belted leather coats, thick-soled black shoes and dark fedoras with narrow brims. It looked like a casting call for one of Torriti's all-time favorite films, James Cagney's The Public Enemy, circa 1931. "Anybody here speak English?" he called.

The woman answered for them. "Not."

"How am I supposed to ask for information if nobody speaks English?" the Sorcerer demanded in exasperation.

"Study Russian," she suggested. "It could be useful in Russia."

"You do speak English!"

"Not."

"Why do I get the feeling I've fallen through the looking glass?" Torriti remarked to nobody in particular.

The woman raised her heavily made-up eyes. "Anybody you want," she ventured, "is not here."

It dawned on the Sorcerer that the thing to do in an insane asylum is humor the inmates. "I don't want anybody," he announced. "I want somebody named Rappaport. Endel Rappaport."

"Yob tvoyu mat," someone called out.

The platinum blonde translated. "He says you, Fuck your mother."

The others giggled at this. Torriti grasped that he was being incited to riot, and a riot would not bring him closer to Endel Rappaport, so he controlled his temper and forced himself to giggle with them.

"Rappaport is a Jew name," one of the extras sitting around the lobby decided.

Torriti pirouetted on a heel to face the speaker. "Is that right?" he said innocently.

The man, a dark-skinned giant with Central Asian eyes, came across the threadbare carpet. "Which sends you to Endel Rappaport?"

"Which which?" the platinum blonde echoed.

"We have a mutual friend. A Rabbi, as a matter of fact, though he has long since given up Rabbi-ing on a daily basis."

"Name?" insisted the man.

"Ezra."

"Ezra his Christian or family name?"

Torriti kept his face expressionless, lest the inmates take offense. Wait till Ezra Ben Ezra learned he had a Christian name! "Both."

"Floor number four," the man said, snapping his head in the direction of the ancient elevator next to the ancient staircase.

"Which door?"

"Any doors, all doors," said the blonde. "He rents the floor."

Backing carefully toward the elevator, Torriti pulled the grille open and thumbed the ivory button with a Roman numeral four on it. Somewhere in the bowels of the building a motor groaned into reluctant activity. The elevator jerked several times in aborted departures, then started with infinitesimal slowness to rise. Two men were waiting on the fourth floor. One of them opened the grille. The other frisked the Sorcerer very professionally, checking the small of his back and his ankles (where he carried the snub-nosed .38 Detective Special in his salad days), as well as the creases in his crotch under his testicles. Satisfied, he nodded to his partner, who pulled a latchkey from a pocket and opened an armor-plated door.

Torriti ambled into a spacious, brightly lit room decorated in Finish imports; stainless steel chairs were gathered around a stainless steel table. Two lean men with vigilant Asian eyes lounged against a lacquered wall. A short, elegantly dressed man with fine white hair leapt from one of the chairs to bow from the waist toward Torriti. His eyes, only half open, fixed themselves intently on the visitor. "You are preceded by your legend, Mr. Sorcerer," he said. "Ben Ezra said me who you used to be. People like me do not meet people like you every day of the week. If you please," he said, nodding toward a chair. "What would give you pleasure?"

Torriti settled heavily into one of the Finish chairs and discovered it was surprisingly comfortable. "A glass," he said.

Endel Rappaport, who must have been pushing eighty, said something in a strange language and, thrusting a fist out of a cuff, pointed with a pinkie. (Torriti couldn't help but notice that it was the only finger remaining on his hand.) One of the men along the wall sprang to attention and threw open the doors of a closet crammed with liquor bottles and glasses. He brought over a crystal goblet. The Sorcerer pulled his flask from an inside pocket and measured out a short Scotch. Rappaport, his maimed hand buried deep in a blazer pocket, returned to his place at the head of the table. "Any friend of Ben Ezra's—" he said, and waved his good hand to indicate that there was no need to complete the sentence. "In your wildest imagination what do you hope I can do for you?"

Torriti glanced at the bodyguards along the wall. Rappaport pursed his lips, a gesture that made him appear gnome-like. "My guardian angels are Uighurs," he informed the Sorcerer. "They speak only Turkic."

"In my wildest imagination I see you arranging to kill eight or ten people for me."

Rappaport didn't flinch. "I sit in awe in the face of such candidness. In Russia people tend to equivocate. So: the going price to have someone killed is between fifteen and twenty-five thousand American dollars, depending."

"On what?"

"On how important he is, which in turn indicates what kind of protection he is likely to have."

The Sorcerer gnawed on the inside of a cheek. Only half in jest he asked, "You being Jewish, me being a friend of the Rabbi's—doesn't that get me a discount?"

"The fee I accept from you will be used to compensate those who could not care less that I am Jewish and you were sent by the Rabbi," Rappaport said quietly. "When it comes time to calculate my honorarium, I will deal directly with Ben Ezra."

Torriti couldn't quite get a handle on Rappaport. How had such an obviously genteel man become a caid in the Moscow underworld? He decided it would help if he knew more about his host. "They had a go at you at some point," he remarked. He pointed with his chins. "I saw the fingers."

"What you saw was the absence of fingers. What a quaint expression you employ—yes, they had a go at me. To begin to understand Russia, you need to know that the average Russian anti-Semite is only remotely related to anti-Semites in the West. Here they are not satisfied with harassing Jews or persecuting Jews, with expelling them from music schools or apartments or cities or even the country. Here they are only satisfied if they can whet an ax and personally sink it into your flesh." Rappaport started to elaborate, then gestured with his good hand; again the sentence didn't need to be finished. "Regarding your request: you will surely have a list."

Torriti produced a picture postcard. One of the bodyguards carried it around the table and set it down before Rappaport. He looked at the photograph, then turned the card over and squinted at the names written on the back. "You are a serious man with a serious project," he said. "Permit me to pose several questions."

"Pose. Pose."

"Must the people on this list be killed simultaneously or would results spread over a period of days or weeks be acceptable?"

"The results could safely be spread over a period of minutes."

"I see."

"What do you see?"

"I see that all the people on your list are connected to each other in a way that I can only guess at."

"Guess. Guess."

"They are most likely associates in a complot. You want to avoid a situation where the death of one alerts the others to the danger of assassination. You want the assassinations to preempt the complot."

"You read an awful lot into a list of names."

"I read even more."

"Read. Read."

"Since you come to me, as opposed to another person of influence, since you arrive with the blessing of Ezra Ben Ezra, it must mean that the complot in question is one that will be inconvenient to the state of Israel. The single thing that would be most inconvenient to Israel would be the shutting down of the emigration of Russian Jews to Israel, which would leave the Jewish state at a permanent demographic disadvantage vis-a-vis their Palestinian neighbors."

The Sorcerer was impressed. "All that from one small list!"

"I have only scratched the surface. Since it is Mikhail Gorbachev who is behind the policy that permits the emigration of Russian Jews, the complot must be aimed at removing him from a position of power. In short, what we have here is a putsch against the existing government, and an attempt by the American Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli Mossad to nip it in the bud with a series of surgical assassinations of the ringleaders."

"At this point I think you know more than I do."

Endel Rappaport waved his good hand again; the Sorcerer's remark was so absurd it didn't need to be denied. "A last question: do you require that the deaths be made to appear to be suicides or accidents?"

"To the degree that that would discourage anyone from walking back the cat and tracing the deaths to you, and eventually to me, suicides, accidents would be suitable. Either, or."

"I am not familiar with the expression walking back the cat but I am able to divine its meaning. Let me sleep on your list," he told Torriti. "Given the names involved, given the requirement that the deaths should appear to be suicides or accidents, the cost per head will be much closer to one hundred thousand dollars than twenty-five. There are two, even three names that will be still more expensive. Something in the region of a quarter of a million American dollars. In all cases payment will be in cash deposited in Swiss accounts, the numbers of which I will supply. One-half of each contract is payable on verbal acceptance by the executor, the remaining half payable when the executee has been executed. Can I assume that the sums I have mentioned, along with the terms, are acceptable to you?"

"Assume. Assume."

"You are staying in the Hotel Ukraine, room 505, if I am not mistaken."

"I am beginning to see you in a new light," the Sorcerer conceded.

"I have been told that it is an unpleasant hotel."

Torriti smiled. "It's not that good."

Rappaport rose to his feet and Torriti followed suit. "The rumors about an international Jewish conspiracy are true," Rappaport said.

"The Rabbi told me the same thing in Berlin many years ago," the Sorcerer said. He remembered Ben Ezra's words: There is an international Jewish conspiracy, thanks to God it exists. It's a conspiracy to save the Jews. "I believed him then. I believe you now."

Rappaport bowed again from the waist. "Take it for granted that I will be in touch when I have something concrete to tell you."

4

DRESDEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 1991

THE DEVISENBESCHAFFER, A MIDDLE-AGED FUNCTIONARY WITH A toothbrush mustache and a toupee that had fallen off in the scuffle when he was abduced, never lost his composure. He was strapped onto an ordinary kitchen chair in a sub-basement storage room of an abandoned meat-packing factory on the outskirts of the city. Two spotlights burned into his anemic face, making the skin on his cheeks, crisscrossed with fine red veins, look diaphanous. He had been tied to the chair so long that he had lost track of time, lost all feeling in his extremities. When he asked, with elaborate German politeness, to be allowed to use the water closet, his captors exchanged mocking comments in a language he didn't understand. The currency acquirer controlled his sphincter as long as he could. Then, unable to contain himself any longer, he mumbled profuse apologies as he defecated and urinated in his trousers. The odors didn't appear to distress the young men who took turns grilling him. From time to time a doctor would press a stethoscope to his chest and listen intently for a moment, then, satisfied, would nod permission for the interrogation to continue. "Please believe me, I know absolutely nothing about funds being transferred to a local Russian bank," the prisoner insisted. He spoke German with a guttural Bavarian growl that originated in his chest. "It is a case of mistaken identity—you are confusing me with someone else."

The Rabbi, following the interrogation over an intercom from an office on an upper floor, was growing impatient. It was ten days since his team had recruited the Jewish bookkeeper who worked in the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce; five days since the teller had alerted him to the daily deposits of anywhere between five and ten million dollars in a special account; two days since the Rabbi had been able to trace the deposits back to a private German bank and its manager, the illustrious Devisenbeschaffer. Now, as the interrogation dragged on, the team's doctor, on loan from an elite commando unit, started to hedge when Ben Ezra asked if there was any possibility of the prisoner dying on them. "Eighteen hours of stress is a long time even for a healthy heart," the doctor said. "He looks perfectly composed but his heart is starting to beat more rapidly, suggesting he's not as calm as he seems. If his heart continues to speed up it could end in a cardiovascular episode."

"How much time do we have?"

The young doctor shrugged. "You guess is as good as mine."

The response irritated Ben Ezra. "No. Your guess is better than mine. That's why you are here."

The doctor refused to be intimidated. "Look, if you want to err on the safe side, give him a night's sleep and start again in the morning."

The Rabbi weighed the alternatives. "Beseda, " he said reluctantly. "We will do as you suggest."

"This place holds many memories for me," Yevgeny was saying. He examined what countryside you could still see from the roof of the Apatov mansion. "When I first came here—it was before we met at my fathers dacha party—I was fresh out of an American university and at loose ends. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life."

"Do you know now?" Aza asked with her usual directness.

Yevgeny smiled. "Yes."

She smiled back at him. "It is a source of pain to me, dear Yevgeny, to think of all the years we wasted."

He threw an arm over her shoulder and drew her closer. "We will make up for lost time."

"It is a delusion to think you can make up for lost time," she said. "The best you can hope for is not to lose any more."

She wandered over to the southeast corner of the roof. Yevgeny came up behind her. "There were stands of white birches and plowed fields where those apartment buildings and the recycling plant are," he said. "The farmers from the Cheryomuski collective used to spread manure from horsedrawn carts. When the wind was wrong, you had to keep the windows closed if you wanted to survive." He shaded his eyes with a hand. "There used to be a secret runway beyond the fields. That's where my plane landed when I was brought home from America. The airstrip was shut down five years ago after Gorbachev cut the military budget. Gangs of kids race souped-up cars on the runway now. Depending on the winds, you can sometimes here their motors revving." Yevgeny hiked himself onto the balustrade and looked down at the entrance to the three-story mansion. "The first time I came up that gravel driveway there were two little girls playing on a seesaw—they were the nieces of the man I'd come to see."

"The one in the hospital?" Aza said. "The one you will not speak about?"

Yevgeny, deep into his own thoughts, stared off toward the horizon without answering.

"I am very hot," Aza said abruptly. "Let us return to the room that is air-conditioned."

He led her down the stairs to the wood-paneled library on the second floor, and gave her a glass of iced mineral water. She produced an embroidered handkerchief from a small purse, dipped half of it in the glass and patted the back of her neck with it. "Is it safe to talk here?" she asked.

"I have technicians who sweep the rooms for microphones."

"Imagine sweeping a room for a microphone! We live in different worlds."

"Thank goodness it's not true," Yevgeny shot back. "Thank goodness we live at last in the same world."

"What transpired at the meeting?"

"Valentin Varennikov—he's the general in charge of all Soviet ground forces—reported that the KGB's Dzerzhinsky Division, along with units from the Kantemirov Division and the Taman Guards, would occupy key sites in the city—the television tower at Ostankino, newspaper offices, bridges, rail stations, intersections on the main arteries, the university and the heights around it—on the first of September. At the same time paratrooper units of the Ryazan Airborne Division will move into Moscow under cover of darkness and stand ready to overwhelm any pockets of resistance. The KGB, meanwhile, has stockpiled two hundred fifty thousand pairs of handcuffs, printed up three hundred thousand arrest forms, cleared two floors of Lefortovo Prison and secretly doubled all KGB pay. The Minister of Defense Yazov, along with the Interior Minister Pugo, are pushing for an earlier date for the putsch—they want to launch it around the middle of this month, while Gorbachev is vacationing in the Crimea. But Kryuchkov and General Varennikov argued that anything before the first of September will involve greater risks, since logistical preparations and tactical orders will not be completed. Also the German Devisenbeschaffer needs more time to collect the funds, scattered through banks in Germany and Austria, and funnel them into my bank in Dresden so I can bring them to Moscow and make them available to the plotters."

"So the putsch will take place on the first of September," Aza said grimly.

"You must warn Yeltsin," Yevgeny said. "He must contact the commanders of units that might remain loyal to the government."

"It is a perilous business, sounding out supporters. People could panic. Word could reach the plotters and they could arrest the loyalists. In any case, aside from some scattered tank units and groups of Afghan veterans, Boris Nikolayevich is not at all sure whom he can muster to defend the Parliament's White House."

"He must muster the people," Yevgeny suggested.

"Yes, by all means, the people. They are our secret weapon, Yevgeny. They understand that Boris Nikolayevich takes the business of reforming Russia seriously. He takes the June election seriously—for the first time in our thousand-year history, Russians went to the voting places and elected a President. When the crisis comes Russians will remember Patriarch Alexy, with his flowing robes and flowing beard, blessing Yeltsin. By the will of God and the choice of the Russian people, you are bestowed with the highest office in Russia. Yeltsin's response will ring in everyone's ears. Great Russia is rising from its knees."

"I hope you're right, Aza. I hope Yeltsin has the nerves for this kind of affair. I hope he doesn't abandon the race at the first hurdle."

Aza came around the table and, leaning over Yevgeny, kissed him hard on the lips. Blushing noticeably, she backed away. "All hurdles grow smaller when confronted by your lust and my desire."

Yevgeny, speechless with emotion, could only nod in agreement.

The Sorcerer bought a ticket at the window, squeezed through the turnstile, and stepped gingerly onto the escalator ferrying passengers down to the Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line in the bowels of the earth. He looked over the head of the woman in front—the Smolenskaia quays seemed to be at the bottom of a sink hole. To make time pass he studied the people passing on the up escalator, an arm's length away. Some had their faces buried in folded newspapers; others stared dumbly into space, their minds (judging from their expressions) clouded by fatigue or worry or resignation or all of the above. One old woman knitted. A middle-aged woman talked angrily to the back of the head of the teenage boy in front of her. Two young lovers stood facing each other, the girl on the higher step so that their heads were level, gazing wordlessly into each other's eyes. Ahead, at the bottom of the escalator, a stern-faced woman in an ill-fitting uniform surveyed traffic from a small booth, her hands on controls that could stop the escalator in an emergency.

The Sorcerer landed on the quays and let himself be carried along in the river of people flowing toward the trains. Half way down the station platform he spotted Leo Kritzky, exactly where his message—written in lemon juice between the lines of a Thank you for the John Deere material note.—said he would be. He was sitting on a plastic bench reading a copy of the English language Moscow News. He looked up as a train eased into the station. His eyes passed over the fat figure of the Sorcerer without a flicker of recognition. Torriti had to hand it to Kritzky; however much he detested him, he was a thorough professional. Kritzky got up and, dropping the newspaper in an open trash bin, walked quickly toward the train, lunging inside just as doors closed. Back on the quay, Torriti nonchalantly fished the newspaper out of the bin and glanced at the headlines while he waited for the train to arrive on the eastbound track. BANK OF COMMERCE AND CREDIT INTERNATIONAL INDICTED FOR MONEY LAUNDERING. GORBACHEV OFF TO CRIMEA FOR SUMMER HOLIDAY. When the train finally pulled in, the crowd, with Torriti lost in its midst, surged toward the doors.

The Sorcerer changed trains several times, making sure he was the last person off and the last on as the doors closed. He eventually rode another escalator to the street, ducked into a toy store with nearly empty shelves and emerged through a back door into an alleyway that led to another street. There he flagged down a gypsy cab and made his way back to the fifth-floor room in the Hotel Ukraine. Locking himself in the bathroom, he tore out the upper right-hand quarter of page four and heated it over a naked light bulb. Within seconds writing in lemon juice began to emerge.

D-day is 1 Sept. General in charge of ground forces, Varennikov, working out of KGB complex in Mashkino, is drawing up plans to infiltrate KGB's Dzerzhinsky Division, units from the Kantemirov Division and the Taman Guards and paratroop elements from Ryazan Airborne Division into Moscow to control strategic points. Gorbachev to be isolated under house arrest while plotters declare state of emergency and take control of government organs. For God's sake, somebody do something before it's too late.

Torriti copied the pertinent details in a minuscule handwriting onto a slip of paper and hid it under the instep of his left shoe. He burned the quarter page of newspaper in an ashtray and flushed the cinders down the toilet. Moments later, at a public booth around the corner from the hotel, he fed a coin into the slot and dialed the number the Rabbi had given him if he needed to communicate with the Israelis in Dresden quickly.

A woman answered the phone. "Pazhalista?"

"I have been told you sell rare Persian carpets at rock bottom prices," Torriti said.

"Please, who said you this information?"

"A little birdie name of Ezra."

"Ezra, bless his heart! He is from time to time sending clients. Sure thing, you come by and we are showing you Persian carpets until your head spins dizzy. You are having my address?"

"I am having your address, lady."

Torriti set the phone back down on its hook, treated himself to a restorative shot of booze from his nearly empty flask and, pulling up the collar of a rumpled sports jacket that had been washed and worn to death, headed for the Arbat.

The Rabbi snared the intercom speaker with one of his canes and dragged the small wooden box closer so he wouldn't miss a word. He held his breath and listened, but all he heard was absolute silence. Then a primeval curdling whimper filled the room. It originated at the bottom of a deep pit of physical pain. Ben Ezra winced: he had to remind himself that ends did justify means; that the ends, continuing to get hundreds of thousands of Jews out of Russia, vindicated the torture of one man who was involved in a plot to prevent it. Gradually the whimper faded and one of the young men could be heard repeating the question.

What is the secret identification number that provides access to the account.

When the Devisenbeschaffer didn't immediately respond, the low buzz of what sounded like an electric razor came over the speaker. Then words detonated like Chinese firecrackers set off in series.

Nicht-das—schalte-es-aus—Ich-werde-es-Dir-sagen!

Enough, a voice ordered. Switch it off.

The buzzing stopped.

The numbers came across sandwiched between sobs and whimpers. Seven-eight-four-two, then the word Wolke, then nine-one-one.

The Rabbi scratched the numbers and the word on a pad. Seven-eight-four-two, then Wolke or cloud, then nine-one-one. He filled his lungs with air and looked up. It was a given in the world of espionage that everyone broke sooner or later. Ben Ezra knew of Jews on mission who had been instructed to hold out long enough to permit the others in their network to escape; sometimes they had, enduring torture for two, two-and-a-half days, sometimes they broke sooner. The Rabbi's own son had been caught in Syria in the mid-1970s and tortured for thirty-four hours before he cracked, at which point he had been sponged and dressed in white pajamas and hanged from a crude wooden gibbet. The German had absorbed more punishment than most; his rage at Jews had numbed him to a portion of the pain he was suffering. But he had broken.

What remained, now, was to test the numbers—and assuming, as he did, that they were correct, to take control of the Devisenbeschaffer's deposits, divert the funds into various bank accounts in Switzerland and send the prearranged message to Jack McAuliffe informing him the dirty deed was done. At which point it would be up to the Sorcerer to fulfill his part of the pact. Ben Ezra had received the Sorcerer's message the previous evening: the putsch was set for 1 September. Using a scrambled telephone in a Mossad safe house, talking cryptically as an added precaution, the Rabbi had passed this detail on to Jack McAuliffe in Washington. "Our mutual friend," Ben Ezra had said, "reminds us that we must get our applications in before the first of September if we hope to win any fellowships; any later will be too late."

"The first of September," Jack had noted on his end of the line, "doesn't leave us much time to get recommendations from the eight or ten key figures in Moscow; does our mutual friend think he can contact these people before the deadline?"

" He has started the ball rolling," the Rabbi had replied. "He expects to have the eight or ten recommendations in hand by the last week in August."

"That's cutting it pretty fine," Jack had shot back; "any possibility of speeding up the process?"

" Getting recommendations from eight or ten people at more or less the same time is a complicated process," Ben Ezra had cautioned Jack; "and we are obliged, for obvious reasons, to get it right the first time, there's no going back for a second try."

"Okay," Jack had said reluctantly, "I'll settle for the last week in August."

Now, sitting at a table in the upper floor office of the meatpacking factory, the Rabbi turned the intercom speaker around to unplug the cord. Peering through the thick lenses of his spectacles, his eyes glazed with the pain that was his constant companion, he saw, in the open back of the box, a tiny red-and-black spider dancing across tendrils that were so fine they were invisible to the naked eye. The spider, appearing suspended in space, froze when Ben Ezra touched one of the strands with his thumbnail. It waited with endless patience, trying to determine if the vibrations it had picked up signaled danger. Finally it risked a tentative movement, then swiftly clawed across its invisible web and vanished into the cavernous safety of the intercom speaker.

Something resembling a scowl surfaced on Ben Ezra's bone-dry lips. His time was growing short. Soon he, too, would claw his way across an invisible web, his bad hip thrusting forward and around and back with each painful step, and vanish into the cavernous safety of the land that the Lord God had bequeathed to the descendants of the Patriarch Abraham.

The siren atop the guard tower sounded high noon at the KGB complex in the village of Mashkino, a series of two-story, L-shaped brick satellites connected by covered passageways to the nuclear headquarters building. In the small air-conditioned conference room on the second floor of this building, the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, in the best of times a testy man who tended to see the cup half empty rather man half full, stared grimly out a window. Behind him the voice of Fyodor Lomov, the foreign ministry apparatchik, droned on as he read aloud from the file that had accompanied the photographs rushed over that morning by motorcycle courier.

It seemed that the Israeli desk of the Second Chief Directorate had a surveillance team watching a husband and wife of Jewish origin who sold Oriental carpets in a hole-in-the-wall shop on a side street off the Arbat. The couple was known to have provided safe house and communication services for the Israeli Mossad in the past. The surveillance team, working out of a vacant apartment diagonally across the street from the carpet store, systematically photographed everyone going in or out of the shop. These photographs were developed every night and delivered to the Second Chief Directorate's Israeli desk in the morning.

On this particular morning the photographs were still being sorted—the mug shots of visitors who could be identified were labeled and pasted into a scrapbook, the others were stored in a wire basket marked unidentified—when Yuri Sukhanov, the cranky head of the Ninth Chief Directorate, one of the core group of plotters working closely with KGB Chairman Kryuchkov, stopped by with a disturbing photograph that the Dresden rezident had pouched to Moscow Centre. It showed a twisted old man struggling with the aid of two canes toward a limousine surrounded by bodyguards. Dresden had tentatively identified the old man as Ezra Ben Ezra, the infamous Rabbi who was winding up a seven year tour as head of the Israeli Mossad. Walking next to him was a corpulent figure that the Dresden rezidentura had not been able to identify— but Sukhanov, a veteran KGB officer who had begun an illustrious career at the East Berlin Karlshorst rezidentura in the mid 1950s, recognized instantly: the man accompanying Ben Ezra was none other than the Rabbi's old friend from Berlin, the legendary one-time chief of the CIA's Berlin Base, H. Torriti, a.k.a. the Sorcerer. The question on everyone's lips, of course, was: why was the head of the Mossad meeting Harvey Torriti in Dresden? Was it possible that their presence had something to do with the sums of hard currency being transferred by the Devisenbeschaffer to the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce? Or worse still, something to do with the sudden disappearance of the Devisenbeschaffer himself?

The intriguing subject was being kicked around at an informal brainstorming session when Sukhanov noticed a pile of mug shots in the wire basket labelled unidentified. Absently leafing through them, he suddenly held one up to the light. "Where did you get this?" he demanded excitedly.

The desk officer explained that it had been taken the previous day by the team watching a Jewish couple that from time to time provided field services to the Israelis. "But this is the same man photographed with the Rabbi in Dresden! It's the American Torriti," the head of the Ninth Directorate said. Sukhanov took Torriti's presence first in Dresden, then in Moscow, as an ominous omen—it could only mean that the CIA, bypassing its Moscow station, had slipped an old professional into the Soviet capitol from the outside. And that, in turn, could only mean that the Americans suspected a putsch was in the works.

It was at this point that the photographs of Ben Ezra and Torriti in Dresden, and Torriti in Moscow, were hiked out to the KGB complex at Mashkino and Kryuchkov was alerted. The premonition of the head of the Ninth Directorate caused consternation among the putschists. A war council with the leading plotters was quickly convened. Lomov finished reading through the file. The Minister of Defense, Yazov, who along with the Interior Minister, Pugo, had originally pushed for a mid-August coup d'etat, argued for moving up the date from 1 September in light of this latest information. General Varennikov, the ground forces chief and the man responsible for mustering the troops that would seize control of Moscow, had previously been against the idea because military preparations couldn't be completed that early. Now, albeit reluctantly, he saw the logic of a mid-August date. The head of the Ninth Chief Directorate, whose agents would be responsible for quarantining Gorbachev during the first hours of the coup, reminded the others that the General Secretary was in his summer residence near the Crimean town of Foros until the twentieth. Which didn't leave much time.

Everyone looked at Kryuchkov, who was still staring out the window. He remarked that there was a brownish smog hovering over the fields surrounding the village of Mashkino. It had been there for the better part of a week. Superstitious peasants, he noted, believed that evil spirits lurking in the smog could cause stillbirths in pregnant women who ventured out on days like this.

In short, it was not an auspicious moment to launch new projects. Happily, he, Kryuchkov, was not superstitious. Turning to his colleagues, looking particularly somber, he announced that he, too, was now in favor of moving up the date of the uprising, even if it meant that all the preparations—including the importation of large amounts of foreign currency to Moscow in order to stock the stores immediately after the coup—could not be completed in time.

"How about the nineteenth?" Kryuchkov said.

"Nineteen August sounds fine to me," Defense Minister Yazov commented. The others in the room nodded in agreement.

"So it is decided," Kryuchkov said. "We will declare a state of emergency, isolate Gorbachev and take control of the government one week from today."

Trying to walk off a chronic angst, Leo Kritzky spent the afternoon exploring the narrow streets behind the Kremlin filled with small Orthodox churches. Over the years he had become so Russian-looking that the ever-present hustlers who waylaid foreigners with offers to buy dollars or sell caviar no longer gave him a second glance. He stopped for tea and a dry cupcake in a workers' canteen, then queued at a pharmacy for a bottle of Polish cough syrup and dropped it off at his lady friend's apartment; she'd been battling a chest cold with herbal infusions but it had only gotten worse. He lingered for half an hour looking at the sketches she'd done for a children's book on Siberian elves and fairies, then took the subway back to Frunzenskaya Embankment. Hanging on to an overhead strap, swaying from side to side as the train plunged through a tunnel, his eyes fell on what he took to be a relic of seventy years of Communism: a small metal plaque at the head of the subway car with the words "October Revolution" engraved on it. He wondered how many people noticed this reminder of things past; how many of those who noticed still believed in the promise of the October Revolution. There were days when he himself thought it might better to start over again; there were other days when he tried not to think about it at all.

Arriving at Frunzenskaya Embankment number 50, entrance 9, he climbed the steps to the third floor. The janitor still had not gotten around to replacing the light bulb at the end of the corridor near his apartment, number 373. As he crouched to insert the latch key in the lock an agitated voice called from the darkness. "Sorry, sorry, but I don't suppose you happen to understand English." When Leo didn't immediately respond, the person sighed. "I didn't think so—it would have been too good to be true."

Leo squinted into the shadows. "As a matter of fact—"

"Oh, thank goodness," the woman exclaimed in relief. She materialized out of the shadows and approached Leo. "Sorry again, but I don't suppose you'd know which of these apartments Leon Kritzky lives in?"

Leo's face turned numb as stone. "Who are you?" he demanded. He raised his fingertips to his cheek and felt only dead skin.

The woman drew closer and peered at Leo. He could hear her catch her breath. "Daddy?" she whispered in a child's anguished voice.

"Tessa? Is that you?"

"Oh, Daddy," she moaned. "It is me. It's me, it's me."

Leo felt time and place and regret and heartache fall away. He opened his arms and Tessa, quaking with sobs, collapsed into them.

It was a long while before either of them could utter a word. They stood there in the shadows clinging to each other until Tessa's tears had saturated the lapel of Leo's windbreaker. Later, neither could remember how they had gotten into the apartment or who had opened the bottle of Bulgarian wine or where the open sandwiches spread with roe had come from. They gazed at each other across the folding table. Every now and then Leo would reach over and touch his daughter and her eyes, riveted on his, would brim with tears.

Tessa had checked into a hotel off Red Square but there was no question of her going back to it; they would collect her valise and the package of books she had brought for Leo the next morning. They spread a sheet on the couch for her and propped up pillows on either end of it and talked in soft voices husky with emotion into the early hours of the morning. Tessa, a thin, handsome woman closing in on forty, had just ended another in a series of love affairs; she always seemed to fall for men who were already married or leery of committing themselves to permanent relationships. And as her sister constantly reminded her, the biological clock was ticking. Tessa was toying with the idea of getting pregnant by her next lover even if the affair never went anywhere; she'd at least wind up with a child, which is what she wanted more than anything.

Vanessa? Oh, she was fine. Yes, she was still married to the same fellow, an assistant professor of history at George Washington University; their son, who had been named Philip after his grandfather, was a strapping four-year-old who already knew how to work a computer. Why hadn't she warned Leo she was coming? She hadn't wanted to get his hopes up. Hers either. She was afraid she might chicken out at the last moment, afraid of what she would find—or what she wouldn't find. She hadn't even told Vanessa where she was going. "Oh, Daddy, if only..."

"If only?"

"If only you hadn't..."

He understood what she couldn't bring herself to say. "I had allegiances and loyalties that went back to before I joined the CIA," he told her. "I was true to these allegiances and loyalties."

"Do you have any regrets?"

The regrets that had fallen away in the corridor flooded back. "Your mother," he said; "I bitterly regret what I did to Adelle. Your sister; I regret that she can't bring herself to talk to me. You; I regret that I can't share your life and you can't share what's left of mine."

"When I first saw you in the hallway, Daddy, I had the terrible feeling that you weren't glad to see me."

"No, it's not true—"

"I saw it in your eyes."

"Seeing you here is the most wonderful thing that's happened to me in seven and a half years. It's only—"

"Only what?"

"This isn't the best time to be in Moscow, Tessa."

"With Gorbachev in power, I thought it'd be a fascinating time to be in Moscow."

"That's just it. Gorbachev may not be in power long."

"Is there going to be a coup d'etat? Gosh, that would be fun—to be in the middle of a real revolution." Suddenly Tessa looked hard at her father. "Do you know something, Daddy, or are you only repeating rumors?"

"A coup is a real possibility."

"Excuse me for asking but do you still work for the KGB?"

He tried to smile. "I'm retired. I draw a pension. I get what information I have from the newspapers."

Tessa seemed relieved. "Predicting coups is like predicting the weather," she said. "Everybody knows the newspapers get it wrong most of the time. So if they say there's going to be a coup d'etat, chances are things will be quiet as hell. Too bad for me. I could have used some excitement in my life."

5

NEAR FOROS ON THE CRIMEAN PENINSULA, MONDAY, AUGUST 19, 1991

FLYING INTO THE WHITEWASHED BULL'S-EYE HELIPAD IN A GIANT bug-like Army helicopter, Yevgeny saw the onion-domed Church of Foros clinging to the granite cliffs and the surf breaking against the jagged shoreline far below it. Moments later Mikhail Gorbachev's compound on the southern Crimean cliffs overlooking the Black Sea came into view. There was a three-story main house, a small hotel for staff and security guards, a separate guest house, an indoor swimming pool and movie theater, even a long escalator to the private beach under the compound.

As soon as the helicopter had touched down, the delegation from Moscow—Yuri Sukhanov representing the KGB, General Varennikov representing the Army, Oleg Baklanov representing the military-industrial complex, Oleg Shenin from the Politburo, Gorbachev's personal assistant and chief of staff Valery Boldin, Yevgeny Tsipin representing the powerful banking sector—was rushed over to the main house in open Jeeps. As the group made its way through the marble and gilt central hall, the head of the compound's security detachment whispered to Sukhanov that he had cut off Gorbachev's eight telephone and fax lines at four thirty, as instructed. "When I informed him that he had unexpected visitors, he picked up the phone to see what it was all about," recounted the officer. "That's when he discovered the lines were dead. He even tried the direct phone to the commander in chief—the one that's kept in a box. He must have understood immediately what was happening because he turned deathly pale and summoned his family—his wife, Raisa Maksimovna, his daughter, his son-in-law. They are all with him now in the living room. Raisa was particularly shaken—I heard her say something to her husband about the Bolsheviks murdering the Romanov family after the October revolution."

Pushing through double doors, the delegation found Gorbachev and his family standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the grand living room. There was a breathtaking view of the cliffs and the sea through the picture window behind them. The General Secretary, barely able to control his rage, stared at his chief of staff, Boldin. "Et tu. Brute?" he said with a sneer. Gorbachev eyed the others. "Who sent you?" he asked with icy disdain.

"The committee appointed in connection with the emergency," Sukhanov told him.

"I didn't appoint such a committee," Gorbachev shot back. "Who is on it?"

Yevgeny went up to Gorbachev and handed him a sheet of onionskin on which the names of the members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency had been typed. The Secretary General fitted on a pair of eyeglasses and looked at the list. "Kryuchkov! Yazov—my God, I plucked him out of nowhere to be Minister of Defense! Pugo! Varennikov! Uritzky!" Gorbachev's head rocked from side to side in disgust. "Do you really think the people are so tired that they will follow any dictator?"

General Varennikov stepped forward. "You don't have much choice in the matter, Mikhail Sergeyevich. You must go along with us and sign the emergency decree. Either that or resign."

Gorbachev glanced at Raisa and saw that she was shivering with fear. He rested a hand on her shoulder, then told the delegation, "Never—I refuse to legalize such a decree with my signature."

In a barely audible voice Raisa asked her husband, "Yeltsin—is his name on the list?"

Sukhanov said, "Yeltsin will be arrested."

Gorbachev and his wife stared into each other's eyes. Their daughter moved closer to her mother and took her hand. Gorbachev smiled grimly at both of them; they all understood that there was a strong possibility of ending up in front of a firing squad. He turned back to the delegation. "You are adventurers and traitors," he said in an even voice. "You will destroy the country. Only those who are blind to history could now suggest a return to a totalitarian regime. You are pushing Russia to civil war."

Yevgeny, conscious of having a role to play, remarked, "You are the one pushing Russia to civil war. We are trying to avoid bloodshed."

Sukhanov said, "Mikhail Sergeyevich, in the end we ask nothing from you. You will remain in Foros under house arrest. We will take care of the dirty work for you."

"Dirty work is what you will be doing," Gorbachev agreed bitterly.

"There is nothing more we can accomplish here," Sukhanov told the other members of the delegation. He approached Gorbachev and thrust out his hand; the General Secretary and the head of the KGB's Ninth Chief Directorate had been on close terms for years. Gorbachev looked down at the hand, then with a contemptuous sneer turned his back on him. Shrugging off the insult, Sukhanov led the way out of the room.

Heading back in the helicopter to Belbek airport, where a Tupolev-154 was waiting to fly them to Moscow, Sukhanov issued instructions over the radiophone to the head of the security detachment at Foros; the General Secretary and the members of his family were to be cut off from the world. No person and no news was to be allowed in or out. Understood?

The words "Your orders will be carried out" crackled over the radio.

Baklanov produced a bottle of cognac from a leather satchel and, filling small plastic cups to the brim, handed them around. Everyone started to drink. "You have to hand it to him," General Varennikov shouted over the whine of the rotors. "Anyone else in his shoes would have signed the fucking decree."

Sukhanov leaned his head back against the helicopter's bulkhead and shut his eyes. "Everything now depends on isolating Boris Yeltsin," he shouted. "Without Gorbachev, without Yeltsin, the opposition will have nobody to rally around."

Yevgeny agreed. "Yeltsin," he said, his thoughts far away, "is definitely the key."

Returning to Moscow well after midnight, Yevgeny rang Aza's apartment from a public phone in the airport parking lot. Using a prearranged code phrase, he summoned her to a quick meeting in a garage across the alleyway from the back door of her building. He found her waiting in the shadows when he got there and they fell into each others arms. After a moment Yevgeny pushed her away and, in short disjointed sentences, explained what had happened: the putschists had unexpectedly moved up the date of the uprising; he and some others had flown down to Foros to try to browbeat Gorbachev into signing the decree establishing the State Committee for the State of Emergency; Gorbachev had flatly refused and was being held prisoner in the Foros compound. Even as they spoke, Marshal Yazov was promulgating Coded Telegram 8825 putting all military units on red alert. Within hours detachments of tanks and half-tracks loaded with combat troops would occupy strategic positions in Moscow, at which point the public would be informed that Gorbachev had suffered a stroke and resigned, and all governmental power was now in the hands of the State Committee for the State of Emergency.

Aza took the news calmly. The events were not unexpected, she noted, only the timing came as a surprise. She would borrow a car from a neighbor and drive out to warn Boris Nikolayevich immediately, she said. Yeltsin would undoubtedly barricade himself inside the massive Russian parliament building on the Moscow River known as the White House and try to rally the democratic forces to resist. If the White House phones were not cut off, Yevgeny might be able to reach her at the unlisted number in Yeltsin's suite of offices that she had given him. In the darkness she caressed the back of his neck with her hand. "Take care of yourself, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," she said, and she whispered a coda from their fleeting romance so many, many years before: "Each time I see you I seem to leave a bit of me with you."

The line, which Yevgeny instantly recognized, left him aching with regret at what might have been; aching with hope at what still could be.

Aza threaded the small Lada through the deserted streets of the capitol. She turned onto Kutuzovsky Prospekt and headed out of Moscow in the direction ofUsovo, the village where Boris Yeltsin had his dacha. She had stopped for a red light—the last thing she wanted was to be pulled over by the police for a traffic violation—when she realized that the ground was shaking under the wheels of the car. It felt like the foreshock of an earthquake. She heard the rumbling at the same moment she saw what was causing it. To her stupefaction, a long column of enormous tanks heading toward downtown Moscow hove into view on the avenue. A soldier wearing a leather helmet and goggles stood in the open turret of each tank. Suddenly the trembling of the earth matched the rhythm of Aza's heart; until this instant the putsch had been a more or less abstract concept, but the sight of the tank treads grinding along the cobblestones into Moscow made it painfully real. The tankers didn't stop for the red light, which struck Aza as outrageous. Who did they think they were! And then it hit her; it was preposterous to think that tanks heading for a putsch would obey traffic regulations. One soldier must have noticed there was a woman behind the wheel of the Lada because he made a gallant gesture as he rolled past, doffing an imaginary top hat in her direction.

The instant the light turned green Aza threw the car into gear and, racing past the line of tanks, sped toward Usovo. On the outskirts of Moscow, the buildings gave way to fields with ornate entrances to collective farms or factories set back from the road. Gorki-9, just before Usovo, was deathly still when she drove down the single paved street and turned onto a dirt lane and braked to a stop in front of a walled compound. The two soldiers on duty, country boys from the look of them, were dozing in the guardhouse when she rapped on the window. One of them recognized her and hurried out to open the gate.

"Kind of early for you, isn't it, little lady?" he said.

"I wanted to put Moscow behind me before traffic jammed the streets," she replied.

"If I had a car," the soldier remarked, "wouldn't bother me none being caught in traffic. I'd listen to American rock 'n roll music on the radio."

Parking around the side of the ill-proportioned wood-and-brick dacha, Aza made her way to the back door inside the screened-in porch. In the woods around the house, the birds had still not started to chirp. She took the skeleton key from its hiding place under a pot of geraniums and let herself into the kitchen. Climbing the wooden steps with the painted balusters, she went down the hallway and knocked softly on the door at the end of it. When there was no response she rapped more insistently. A gruff voice called from inside, "What the devil is going on?"

"Boris Nikolayevich, it's me, Azalia Isanova. I absolutely must speak to you."

Down the hall, several doors opened and Yeltsin's daughters, Lena and Tanya, quite frightened to be awakened at this hour, stuck their heads out. "What is happening?" asked Tariya, the younger of the two.

Yeltsin, wearing trousers with the suspenders dangling and a nightshirt, carrying a large-bored pistol in one hand, pulled open the door of the room. "Go back to bed," he called over Aza's head to his daughters. "Come in," Yeltsin told Aza. He knew that it wasn't good news that had brought her out from Moscow at dawn. He set the pistol down on the night table next to a nearly empty bottle of cognac. Pointing to a chair, pulling another over to it, he sat down facing her. "So you've had word from your informant?" he demanded.

Aza nodded. "He came to see me around one-thirty," she said, and she repeated what Yevgeny had told her: the putsch was underway, Gorbachev had refused to cooperate and was being held prisoner in the Crimea, Army and paratroop units had been ordered to take up positions in the capitol. She had seen one of them, a long line of giant tanks, heading into Moscow with her own eyes.

Yeltsin threaded the three thick fingers of his left hand through a shock of graying hair and stared at the floor, brooding. Then he shook his head several times, as if he were arguing with himself. "How did you get out here?" he asked.

"I borrowed a Lada from a neighbor."

He looked away, a preoccupied frown pasted on his face; Aza knew him well enough to realize that he was sorting through scenarios. "It is essential for me to return to the White House," he finally said, thinking out loud. "I'm sure to be on the KGB's list of those to be arrested. By now they'll have set up roadblocks around Moscow. If I go back in my limousine, surrounded by bodyguards, they are bound to recognize me and that will be the end of it. I have a better chance of getting through the checkpoints if I drive back with you. It could be dangerous—are you willing to take the risk?"

"I am, Boris Nikolayevich."

"You are a spunky woman, Azalia Isanova."

Yeltsin jumped to his feet and switched on a small radio tuned to an all-night Moscow station. It was playing a recording of Swan Lake, which was a sinister sign; Soviet stations always switched to Swan Lake in times of trouble. Then an announcer, his voice quivering with nervousness, interrupted the music to read a news bulletin: "Mikhail Gorbachev has stepped down for reasons of health. At this grave and critical hour, the State Committee for the State of Emergency has assumed power to deal with the mortal danger that looms over our great Motherland." Hearing the commotion, Lena and Tanya came flying into their father's bedroom. Yeltsin waved for them to be quiet. "The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail Gorbachev's initiative and designed to insure the country's dynamic development," the voice on the radio was saying, "has entered into a blind alley. The country is sinking into the quagmire of violence and lawlessness. Millions of people are demanding measures against the octopus of crime and glaring immorality."

Yeltsin snapped off the radio. "Millions of people are demanding democratization, not a new dictatorship of the proletariat," he declared. Peeling the nightshirt off over his head, he began to strap on a bullet-proof vest. He put on a white shirt and adjusted the suspenders, slipped into a brown suit jacket and dropped the pistol into a pocket. Turning to his daughters, he instructed them to phone their mother in the family's apartment in the city. "The line is certain to be tapped," he told them. "Say only that I heard the radio and left immediately by car for Sverdlovsk. Nothing more."

Outside, a particularly large shooting star etched a fiery path through Ursa Major. "Make a wish," Yeltsin ordered his daughters. He himself was not a religious man but he did believe in destiny; clearly the moment was at hand to fulfill his. Gazing up at the cloudless August sky he made a wish, then settled into the passenger's seat ofAza's Lada.

"Papa, only keep calm," Lena said as she closed the car door. "Remember that everything depends on you."

At first the ringing seemed far away and Jack McAuliffe integrated it into his dream; through a haze of memory, he could see himself handcuffing Leo Kritzky to a radiator as a bicycle bell reverberated through a dilapidated wooden hulk of a building to remind everyone that coffee and doughnuts were available in the hallway. Surfacing with infinite languidness from the depths of the dream, Jack realized where he was and what was ringing. In the darkness he groped for the telephone on the nightstand. Millie got to it first.

"Yes?"... "Who did you say you were?"... Out of long habit she murmured, "I'll see if he's here."

She smothered the mouthpiece in the pillow and whispered to Jack, "Its the Langley night duty officer, Jack. Are you here?"

Jack, breaking the surface, grumbled, "Where else would I be in the middle of the night except in bed with my wife." He found Millie's shoulder, then followed the arm to her hand and the telephone. Taking it from her, he growled, "McAuliffe speaking."

Wide awake now, Jack sat up in bed and shifted the phone to his other ear. "Jesus H. Christ, when did this come in?".. ."Okay, dispatch an Action Immediate to Moscow Station ordering all hands off the streets until the situation stabilizes. We don't want any of our people killed in crossfires. Sign my name to it. Next, track down Director Ebbitt—he's on a sailboat named Gentleman Rankers somewhere off Nantucket."... "Alert the Coast Guard if you can't raise him on the radio. Also notify the DD/0, Manny Ebbitt. Tell him to come straight in to the situation room. I'll be there in three quarters of an hour. I'll decide then whether we wake the President immediately or hold it for a morning briefing."

Jack felt around in the dark until he found the light switch. The sudden brightness blinded him and he covered his eyes with a forearm as he hung up the phone. "Balloon's gone up in Russia," he told Millie. "Leo got it wrong. Goddamn plotters launched their putsch twelve days ahead of schedule. Russian Army's occupying strategic positions in Moscow. Gorbachev's either dead or under arrest in the Crimea."

"Maybe I ought to go in with you, Jack, to get the public relations angle sorted out—Washington TV'll be breaking down our door in the morning to know why we didn't give the President some advance warning of a coup.

"As usual we can't tell them we did." He glanced at Millie—she looked every bit as appetizing as the day he first laid eyes on her in the Cloud Club. "Anyone ever told you you're one hell of a beautiful broad?" he asked.

"You have, Jack." She reached over and smoothed his disheveled mustache with the tips of her fingers. "Tell me one more time, I might begin to believe it."

"Believe it," he said. "It's gospel truth." Frowning in preoccupation, he pushed himself out of the bed. "Fucking Russians," he groaned. "If this coup succeeds it'll put them right back into the Bolshevik ice age."

Curled up on the couch in the living room, Tessa slept through the sound of Leo's alarm and the flushing of the toilet and the water cascading through the pipes in the wall. She finally opened an eye when the odor of percolating coffee reached her nostrils.

"Rise and shine, baby," Leo called from the kitchenette. "We want to get on the road at a decent hour if we're going to go to Zagorsk."

"I can handle the rise part," Tessa moaned. "Shine is beyond my diminished capacities."

The two of them had been covering Moscow like a blanket (as Tessa liked to say), visiting every nook and cranny of the Kremlin, St. Basils Cathedral, the labyrinthian halls of GUM, the Novodievitchi Monastery and cemetery (where Manny Ebbitt had been nabbed seventeen years ago this month), the Pushkin Museum. In the waning light of the late afternoons, they had explored lengths of the Moscow River embankment and segments of the Sadovaya Ring. Leo, at sixty-four, seemed to have a bottomless well of energy to draw on; it was Tessa, at thirty-seven, who ultimately cried uncle and asked if they couldn't put off seeing the rest of Moscow until tomorrow.

"Three more days," Leo said now, buttering a toasted bun (he did all his shopping at a special KGB store whose shelves were filled to overflowing) and handing it across to his daughter.

"I'll be back, Daddy"

"Will you?"

"You know I will. Maybe next time I can convince Vanessa... " She let the sentence trail off.

"I'd like that," Leo said quietly. "I'd like it a lot."

The telephone in the living room rang and Leo got up to answer it. Tessa could hear him talking to someone in urgent tones when a low throaty rumble rose from the street. She went over to the open window and parted the curtains and looked out to see the most startling sight of her life: a long column of monstrously large tanks lumbering down Frunzenskaya Embankment.

Behind her Leo was almost shouting into the phone. "What happened to the first of September, for God's sake? Twelve days ahead of schedule will throw any plans Torriti may have made into the garbage heap."

On the avenue, the tanks were splitting up into smaller formations and wheeling off in different directions. Two of the tanks remained behind at an intersection, the barrels of their cannons twitching as if they were searching for something to shoot at.

Leo could be heard saying, "How do they know Yeltsin fled to Sverdlovsk?" Then: "Without Yeltsin the democratic forces will have no one to lead them." Coming back into the kitchen, he heard the coughing of diesel motors on the Embankment and joined Tessa at the window.

"What's going on, Daddy?" she asked anxiously.

Shaking his head in disgust, he took in the scene. "The putsch has begun," he said.

It wasn't lost on Tessa that her father seemed to be extremely well informed. "Who's rebelling against whom?" she asked.

"The KGB, the military-industrial interests, the Army want to get rid of Gorbachev and set the clock back."

Tessa retrieved the 35-mm Nikon from her canvas carryall, fitted on a telescopic lens and took several shots of the two tanks at the intersection. People heading for work had gathered around them and seemed to be arguing with the commanders who stood in the turrets. "Hey, let's go down there," Tessa said, throwing some rolls of film and her camera in the carryall.

"The smartest thing would be for us to stay put."

"Daddy, I work for an American news magazine. I'm not about to hide in a closet if there's a real live coup d'etat going on."

Leo looked out the window again; he, too, was curious to see what was happening. "Well, as long as nobody's shooting, I suppose we could take a look."

Muscovites were streaming into the streets when Leo and Tessa emerged from Number 50 into the brilliant August sunlight. Knots of people had gathered at corners to exchange information. A large group swarmed around the two tanks at the intersection. Students bending under the weight of backpacks filled with textbooks kicked at the treads. "Make a U-turn and go back to your barracks," one of them cried.

"We have been given orders and we are obliged to follow them," the young officer in the turret tried to explain, but he was shouted down.

"How can you carry out orders to shoot at your own people?" pleaded a young woman balancing an infant on her hip.

"Answer if you can," an old woman challenged.

"Yes, Yes, answer!" others cried in chorus.

An old man shook his cane at the tanks. "Shame on you, shame on the parents who raised you," he called hoarsely.

"Pozor! Pozor!" the crowd chanted.

"Shame! Shame on anyone who shoots Russian bullets at Russian citizens," someone else shrieked.

"We are shooting at no one," declared the officer, visibly shaken.

Tessa circled the crowd, snapping pictures of the officer in the turret and the students shaking their fists at the tank. She reloaded her camera and, tugging at her father's elbow, headed in the direction of the Kremlin walls. At another intersection soldiers had formed a circle around two trucks and a Jeep, their Kalashnikovs slung under their arms. Three young girls wearing short summer skirts that swirled around their bare thighs spiked the stems of roses into the barrels of the rifles, to the cheers of the bystanders. At the Kremlin tower, a soldier could be seen hauling down the Russian tricolor from a flagpole and raising the red hammer-and-sickle standard in its place. A bearded man in a wheelchair watched with tears streaming down his cheeks. "We thought we'd seen the last of the Communists," he complained to everyone within earshot. A teenage boy on roller skates balanced a portable radio on a fire hydrant and turned up the volume. People clustered around. The distinctive voice of Boris Yeltsin's filled the air. "...soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior Ministry! At this difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against them. The days of the conspirators are numbered. The elected government is alive and well and functioning in the White House. Our long-suffering masses will find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour you will make the right decision. The honor of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people."

Leo pulled his daughter to one side and said breathlessly, "Yeltsin didn't run away to Sverdlovsk! He's broadcasting from the White House. There still may be a shred of hope."

"What is the White House, Daddy?"

"The Russian parliament building on the Moscow River."

"Then that's where we ought to go."

Around them others were beginning to get the same idea. "To the White House," a girl with pigtails cried excitedly. As if drawn by a magnet, dozens drifted in the direction of the Arbat, the broad artery that led to the Kalinin Bridge and the Moscow River. With rivulets of Russians streaming into the Arbat, the march to the river thickened to hundreds. By the time the massive white Parliament building at the end of the Arbat came into view, the crowd had swelled to thousands. Leo, bobbing in currents of people, had the sensation of being caught up in a maelstrom; his feet didn't seem to touch the ground as he was carried along with the horde. All of a sudden protecting Yeltsin and the last bastion of democratization, the White House, seemed like a sacred mission, one that would vindicate his life-long allegiance to the Soviet Union.

At the White House, Afghan veterans wearing bits of their old uniforms and armed with anything that came to hand—kitchen knives, socks filled with sand, occasionally a pistol—were directing the students in the construction of barricades. Some were overturning automobiles and a city bus, others were felling trees or dragging over bathtubs stolen from a nearby building site, still others were prying up cobblestones with crowbars. The crewmen of the ten Taman Guard tanks drawn up in a semicircle around the White House sat on their vehicles, smoking and watching but not intervening. Minutes after bells in the city pealed the noon hour, a cheer rose from the hot asphalt and gradually grew louder until it appeared as if the ground itself was erupting. "Look," Leo yelled, pointing to the front doors of the Parliament building. The bulky figure of a tall man with a shock of gray hair could be seen standing on the top step, his arms thrust high over his head, his fingers splayed into v-for-victory signs. "It's Yeltsin," Leo shouted into his daughter's ear.

Scrambling onto the hood of a car, Tessa took several photographs, then elbowed her way through the crowd to get a closer look. Leo trailed after her. At the White House, Yeltsin descended the steps and clambered onto a T-72 with the number 110 stenciled on the side of the turret. The crowd grew silent. Journalists held out microphones to capture what he said. "Citizens of Russia," he bellowed, his voice booming over the heads of the demonstrators, "they are attempting to remove the legally elected president of the country from power. We are dealing with a right-wing anti-constitutional coup d'etat. Accordingly we proclaim all decisions and decrees of this State Committee to be illegal."

Yeltsin's short speech was greeted with wild applause. He climbed down from the tank and chatted for a moment with one of the Taman Guard officers. Surprisingly, the officer snapped off a smart salute. Beaming, Yeltsin made his way up the steps, through supporters who thumped him on the back or pumped his hand, and disappeared into the building.

The motors on the ten Taman Guard tanks revved and black fumes belched from their exhausts. And to everyone's utter astonishment, the gunners in the tanks swiveled their cannons away from the Parliament building. A raw cry of pure joy rose from the masses as people realized that the Taman tankers, moved by Yeltsin's speech, had decided to defend the White House, not attack it.

As the afternoon wore on, thousands more spilled into the plaza around the Parliament building. Estimates picked up from bulletins on portable radios put the crowd at fifteen thousand, then twenty thousand, then twenty-five thousand. The Taman officers and the Afghan veterans began to impose order on what many were calling the counterrevolution. The barricades grew higher and thicker and sturdier. Students on motorcycles were sent out to reconnoiter the city and report back with news of troop movements. Girls, some of them prostitutes who worked the underground passages near the Kremlin, hauled cartons of food and drink and distributed them to the demonstrators blocking the approaches to the White House with their bodies.

At one point Tessa noticed antennas on the roof of the building. "Do you think the phones are still working?" she asked.

Leo looked up at the antennas. "The ones that work off satellites probably are."

"If I could get to a phone, I might be able to call Washington and give my editors a first-hand account of what's happening here. It could help turn world opinion against the coup."

Leo immediately saw the advantages in what she was suggesting. "It's worth a try."

Pushing through the crowd, the two of them went around to entrance number twenty-two at the side of the building. The doors were guarded by some tough-looking Afghan veterans armed with two machine guns and a handful of pistols. One of the veterans was peering through binoculars at the hotel across the street. "Stay alert—there are snipers taking up positions in the upper windows," he called. Leo quickly explained in Russian that the young woman with him was an American journalist. One of the guards glanced at Tessa's press card, which he was unable to read, and waved them through.

Inside, couriers scurried through the corridors delivering messages attached to clipboards. Secretaries pushed carts loaded with Molotov cocktails or sheets ripped into strips to make bandages. Young guards from private security companies were teaching university students how to load and fire Kalashnikovs. In one room on the third floor, down the hall from Yeltsin's command bunker, they found a woman faxing Yeltsin's denunciation of the putsch to Party organizations and factories and local governments around the country. Leo explained that the American journalist with him needed a telephone to call out the story of the counterrevolution. The woman stopped what she was doing and took them into a smaller office with a phone on a table. "This one works off a satellite," she told Tessa in careful English. "If you get through to America keep the line open. When we are attacked, you must lock yourself in and let the world know what is happening."

The woman turned to stare out a window, a faraway look in her eyes. "I have always disliked summers," she remarked in Russian. "This one is no exception." She looked back at Leo. "What is your name?"

"Kritzky," he replied. "She is my daughter."

"Mine is Azalia Isanova Lebowitz. An assault could come at any moment. We are short of guards for Yeltsin's office. Will you volunteer?"

"Of course I will."

Leo left Tessa dialing a number and went down the corridor to the double door leading to Yeltsin's command bunker. From inside, phones could be heard ringing insistently. From time to time Yeltsin's booming voice echoed through the rooms. "The Ukrainian KGB chief, Golushko, phoned to say he didn't support the coup," he cried. In the hallway, Leo helped himself to a Kalashnikov and several clips of ammunition from a carton on the floor and joined a heavy man standing sentry duty at the door, an AK-47 in his strong hands.

"Do you know how to work that thing?" the man inquired in Russian.

"Not really," Leo answered.

"Here, I'll show you. It's not very complicated. You drive home the clip until you hear a solid click. If you intend to shoot you must work the first round into the barrel. Then there is nothing left but to aim and squeeze the trigger. I'll put it on single action firing so the gun won't climb up on you, which is what happens when you shoot in bursts. Do you think you have it?"

"Work the first round into the barrel, aim, squeeze the trigger."

The man smiled warmly. "Pity the counterrevolution that relies on the likes of us to defend it." He held out his hand. "Rostropovich, Mstislav," he said, bowing slightly as he introduced himself.

Leo took the hand of the world-famous Russian cellist. "Kritzky, Leo," he said.

"It all comes down to this moment in this place—the struggle to change Russia," Rostropovich remarked.

Leo nodded in fervent agreement. The two of them turned and, planting their backs against the wall, surveyed the traffic in the corridor.

Wedged into a folding aluminum garden chair in the rooftop solarium, one empty and one full bottle of Scotch within arm's reach on the deck, Harvey Torriti enjoyed a bird's-eye view of the events unfolding in the streets around the White House, across the river from the Hotel Ukraine. He had swapped his Swatch for a pair of Red Army binoculars before taking the elevator to the twenty-ninth floor late in the afternoon and hauling his carcass up the last staircase, an exertion that left him vowing to start smoking again since he couldn't see what stopping had done for his respiration. Moscow had cooled down once the sun dipped below the industrial haze on the horizon and the lights of the city had flickered on peacefully enough. It was only when the Sorcerer peered through the binoculars that the scene began to look more ominous. The concierge at the desk in the lobby had been vague about what was going on outside. There was some sort of military exercise under way, he guessed. Certainly nothing to be alarmed about. Russia, after all, was a civilized country where the rule of law prevailed. What about the mob at that white building on the other side of the river? Torriti had asked. Pensioners, the concierge had explained with a contemptuous wave of his hand, bitching about inflation.

The pensioners bitching about inflation, some fifty thousand strong if you believed the British journalists in the lobby, had settled down for the night around the white building. Through the binoculars Torriti could make out clusters of them huddled around dozens of campfires. The light from the flames illuminated shadowy figures who were laboring to pile desks and park benches and potbellied stoves onto the already towering barricades.

Torriti uncapped the last bottle of Scotch and treated himself to one for the road even though he had no intention of hitting the road. It was a crying shame—a few more days and his gnomelike friend Rappaport, surrounded by Uighur guardian angels, might have been able to fulfill the contracts that Torriti had put out on ten of the leaders of the uprising. No plotters, no putsch. The Sorcerer wondered what had pushed them to advance D-day. He'd probably never know. Well, what the hell—you win some, you lose some, in the end it pretty much evened out.

He brought the binoculars back up to his red-rimmed eyes. Near the Kremlin, on the Lenin Hills, along several of the wider boulevards visible from the Ukraine's roof, long lines of hooded headlights could be seen snaking in one direction or another. "Tanks," the Sorcerer muttered to himself. He wondered where Leo Kritzky was at this moment. Probably locked himself in his apartment until the tempest passed. It crossed the Sorcerer's mind that he might not be safe here on the roof—he remembered Ebbitt telling him once how Soviet tanks invading Budapest in '56 had shot out the lower floors of buildings to bring the upper floors crashing down on them. Torriti had gotten off to a sour start in Berlin with Ebbitt—Jesus, that was a lifetime ago!—but he'd turned out to be a good brick after all. And when it came to Russian tanks, Ebbitt knew what he was talking about—he'd witnessed the Budapest fiasco with his own eyes. Still, if the tanks attacked, it wouldn't be the Hotel Ukraine with all the foreigners inside. It would be the white building across the street. But to get close enough to shoot out the bottom floors the tanks would have to crush a lot of warm bodies blocking the streets.

Would the generals and the KGB conspirators lose their nerve when it came down to shedding Russian blood? Would the demonstrators in the streets break and run, if and when the kettle boiled over?

From far below, an indistinct cry rose from the gutters around the white building. Heaving himself out of the chair, Torriti shambled over to the guardrail and angled his ear in the direction of the sound. Words seemed to impregnate the currents of cool air drifting in from the river. Ross-something. Rossiya! That was it. Rossiya! Rossiya! It spread through the streets and came back again like an echo. Rossiya! Rossiya! Rossiya!

Torriti scratched at his ass with a fat knuckle. He had frittered away the best years of his life locked in combat with this Rossiya. And here he was, boozing it up on a Moscow rooftop and rooting for it to survive.

Go figure!

Azalia Isanova was running on raw nerves and nervous energy. Aside from an occasional catnap on a sofa, she spent most of her waking hours keeping the fax machines humming with Yeltsin's ringing proclamations declaring the putsch not only illegal but downright evil. The barrage of faxes dispatched to the far corners of the immense Soviet empire was starting to bear fruit. Pledges of loyalty to the elected central government trickled in from local Party organizations. Collective farms in the Caucuses, regional dumas in Central Asia, veteran groups as far away as the Kamchaka Peninsula telexed their support. Yeltsin himself was jubilant when Aza brought word that 100,000 people had rallied in Sverdlovsk's main square to denounce the putschists. Now, on the second night of the coup d'etat, as the war of nerves dragged on, rumors became rampant. Such-and-such a tank unit was said to have been ordered to come down from the Lenin Hills and clear the approaches to the White House. Elite KGB troops had been spotted boarding helicopters at an airbase near Moscow. The KGB chairman, Kryuchkov, was reported to have assembled his lieutenants in a Lubyanka conference room and given them an ultimatum: Crush the counterrevolution within twenty-four hours.

During a lull on the second night of the putsch, Aza abandoned her bank of fax machines for a few minutes and wandered over to an open window for a breath of fresh air. Three floors below, demonstrators were breaking up enough furniture to feed the campfires for another long night. On a makeshift stage, middle-level government officials loyal to Yeltsin were taking turns at a microphone, boosting morale of the counterrevolutionists as best they could. Then Yevgeny Yevtushenko could be seen striding up to the microphone. His piercing poet's voice, familiar to every Russian, reverberated through the plaza from speakers fixed to lampposts. "Nyet!" he cried.

"Russia will not fall again on her knees for interminable years. With us are Pushkin, Tolstoy. With us stands the whole awakened people. And the Russian Parliament, like a wounded marble swan of freedom, defended by the people, swims into immortality."

The cheers were still ringing in Aza's ears when the telephone she kept in a drawer of her desk buzzed. She bolted over, yanked open the drawer and plucked the phone from its cradle. "Of course it's me," she breathed. "I am the only one to answer this phone... For me it is the same. Every time you call my heart leaps with an elation that defies description. I only worry that someone will catch you calling... When this is over, dear heart... Yes, yes, with all my soul and all my body yes... When is this to happen?... You are sure it is only a probing action, not the advance guard for a full-blown attack?... And they suspect nothing?... I pray to heaven it is true. Only be careful. Call when you have news but not more often. Protect yourself... If only it turns out that way. Hang up, I beg you... Then I will do it for you. Goodbye for now."

Aza forced herself to cut the line. She stood for a long moment listening to the dial tone. Then, sighing deeply, she went down the hall to Yeltsin's command center. Boris Nikolayevich, his hair unkempt, his eyes rimmed with red from sleeplessness and anxiety, prowled back and forth in an inner office dictating yet another proclamation to an exhausted secretary. He stopped in mid-phrase when he noticed Aza. She took him aside and quickly told him what she had learned from her source. Yeltsin summoned one of the Afghan veterans and passed the information on to him. The officer hurried down to the second-floor canteen that had been transformed into a dormitory; people who served as guards at the White House doors or inside the building slept in shifts on blankets folded on the floor. The officer buttonholed the group just coming off duty and explained the situation. Three T-72s had been ordered to probe a barricade on the Garden Ring Road and test the will of the defenders. It was vital that the Yeltsin loyalists put up a strong show of force, because conclusions about the counterrevolution's will to resist would obviously be drawn by the putschists. The Afghan officer called for volunteers. Seven students and six veterans, as well as an older man who had been standing shifts outside the command center, raised their hands.

The squad members, jamming spare clips into their pockets and grabbing several cartons filled with Molotov cocktails, commandeered three taxis in the basement garage and, after inching through the masses of people in the plaza, headed into the city. The taxis turned off the Arbat onto the Ring Road and sped along it until they reached the barricade. It was half an hour to midnight and most of the defenders had melted away to snatch some sleep. Only a handful of students, half of them girls, remained. The Afghan officer distributed the Molotov cocktails, two to each man, and posted his volunteers on either side of the street up from the barricade.

At midnight three large tanks with hooded headlights swung into view and crawled toward the barricade, grinding up the pavement under their treads. When they came abreast of the defenders hiding in alleyways off the Ring Road, the Afghan officer blew shrilly on a whistle. From both sides of the road, dark figures grasping wine bottles with burning wicks wedged in the necks darted toward the tanks. The tankers must have been equipped with night-vision goggles because the turrets immediately swiveled to the sides and machine guns raked the street. The first two students were cut down before they got within throwing distance. The other fighters, shooting at the tanks from the alleyways, diverted the attention of the gunners in the turrets. In the confusion two more defenders scurried onto the Ring Road. The first one got close enough to fling a Molotov cocktail at the treads of the lead tank, causing it to veer into a fire hydrant. The gunner in the turret pitched forward and his machine gun, silenced, fell off to one side. At that moment the second fighter, crouching low, lumbered in from the blind side and scrambled onto the back of the tank and pitched his Molotov cocktail directly down through the open hatch. There was a flash of flames, against which the fighter was silhouetted. The Afghan officer screamed from the side, "Run!" The fighter turned to jump off the burning tank—too late. The gunner on the second tank jerked the gun carriage around and opened fire at the silhouetted figure. Impaled on the bullets stabbing into his chest, the fighter was flung back against the burning turret. The ammunition inside the vehicle began to explode as the fighter's body slid sideways off the tank into the street. A burst of radio static from the second tank filled the night. The drivers of the two remaining vehicles revved their engines and the tanks reversed away from the burning hulk. A roar went up from the barricade and the alleyways.

The probe had been turned back.

The volunteers recovered the bodies of their three dead comrades and brought them to the White House, where they were laid out on the makeshift stage. Women, their eyes awash with tears, sponged away the blood as best they could and covered the corpses with flowers. The Afghan veterans, caps in hand, filed past to pay their respects. An Orthodox priest wearing a black pope's hat and robes placed a small wooden cross on the heart of each dead man.

Tessa was sound asleep at a desk, her head buried in her arms, when Azalia Isanova shook her awake.

"Has the attack begun?" Tessa demanded when she saw the tears streaming down Azalia's cheeks.

"It is about your father," Aza said so softly that Tessa wasn't sure she had heard correctly.

"My father?"

"There was an attack on the Ring Road... three tanks... volunteers went out to stop them... destroyed the first and turned back the others... heavy price... three of our defenders were killed. Your father was one of them."

Tessa was too numb to cry. "I must see him," she whispered.

Aza took her by the hand and led her past the students and Afghan veterans lining the corridors and staircase to the great entrance of the White House, and up onto the makeshift stage outside its doors. The masses of people lost in the darkness of the plaza were perfectly still as Tessa sank to her knees next to the body of her father. At first she was afraid to touch him for fear of hurting him even more. Leo's chest looked as if it had been crushed by a sledgehammer. The ankle of one foot was turned out at an angle that could only mean the bone had been pulverized. His face, grown ten years older in twenty-four hours, appeared swollen and colorless. His eyes were shut. Dried blood stained one lid. And yet... and yet he looked, to Tessa's anguished eyes, as if he had finally found a semblance of peace.

She removed the cross from her father's broken chest and handed it to the priest. "He wasn't Christian, you see," she pointed out. "He wasn't really Jewish, either. He was—" Her voice faltered. It suddenly seemed important to provide a requiem. "He was an honorable man doing what he thought was right."

During a break in the tense late-night sessions at Kryuchkov's Lubyanka war room, Yevgeny wandered down the corridor to a canteen where sandwiches and beer had been set out and helped himself to a snack. On the way back to the conference hall, he passed the open door of an office in which a KGB captain was monitoring the pirate radio station broadcasting from the White House. Listening from the door, Yevgeny heard a female announcer reading Boris Yeltsin's latest defiant proclamation. In mid-sentence she interrupted the program with an important bulletin—sources at the White House were reporting that a pitched battle had taken place in the early hours of the morning between forces loyal to the State Committee for the State of Emergency and Yeltsin's counterrevolutionists. The KGB captain turned up the volume and scrawled notes on a pad. Yevgeny, munching on a sandwich, moved closer.

"...three tanks sent by the putschists were stopped by freedom fighters when they tried to break through an outer barricade on the Garden Ring Road. The lead tank was destroyed in the action but at great cost. Three of the gallant fighters laid down their lives. All honor to the heroes: Dmitri Komar, Ilya Krichevsky and Leon Kritzky—"

Yevgeny, dazed, asked, "Did she say Kritzky?"

The captain looked at his notes. "Leon Kritzky. Yes. You know him?"

"I know someone named Kritzky," Yevgeny said, thinking fast, "but his first name isn't Leon. And my Kritzky is against Yeltsin."

Yevgeny found his way to the men's room and threw some cold water on his face. He swayed forward until his forehead was touching the mirror. How could such a thing have happened? How could Leo, who had risked his life for thirty years in the service of the Socialist state, have become a victim of the State Committee for the State of Emergency? All he had to do was lock himself in his Embankment apartment. What on earth had lured him into the streets at a time like this? What the hell was he doing at his age defending a barricade?

The irony of Leo's death staggered Yevgeny. Straightening, he stared at his reflection in the mirror and caught a glimpse of a death mask. And he felt a filament of sanity unravel somewhere in his skull.

He knew what had to be done to avenge Leo's death.

Retrieving his car from the basement garage, Yevgeny drove through the deserted streets to the private KGB clinic. As he pushed through the revolving door with the tarnished gold hammer and sickle over it, he realized that he had no memory of how he had gotten there. In the early hours of the morning, only an old, half-blind porter was on duty in the main hall. He touched his cap when he noticed the shadow of a man heading for the staircase.

"If you please, your name?" he called. "I am required to log visitors in my register."

"Ozolin," Yevgeny said.

"And how are you spelling Ozolin?"

"O-Z-O-L-I-N."

Moving as if in a dream where the most extraordinary events came across as perfectly unremarkable, Yevgeny made his way down the hallway on the fourth floor to the door with the scrap of paper taped to it that read, "Zhilov, Pavel Semyonovich." Inside, yellowish light from the street splashed the ceiling. In the undulating darkness, he could detect the purr of a battery-powered pump and the labored breathing of the ghostly figure in the metal hospital bed. Moving closer, Yevgeny's eyes fell on the clipboard at the foot of the bed. Written in ink across it was the notation, "Chest pains compatible with enlarged heart." He moved around to the side of the mattress and stared down at the skeletal body covered with a urine-stained sheet. Small bubbles of air seemed to burst in Starik's throat as his medication flowed through the intravenous drip attached to the catheter in his chest.

So this is what Tolstoy looked like, stretched out on a wooden bench at the Astapovo Station, his straggly beard matted with phlegm and coughed-up blood, his jaw gnashing, the petrified stationmaster Ozolin leaning over him, praying the famous fossil of a man would live long enough to die somewhere else. Starik stirred and a moan escaped his lips. He must have sensed the presence of another human being because his bony fingers reached out and wrapped themselves around Yevgeny's wrist.

"Please," he wheezed, forcing the words out the side of his mouth that wasn't paralyzed. "Tell me... is the game over?"

"Despite all your efforts to keep it going, it is ending, Pavel Semyonovich. Your side is going to lose."

Starik heaved himself onto an elbow and gaped through crazed eyes at the paint peeling from a wall. "Do you see it?" he cried.

"See what?"

"The Red Queen! She is running into the wood where things have no name. Faster! Faster before it catches you!" Spent, Starik collapsed back onto the mattress.

Yevgeny reached down to the shelf of the night table and groped around until he found the line connecting the small pump to the battery. He gripped it and yanked it out of the socket. The murmur of the pump broke off abruptly.

With the pump no longer injecting the French drug Flolan into Starik's body, his lungs would gradually fill with fluid. By the time the nurse on the morning shift came around to check him, he would be long dead. Already his breathing was more labored. When he spoke again, ranting about the Red Queen, there was a shallow metallic rasp between each word as he struggled to suck in air.

Yevgeny backed away from the bed of the drowning man until he could no longer make out his voice. Turning, he hurried from the clinic. There were still things he had to do before the sweet tide of insanity ebbed.

Yeltsin hadn't closed his eyes since the start of the putsch. Physically exhausted, mentally drained, he slumped in a chair, his jaw wedged in a palm, desperately trying to focus on Aza's mouth and the words coming out of it. "Say again more slowly," he instructed her. She started from the beginning. Her source in Lubyanka had phoned again to report that KGB Chairman Kryuchkov was pushing for a decisive attack that night. The stratagem, dubbed Operation Thunder by the military planners, was straightforward: before dawn the protesters around the White House would be dispersed by water cannons and tear gas, at which point elite KGB and paratroop units would penetrate the area and blast through the buildings doors with grenade launchers. At precisely the same moment helicopter gunships would deposit troops on the roof. The two forces would spread out and comb the building for Yeltsin, who would be killed resisting arrest. If the operation went according to plan the whole thing would be over in minutes.

Yeltsin let the information sink in. He mumbled something about how it was a godsend to have a spy at the heart of the putsch. Then he summoned the Afghan officers and had Aza repeat what she had told him. The group brainstormed for several minutes, after which Yeltsin issued his orders. Buckets of water were to be placed in the plaza around the White House so that demonstrators could wet pieces of cloth and use them as masks to protect themselves from the tear gas. The barricades were to be reinforced, additional Molotov cocktails were to be distributed to stop the water cannons. The roof of the White House was to be immediately strewn with office furniture to make it more difficult for the helicopters to land. Yeltsin himself, along with his senior aides, would retreat to a sub-basement bunker and lock himself behind a fifty-centimeter-thick steel door. "The flame of resistance burns as long as I am alive," he said tiredly.

At the Lubyanka, the debate raged on around the oval table. Some of the middle-level field commanders who had been assigned to lead Operation Thunder were having second thoughts. At first the reservations were couched in mundane operational terms:

"How are we to land helicopters on a roof piled high with furniture?"

"What if Yeltsin manages to slip away in the confusion?"

"We have to consider worst-case scenarios. What will happen if we kill several thousand defenders and still don't capture Yeltsin?"

"What if Yeltsin escapes to the Urals and goes through with his threat to form a shadow government?"

"What if our troops refuse to fire on the people manning the barricades? What then?"

"Worse still, what if our troops attack and are turned back?"

As the discussion dragged on the criticism became more pointed. Sensing that the balance was slowly tilting against them, the putsch leaders tried desperately to save the day. They argued that the stalemate worked for the counterrevolutionists; as long as the White House held out people would continue to rally to Yeltsin. And if Yeltsin were permitted to prevail, the careers, the lives of all those who had sided with the putsch would be in jeopardy.

A combat general who had been for the attack when it was first proposed wavered. "I don't know—if this blows up in our faces, it's the Army's reputation that will bear the stain."

"The Party leadership walks away when things turn sour—the war in Afghanistan is the most recent example," complained another war hero.

The press baron Uritzky pleaded with the field commanders. If Gorbachev and Yeltsin retained power, they would slash military budgets and humiliate the once-proud Soviet army. Gorbachev's military adviser, Marshal Akhromeyev, who had rushed back to Moscow from vacation to join the coup, insisted that it was too late to back down; once the putsch had been launched the plotters had no option but to go forward, if only to preserve the Army's credibility.

"We have something more important than credibility—we have the respect of the masses, " observed an older officer who had remained silent up to now. "All that goodwill will disappear overnight if we fire on our brothers and sisters in the streets of the capitol."

One senior commander headed for the door in disgust. "They want to smear the Army in blood. I for one will not storm the White House."

A much-decorated Air Force commander agreed. "I categorically refuse to send my helicopters into the air. You'll have to get somebody else to issue the order."

Under the noses of the ringleaders the putsch began to unravel in a flurry of recriminations. Watching from the sill of a window, Yevgeny concluded that the senior military commanders had lost their nerve. As the mood deteriorated, bottles of liquor appeared on the conference table and the putschists began the serious business of drinking themselves into a stupor. Yevgeny joined two others who were heading for the toilet, then slipped into a small office with a telephone on the desk. He lit the green-shaded desk lamp and dialed a number and listened to the phone ringing in a drawer on the other end. When Aza finally came on the line Yevgeny could barely repress the triumph in his voice.

"Yeltsin can go to sleep," he told her. "They have called off the attack... No, the leaders were willing to take the risk. In the end it was the field commanders who didn't have the appetite for bloodshed... I think its over. Without the army behind them, the putschists have no way of swaying the masses. Yeltsin has won... To tell the truth I can hardly believe it either. In a few hours the sun will rise on a new Russia. Things will never be the same... Let us meet at—" Yevgeny stiffened as his ear caught a faint echo in the phone. "Is someone else on this line?" he asked quietly. "Not to worry. It must be my imagination. We will meet at your flat at the end of the afternoon... Yes. For me, too. We will slow down the time left to us so that each instant lasts an eternity."

When he heard Aza hang up, Yevgeny kept the phone pressed to his ear. Twenty seconds went by. Then there was a second soft click on the line that caused him to catch his breath. Perhaps he was jumping at shadows; perhaps it originated with the telephone exchange or the central switchboard operator. Turning off the desk lamp, he walked into the outer office. He stood for a moment waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. Hearing the rustle of fabric, he peered into the shadows and realized that someone was in the doorway.

A woman's voice, seething with pent-up fury, hissed, "So it was you, Yevgeny Alexandrovich, the traitor in our ranks who betrayed us to the counterrevolution."

He knew the voice—it belonged to Mathilde, the wife of the press baron Uritzky. An overhead light snapped on and she stepped out of the shadows to confront him. Buried in her fist was a metallic object so small that he thought it could only be a lipstick.

"It was not lost on us that at every turn the counterrevolutionists seemed to know what we were doing. My husband told Kryuchkov there was a traitor in our midst but he didn't pay attention. He was so sure Yeltsin would cave in once he realized the hopelessness of his position."

"He miscalculated," Yevgeny remarked.

"So did you!"

Mathilde stepped closer and raised the object in her fist and pointed it at Yevgeny's forehead. It dawned on him what she was holding and he understood there would be no time left to slow down. "To the success," he murmured, "of our hopeless—"

All of Moscow erupted in a paroxysm of jubilation. On the sweating asphalt avenues around the Kremlin, long convoys of tanks and armored personnel carriers headed out of the city, cheered on by women tossing carnations and roses up to the laughing soldiers. Bystanders lining the route applauded the departing troops who, clearly relieved to be heading back to their barracks, applauded back. "Thanks to God, we're going home," one officer shouted from the turret of a tank.

Outside the Central Committee building, thousands of demonstrators chanted defiantly, "Dissolve the Party" and "Smash the KGB." Communist functionaries could be seen fleeing from side entrances carting off everything that wasn't bolted down—fax machines, computers, television sets, video recorders, air conditioners, lamps, desk chairs. Word spread that the apparatchiki still inside were feeding mountains of paperwork into shredders; in their panic to destroy evidence of the putsch the Communists neglected to remove the paperclips, causing the machines to break down. When a portable radio at a kiosk blared the news that Yeltsin was said to be preparing a decree suspending the activities of the Russian Communist Party, effectively ending seventy-four years of Bolshevik dictatorship, people linked arms and danced euphorically. In parks and squares around the city, construction workers armed with crowbars pried the statues of Old Bolsheviks from their pedestals and smashed them against the ground. In the great square outside the Lubyanka, a crane lifted the enormous statue of Feliks Dzershinsky off its base. For a few delicious minutes Dzerzhinsky, the cruel Pole who in 1917 created the Cheka, the precursor of the despised KGB, hung from the cable around his neck while the crowd cheered hoarsely.

Sleepwalking through streets teeming with people celebrating the victory of something they barely understood and the defeat of something they understood only too well, Aza happened to witness what newspapers would call "the execution of the executioner." But even that brought her no relief from the ache of the emptiness that would fill the rest of her life.

Only the notion that she might somehow find a way to speed time up gave her a measure of comfort.

The Uighurs checked the stairwell off the fifth floor of the Hotel Ukraine and waved to Endel Rappaport to tell him the coast was clear. Rappaport went in first and held the door for the Sorcerer. "We can talk here," he told Torriti as the heavy fire door swung closed behind him.

"Who's he?" asked the Sorcerer, eyeing the short, slender Russian leaning against a wall; in his early forties and dressed in a smart business suit, he certainly wasn't one of Rappaport's Uighurs. There was a deadpan expression in his humorless eyes; to Torriti, the stranger looked as if he could be bored to death by an assassin.

Rappaport chuckled. "Vladimir is a business associate from Dresden."

"Hello to you, Vladimir," ventured Torriti.

Vladimir didn't crack a smile or respond.

Rappaport asked Torriti, "When are you flying out?"

"This afternoon."

Rappaport, wearing a double-breasted blazer with gold buttons and carrying a walking stick with a golden dog's head on top, waggled his pinkie in the Sorcerer's face. "The country you are leaving is not the same as the one you came to."

"For sure," Torriti conceded. "Yeltsin will pack Gorbachev off into retirement and destroy the Communist Party, so far so good. Sixty-four thousand dollar question is, what's going to take its place?"

"Anything will be better than what we had," Rappaport contended.

"Hey, you got to live here, pal, not me."

Rappaport cleared his throat. "About those contracts." When Torriti glanced at the dour Russian against the wall, Rappaport said, "You can speak in front of him—I have no secrets from Vladimir."

"About those contracts," the Sorcerer agreed.

"Given who you are, given whom you represent, my associates are eager to do the right thing. In light of the fact that the contracts were supposed to be fulfilled before the recent events, they are ready to cancel the contracts and return the sums deposited in Switzerland."

The Sorcerer jowls quivered with the comedy of the situation. "In the United States of America," he said, "people have been heard to say, Better late than never.

"Do I understand you correctly, Mr. Sorcerer? Despite the lateness of the hour, you still wish my associates to deliver on these contracts?"

"Look at the situation from my point of view, friend. My clients want to make sure Yeltsin won't have the same jokers diddling with him this time next year."

The gnome-like Russian looked up at the Sorcerer. "You are one in a thousand, Mr. Sorcerer." He thrust out a hand and the Sorcerer gave it a limp shake.

"It's a pleasure to do business with you, Endel. You don't mind I call you Endel? I feel as if we've known each other for weeks. Listen, I'm concerned about your remuneration. I wouldn't want you to come away from all this without a little something for your troubles."

"I am moved almost but not quite to tears by your concern, Mr. Sorcerer. Rest assured, I have been in touch with the Rabbi, who has been in touch with someone who goes by the appellation of Devisenbeschaffer—"

Torriti was startled. "You know of the existence of the currency acquirer?"

Endel Rappaport's thick lips curled into a sheepish smirk. "The legendary Rabbi Hillel, who made something a name for himself in the second century, is said to have posed the ultimate question: If I am not for myself, who is for me? Vladimir here has been tracking the Devisenbeschaffer's pecuniary activities in Dresden for me. A third of what the Rabbi gets from the currency acquirer will wind up in Swiss accounts that I control."

"People like me do not meet people like you every day of the week," Torriti said seriously. "A third of what the Rabbi gets is a pretty penny. What are you going to do with all that money?"

The smirk froze on Rappaport's face. "Before they cut off my fingers I was a student of the violin. Since then I have not been able to listen to music. What I am going to do with my share of the money is get even."

"Even with who?"

"Russia."

"Yeah, well, I'm glad we never got to cross paths during the Cold War. Your premature death would have weighed on my conscience."

Rappaport's brow wrinkled in pain. "I feel the same about you. Do have a good trip back to wherever it is you are going."

"I'm heading home," Torriti said. "The end of the line is East of Eden, a paradise on earth for golfers and/or alcoholics."

Merriment danced in Rappaport's eyes. "I need not ask which category you fall into."

Torriti had to concede the point. "No, I don't suppose you do."

The deaths were all listed on police blotters as accidents or suicides.

Nikolai Izvolsky, the Central Committee's financial wizard who had siphoned Party funds to the Devisenbeschaffer in Germany, fell to his death from the roof of a Moscow apartment house while taking the air late one night. A crotchety old woman in the next building later told police that she had seen four men on the roof next door moments before she heard the scream and the police sirens. As the woman was well known in the local precinct for inventing stories of Peeping Toms on the roofs of adjacent buildings, the state procurator discounted her testimony and ruled the death an accident.

The press baron Pavel Uritzky and his wife, Mathilde, were discovered asphyxiated in their BMW parked in the private garage behind their kottedzhi on the edge of Moscow. One end of a garden hose had been inserted into the exhaust pipe, the other end run into the ventilation tubing under the hood. The nurse in the ambulance responding to the frantic call from the couple's butler broke the car window with a hammer, switched off the motor, dragged the bodies outside and administered oxygen, but it was too late. In his subsequent declaration to the authorities, the nurse mentioned having detected the pungent odor of chloroform in the garage. The first policemen on the scene made no mention of this and the question of chloroform was relegated to a footnote in the official report. The state procurator noted that the car doors had been locked on the inside, with the remote door control device attached to the key in the ignition. The second remote device, normally in Mathilde's possession, was never found but no conclusions were drawn from this. Careful examination revealed no bruises on the corpses and no evidence under the fingernails to indicate there had been a struggle. No suicide note was found. Pavel Uritzky had been one of the ring-leaders of the putsch and deeply depressed at its failure. Mathilde was linked to the shooting of the banking magnet Tsipin and said to be terrified of being prosecuted. The deaths of the Uritzkys were listed as a double suicide and the case was closed.

Moscow neighbors of Boris Pugo heard what sounded like a shot and summoned the police, who broke down the door and discovered the Interior Minister slumped over the kitchen table, a large-caliber pistol (obviously fallen from his hand) on the linoleum floor and brain matter seeping from an enormous bullet wound in his skull. A note addressed to his children and grandchildren said, "Forgive me. It was all a mistake." Pugo's old father-in-law was found cowering in a clothes closet muttering incoherently about assassination squads, but police psychiatrists decided the father-in-law was suffering from dementia and the state procurator eventually ruled that Pugo's wound was self inflicted.

The body of Gorbachev's military adviser, Marshal Akhromeyev, was found hanging from a noose attached to an overhead lighting fixture in his office. People in adjacent offices told police they had heard what sounded like furniture being moved and objects being thrown on the floor, but had not become suspicious because they knew that, in the aftermath of the aborted putsch, the Marshal had been retired from active duty and assumed he was simply moving out his personal affairs. The various noises were further explained away by Akhromeyev's typed suicide note, which said: "I am a poor master of preparing my own suicide. The first attempt didn't work— the cord broke. I will try with all my strength to do it again. My age and all I have done give me the right to leave this life."

The foreign ministry apparatchik Fyodor Lomov, one of the key putschists, fled Moscow to avoid arrest and was never heard from again. He left behind a cryptic note saying the only thing he regretted was that the coup against Gorbachev had failed. Clothing later identified as belonging to Lomov were discovered neatly folded on a bank of the Moscow River upstream from the capitol. The river was dragged but Lomov's body was never found; his disappearance was carried on the police books as a "swimming accident."

Newspapers reported other mysterious deaths: two in the city that used to be called Leningrad but had changed its name back to Saint Petersburg (the dead men, killed when their car went over a cliff, were KGB generals who had plotted to oust the elected mayor and take control of the city in the name of the State Committee for the State of Emergency); one in the Crimea (a senior KGB officer from the Ninth Chief Directorate who had commanded the unit keeping Gorbachev prisoner in Foros died in the explosion of a kitchen gas canister); one in the Urals Military District (an Army general who, at the height of the putsch, had ordered the local KGB to round up "cosmopolitans," a Stalinist code word for Jews, was knifed to death in a banal mugging).

Alerted by the rash of accidental deaths and suicides, the authorities decided to take extraordinary precautions with the putsch ringleaders already in custody, KGB Chairman Kryuchkov and Defense Minister Yazov being the most prominent among them. Visitors were required to communicate through a glass window; shoelaces, belts and sharp objects were removed from the cells and the accused were put on under round-the-clock surveillance.

With all eyes on Russia, few noticed the small item that appeared on a back page in the Dresden press: early-morning joggers had discovered the body of the Devisenbeschaffer hanging under a bridge across the Elbe. Sometime before dawn he had attached one end of a thick rope to a stanchion and tied the other end around his neck, and jumped to his death. He was wearing a neatly pressed conservative three-piece suit that showed no evidence of a struggle. A typed and signed note was found in his inside breast pocket; detectives eventually established that the typeface matched the deceased's computer printer. The note asked his wife and three children to forgive him for taking the easy way out, and went on to say that he had decided to kill himself because he had siphoned funds into Russia to finance the aborted putsch and was now sure he would be exposed and punished. The police report noted that the Devisenbeschaffer had failed to specify which accounts in Russia the money had been sent to, and they held little hope of ever finding out; for all intents and purposes the funds had vanished into thin air.

Turning their backs on the main drag crawling with narrow trolley cars and lined with banks, the Sorcerer and his Apprentice strolled across the footbridge at the end of Lake Geneva and went to ground in an open air cafe. Attractive young women wearing white aprons over gauze-thin blouses and peasant skirts waited on tables. Jack summoned one of them and inquired, "What do people order when they're celebrating?"

"Champagne cups," she said without hesitation.

"Oh, Jesus, not Champagne," Torriti whined. "The goddamn bubbles give me gas."

"Two Champagne cups," Jack told the waitress. When Torriti pulled a face, Jack said, "You've been drinking cheap booze so long you think it's an elixir. Besides which, we've got to launch the Enterprise in style."

Torriti nodded grudgingly. "It's not everybody who waltzes into a Swiss bank and finds out he's got $147 million and change stashed in a secret account. When you got up to leave I thought the clown in the three-piece suit was going to shine your shoes with his tongue."

"It's so much money I have trouble thinking of it as money," Jack told his friend.

"Actually, I thought this Devisenbeschaffer character had squirreled away a lot more in Dresden. You sure Ezra Ben Ezra isn't holding out on you?"

"The Rabbi took expenses off the top. To start with, there was your mafia chum in Moscow—"

"The inimitable Endel Rappaport, who's going to make Mother Russia pay through the nose for the fingers that got lopped off."

"He got a share of the money. Another chunk wound up in the pocket of a shadowy individual who may be sponoring the career of a little known KGB lieutenant colonel named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The individual in question worked with Putin in Dresden and knew his way around well enough to siphon off some of the Devisenbeschaffer loot before the Rabbi could get to it."

"Funny thing, there was a Russian named Vladimir with Rappaport the last time our paths crossed."

"The Rabbi said this Putin quit the KGB the day after the coup against Gorbachev began, then turned up in something called the Federal Security Service, which is the successor to the KGB."

"Nimble footwork," Torriti commented. "Putin." He shook his head. "Name doesn't ring a bell."

"It will," Jack said. "With roughly a hundred fifty million to spread around, he's bound to surface eventually."

The waitress set the Champagne cups on the table and tucked the bill under the ashtray. "Here's to Swiss banks," Torriti said, and wincing in apprehension, he warily tested his cocktail.

"Here's to the Enterprise," Jack said. He drank off half the Champagne as if it were seltzer water. "You want to know something, Harvey. I feel like Mr. Rockefeller must have felt when he set up his foundation. My big problem now is to figure out how to give away the seven or so million the account generates a year."

"Read the newspapers and send out money orders to deserving causes."

"How would you define deserving causes?"

Torriti said with utter seriousness, "That's not complicated—deserving causes knock off deserving people."

Sniffing the air, Torriti smiled at a thought. Jack asked, "What is it?"

"Funny thing, Kritzky cashing in his chips like that. You want a second opinion, he got what was coming to him."

Jack gazed at the lake without seeing it. He could make out Leo's voice in his ear. I'm still sorry, Jack. About our friendship. But not about what I did. "He set out to fix the world," Jack said. "He didn't realize it wasn't broken."

Torriti could see that his Apprentice needed cheering up. "Well, don't let it go to your head, sport, but the fact is I'm proud of you. No kidding aside, I am. You're the best thing since sliced bread."

"I had a great teacher."

Torriti hiked his glass. "To you and me, sport, the last of the Cold War Mohicans."

"The last of the Cold War Mohicans," Jack agreed.

The Company pulled out all the stops for Jack's official going away bash in the seventh-floor dining room at Langley. A banner bearing the McAuliffe family mantra ("Once down is no battle") had been strung over the double doors. The Time magazine photo of Jack being rescued from a half-inflated rubber raft off the Bay of Pigs had been blown up larger than life and taped to one wall. Much to Jack's embarrassment and Millie's delight, the secret citations that accompanied his many "jockstrap" medals ("... for courage above and beyond the call of duty... highest tradition of the clandestine service... honor on the country and on the Company") had been printed up poster-size and tacked to the remaining walls. The speeches—beginning with Manny's tribute and ending with Ebby's—had been interminable. "All Central Intelligence officers have the right to retire when they're pushing sixty-five," the DCI told the several hundred men and women crowded into the executive dining room, "especially after forty years of dedicated service to the flame of liberty. But with Jack's departure, we're losing more than a warm body who happens to be the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. We're losing the heart and the soul and the brain and the expertise and the instincts of a warrior who has fought all the battles, from the rooftops of East Berlin to Cuba to the recent attempt at a putsch in Russia. In the process, he survived the bloodletting and earned the kudos and taught us all that once down is no battle. Forty years ago I sat with Jack in a cabaret in Berlin called Die Pfeffermuhie and we drank more than our share of beer and wound up singing the Whiffenpoof song. And there's a stanza in it—correct me if I screw this up, Jack—that says: And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth, God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

"For those of us who were around then and, like you, Jack, knew the worst too young, that about says it all. Except, perhaps, good luck and Godspeed."

The Company officers, a great many of whom hadn't been born when Jack and Ebby were hanging out in Die Pfeffermuhie, applauded enthusiastically; Jack was extremely popular with the rank and file and the truth was they were sorry to see him go. It was, as one section head put it, the end of an era. To everyone's delight, Millie, sobbing openly, rushed up and planted a kiss on Jack's Cossack mustache. Elizabet and Nellie and Manny crowded around him. Jack's son, Anthony, and his daughter-in-law, Maria, hugged him affectionately.

And then the liquor started flowing.

"How did things go in Room SH219?" Jack asked when he managed to buttonhole Ebby in a corner.

"For once they gave us grudging credit for anticipating the putsch and getting the President to warn Gorbachev, even if the warning fell on deaf ears," Ebby recounted. "They asked about you, Jack. I told them you were starting a private security consultancy called the Enterprise. They wanted to know who was bankrolling you." Ebby raised his half-empty whiskey glass and clinked it against Jack's. "Who is bankrolling you, old buddy?"

"Clients," he said.

"You sure are tight-lipped about the whole thing."

"A security consultancy needs to be tight-lipped if it wants to have credibility," Jack retorted.

"I suppose," Ebby said. "Funny thing happened at today's session—our congressional watchdogs went to great pains to remind me that political assassination is prohibited by a 1976 executive order. They kept coming back to that rash of accidents and suicides after the putsch—they asked me several times if I knew anything about them."

"What did you say?"

"I told them the truth, Jack. I told them I'd read about the deaths in the newspapers. I told them that there was no way under the sun the Company would be involved in this sort of thing on my watch." Ebby tilted his head and sized up his retiring DDCI. "You don't happen to know anything about these deaths that you haven't told me, do you, Jack?"

"I'm clean as a whistle on this," he replied.

Jack had learned how to lie from a virtuoso. Every inch the Sorcerer's Apprentice, he summoned up a perfectly guileless smile and, looking Ebby squarely in the eye, repeated what Harvey Torriti said when Jack had raised the subject of RAINBOW'S death in Berlin a dozen or so wars back. "Hey, pal, I swear it to you. On my mother's grave."

POSTLUDE

"Tut, tut, child!"said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

VIENNA, VIRGINIA, SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 1995

HIGH OVER THE CITY, A MARE'S TAIL DRIFTED ACROSS THE GREAT Bear so languorously it looked as if the motion picture had been slowed down. On a deserted street running along one side of Nottoway Park in Fairfax County, Virginia, a crow's mile from the town of Vienna, a broad-shouldered fiftyish-something man known to his Russian handlers only by his code name, Ramon, surveyed the neighborhood through prism binoculars that could see in the dark. Sitting motionless in the back seat of his Isuzu Trooper, he'd been keeping an eye on the streets and paths since midnight. He'd watched several people impatiently walking dogs, a couple of homosexuals who stopped in their tracks every few seconds to bicker, an inebriated woman of uncertain age tottering on spiky heels that dispatched sharp echoes into the still summer night. Then absolute silence. Just after two in the morning he'd spotted the dark four-door Ford with two men in it cruising the area. It vanished down a side street and materialized ten minutes later from another direction. On its fourth pass around the area the car eased to a stop at the curb near the park's main entrance on Old Courthouse Road. The headlights flickered out. For a long while the two men remained in the Ford. From time to time one of them would light a fresh cigarette from the glowing embers of the last one. At a quarter to three the men finally emerged from the car and made their way through the park to the wooden footbridge. The one smoking the cigarette turned his back on the bridge and stood guard. The other crouched quickly and tugged a green plastic trash bag from its hiding place under the end of the bridge, and wedged a paper shopping bag into the cranny in its place. On their way back to their automobile, the two men stripped off the white adhesive tape pasted vertically across a "pedestrian crossing" sign (indicating that Ramon was ready to receive the package) and replaced it with a horizontal length of tape (indicating that the dead drop had been serviced). With a last look around, they got back into their car and, accelerating cautiously, drove off.

Ramon waited another twenty minutes before making his move. He had been spying for the Russians for ten years now, and long ago decided that this was the only really perilous moment in the game. His Russian handlers had no idea who he was. They would have figured out from the documents he supplied that he was deeply involved in Russian counterintelligence and just assumed he worked for the CIA; it would never have crossed their minds that he actually worked for the FBI. Which meant that even if the Americans got their hands on a mole or a highly placed Russian defector, they couldn't discover Ramon's identity from the Russians because the Russians didn't know it. On his end, he was senior enough in his shop to have access to computer codes and files that would give him early warning if anybody raised the specter of an American mole working for the Russians.

Ramon, meticulous and experienced when it came to tradecraft, had examined the operation from every point of the compass. As far as he could see there was no way he could be caught—except in the act of picking up the payload in the dead drop. Which was why he went to such lengths to survey the park before retrieving what his Russian handlers had left for him.

Back in the mid-1980s, when he'd delivered his first plastic trash bag filled with secrets, the motive had been money. The people around him—his college classmates, his neighbors, lawyers and stock brokers he ran into at cocktail parties—were pulling down enormous salaries and year-end bonuses and stock options worth a fortune. Ramon's government payroll check permitted him and his family to live comfortably, but he didn't see how he would pay for the college education of the three children he already had and the fourth that was on its way. He didn't see how he could live with a measure of self-indulgence when the time came to retire. Unless... unless he came up with a scheme to augment his income. And the only scheme that seemed within the realm of possibility was peddling state secrets to the state's principal adversary, Russia. He carefully studied the case histories of previous moles to make sure he didn't fall into the same traps that eventually led to their downfall. He was careful not to change his lifestyle, something that was sure to attract the attention of the security mavins. He drove the same beat-up cars and lived in the same middle-class home in Virginia and vacationed at the same modest resorts on mainland America. Curiously, it was only after he'd delivered the first few packets to the Russians that he realized the money wasn't the only reward.

There was an enormous kick to be had from beating the system; the adrenalin flowed when he outsmarted the counterintelligence teams that had been created to prevent someone from doing what he was doing. The fact that he was a member of such a team only made the exploit sweeter. His drab life, which was filled with dreary routines and tedious paperwork and rigorous pecking orders, suddenly seemed a lot more glamorous.

Ramon could feel the pulse pounding in his temple as he let himself out of the Isuzu. Walking soundless on rubber soles, he approached the footbridge and, squatting, worked the paper bag free from the cranny. He could make out the wads of bills, used twenties and fifties bound together with rubber bands, through the paper; his Russian handlers will have left him $50,000 in all, compensation for the payload he'd left the month before that included the identities of two Russian diplomats serving in Washington who were spying for the CIA. Back in the car, he jammed the paper bag up under the dashboard behind the radio and started the motor. Threading his way through the empty streets in the direction of home, he felt the throb in his temple gradually returning to something approaching normal and experienced the liberating serenity familiar to the mountaineer coming down from an alp.

The God-awful truth was he had become an adrenalin junkie; the double game had become the only game worth playing.

Minutes before 5 A.M. an ambulance eased down the ramp of the Veterans Administration hospital on San Pedro Drive in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hunched over the wheel of a rented car parked in an outdoor space reserved for doctors, Jack McAuliffe watched the automatic door rise and began ticking off the seconds. At three one-hundredth he was jogging down the ramp as the taillights of the ambulance disappeared into the vast basement garage. At nine one-hundredth he ducked under the overhead door as it started closing behind him. Threading his way between parked cars to a locked door, he worked a thin metal wedge down the jamb until the dead bolt clicked open. Picking the lock gave him a lot of satisfaction; he hadn't done this sort of thing since S.M. Craw Management initiated him into the joys of tradecraft. Taking the stairs two at a time, he climbed to the fourth floor. Winded, he leaned on the banister to catch his breath; the body had aged more than the mind wanted to admit. Checking to make sure the coast was clear, he loped down the hospital corridor to the locker room, which was precisely where the nurse said it would be. He snatched a pair of white trousers and a knee-length white coat from the laundry bin, along with two white canvas shoe sheaths, and quickly pulled everything on. For good measure, he pinched a stethoscope from a peg on the wall and hung it around his neck. Moments later he made his way down to the third floor and pushed through the doors of the special ward the Company maintained for former officers and agents. There was an imperious red-lettered sign splashed across the inner doors that warned "Absolutely No Visitors."

Out of the corner of an eye Jack noticed a nurse at the far end of the unit glance in his direction as he approached the third cubicle. He made a show of studying the chart attached to the partition. Moving around to the side of the bed, he reached down to take the patient's pulse. Harvey Torriti, wearing a sleeveless hospital gown and looking like a beached whale, opened one damp eye and then the other. He sniffed in pleasure as he recognized his visitor.

"Goddamn, Harvey, how did you wind up here?" Jack whispered.

"With all the painkillers I take, they're worried about me babbling Company secrets," Torriti said. "So they sentenced me to death in this sterile VA brig. Only immediate family are allowed to visit. As I have no family, immediate or otherwise, nobody gets in to see me." The sight of his Apprentice had obviously cheered the Sorcerer. "How'd you get past the guards?" he demanded in a voice raw from disuse.

"Exfiltrations, infiltrations, I learned it all at the foot of the master," Jack said.

Jack could make out the shrapnel wound that had decapitated the naked lady tattooed on Torriti's arm; he remembered Miss Sipp fainting dead away when the Sorcerer peeled off his shirt to show it to her. He leaned closer until his face was hovering above Torriti's. "So how are you doing, Harvey?"

"What can I say, kid? I'm not doing so good. I'm dog-tired when I go to sleep, I'm bushed when I wake up. Lets face it, I'm on my last legs. I think this is where I get to buy the farm."

"These days the doctors can pull off miracles—"

Torriti waved away the idea with a limp hand. "Don't fuck with me, pal. We've come too far together for you to fling bullshit on a dying man." He turned his head on the pillow to make sure the nurse was still at the far end of the ward., "You wouldn't by any chance have a pick-me-up on you to help a buddy over the Great Divide?"

"Funny you should mention it—"

Jack produced the hip flask filled with cheap whiskey. Torriti brightened as his Apprentice lifted his head and tilted the flask to his lips. The alcohol burned. There was a rattle in the back of his throat as he sucked in air to douse the fire. "Just what the doctor ordered," he murmured as he sank back onto the pillow. "Suppose you read about those two Russian diplomats who were caught spying for the CIA and shot."

"What about them, Harvey?"

"You need to be dumb and blind not to see it, kid. Anybody could stumble across one mole, but two at a time—it set my nose to twitching. Want an educated guess, means the Russians have got themselves a mole of their own somewhere, probably in counterintelligence, since he knew about the two diplomats we'd turned."

"The Cold War may be over but the great game goes on," Jack said.

"Nature of the beast," Torriti grunted. "Long as the Homo politicus is addicted to adrenalin highs, spies will keep on spying." The Sorcerer, in pain, opened his mouth wide and breathed deeply. When the pain had subsided, he said, "Read about Endel Rappaport in the papers from time to time."

"I never saw Rappaport's name—"

"They don't mention him by name. They just talk about the homegrown Russian mafia taking over this or that banking syndicate or oil cartel."

Jack started to say something but Torriti plunged on, "I've been following that Vladimir Putin fellow, too. In case you haven't noticed, which I doubt, he's the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Folks who keep track of these things say he's close to Yeltsin and conspicuously upwardly mobile and has a filthy rich patron, so they say." The Sorcerer's eyes widened playfully. "I read about you, too, Jacko."

"You read about me?"

"I wasn't born yesterday, kiddo. Every now and then the good guys score and I figure your Enterprise could be behind it. The assassination of that drug tsar in Colombia, the disappearance of that Communist journalist in Egypt, the bomb that went off under the car of that neo-Nazi in Austria. You still got all that money stashed in Switzerland?"

"Loose lips sink ships, Harvey."

Torriti's eyes focused on the past. "I remember the day you showed up in Berlin Base, I remember the night we met that poor son of a bitch Vishnevsky in the safe house over the movie theater—you were one hell of a circus act. Jack, with those splotches of green behind the ears and a cannon of a pistol tucked into the small of your back. No harm telling you now, I wasn't positive you'd survive."

"Thanks to you, Harvey, I survived. Thanks to you, we made a difference."

"You think so, Jack? I tell myself we made a difference. Nowadays people have short memories—they forget the goddamn Goths were at the goddamn gate. You and me, kid—we put our warm bodies on the firing line and turned them back. Fuck, something like the Cold War has to have a moral. Otherwise what was it all about?"

"It was about the good guys beating the bad guys," Jack said softly.

The Sorcerer snorted. "We sure screwed up an awful lot in the process."

"We screwed up less than they did. That's why we won."

"Never could figure out how the frigging Soviets lasted as long as they did."

"Russia wasn't a country," Jack said. "It was a metaphor for an idea that may have looked good on the drawing boards but in practice was deeply flawed. And flawed metaphors are harder to slay than flawed countries. But we clobbered them in the end."

Torriti's inflamed lids drifted over his eyes. Jack burst out, "Jesus H. Christ, Harvey, I hope you're not planning to die on me. The least you could do is wait until I'm gone."

The remark drew a feeble grin from the Sorcerer. With an effort he forced his eyes open and said, "All these years I been wondering what the hell that H in Jesus H. Christ stands for."

"Hey, it's like a lot of middle initials," Jack explained. "They don't stand for anything. They're tacked on to dress up the name. The H in Jesus H. Christ. The J in Jack J. McAuliffe. The S in Harry S. Truman."

Torriti coughed up a crabby snicker. "I read what you're saying, sport. Its like the I in CIA—that doesn't mean nothing neither."

Jack had a last laugh; he didn't see himself laughing again, ever. "You may be on to something, Harv."

The End