Extraordinary Powers

International Herald-Tribune

Leader of Germany’s National Socialist Party Assassinated

BY ISAAC WOOD

NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE

BONN-Jurgen Krauss, the fiery chairman of the reborn Nazi Party, who was the leading contender in the race for Chancellor, was shot and killed this morning in a rally here.

No one has yet claimed responsibility.

That leaves only two men in the contest to lead Germany, both of them considered centrists. While voicing sorrow at the violent end of Mr. Krauss, diplomats expressed relief…

THIRTY

I had been to Rome several times before, and never much liked it. Italy is without a doubt one of my favorite countries in the world, perhaps my single favorite, but I’ve always found Rome grimy, congested, and despondent. Beautiful, yes-Michelangelo’s Campidoglio, St. Peter’s, the Villa Borghese, the Via Veneto, are all striking in different ways, ancient, luxuriant, opulent-but overwhelming, threatening. And virtually everywhere you go in the city you somehow always end up at the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, a horrific typewriter-shaped structure of white Brescian marble, on the Piazza Venezia, shrouded in malign traffic fumes. Mussolini delivered his harangues here; I preferred to avoid it whenever possible.

The day I arrived was rain-swept and unpleasantly chilly. In the driving rain, the taxi stand in front of the international terminal at Fiumicino seemed a bit too forlorn to brave right away.

So I found a bar and ordered a cafe lungo, savored it for a long while, feeling the caffeine do battle with my jet lag. I had entered the country on a false passport, provided for me by those wizards of forgery in CIA’s Technical Services section (in cooperation, let it be said, with the U.S. State Department).

My cover was Bernard Mason, an American businessman here to make some arcane arrangements with my corporation’s Italian subsidiary. The passport they’d supplied me was admirably dog-eared; if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought it had indeed been used on many international trips before, and by a slob. But of course it had been dummied up just for the occasion.

I polished off a second cafe lungo and a cornetto and made my way toward the restroom. The facility was simple, black and white, and clean. Against one wall, below a large mirror, was a row of sinks; facing them on the other side of the small room were four toilet stalls, the doors to which were painted a glossy black and went from floor to ceiling without a gap. The leftmost stall was occupied, and although the center one was vacant, I stood at the sink for a while, washed my hands, my face, and combed my hair, until the door to the left stall opened. A pudgy middle-aged Arab emerged, tightening his belt against his ample gut. He left without washing his hands, and I immediately entered the stall he had just vacated and locked it.

I lowered the toilet seat, climbed up on it, and reached up to the molded-plastic compartment near the ceiling. It lifted open easily, as promised, and there it was, a fat bundle. A padded manila envelope that contained, swaddled in clean cotton rags, a box of fifty.45 ACP shells and a sleek, matte black.45 semiautomatic pistol, a Sig Sauer 220, brand-new and still oily from the manufacturer. The Sig is, I believe, the best pistol made. It has tritium night-sights, a four-inch barrel, six rifling grooves, and weighs around twenty-six ounces. I hoped I’d have no use for it.

I was in a foul mood. I had sworn I’d never return to this terrible game, and now I was back. And once again I would have to draw upon my dark, violent side, which I thought I had buried once and for all.

I wrapped it back up, slipped it into my carry-on bag, and left the envelope in the compartment, which I pressed closed.

As soon as I left the restroom and headed for the taxi stand, however, I felt something wrong. A presence, a person, a stirring. Airports are chaotic, hectic, bustling places, and so they are perfect for surveillance. I was being observed. I felt it. I can’t say I heard or read anything-far too many people in too many little throngs, a Babel of foreign languages, and my Italian was only serviceable. But I sensed it. My instincts, once so finely tuned, then so long out of use, were slowly returning.

There was someone.

A compact, swarthy man, perhaps in his late thirties or early forties, wearing a green-gray sports jacket, lounging near the farmacia, his face mostly hidden behind a copy of the Corriere della sera.

I hastened my pace somewhat until I was outside. He followed me out: very unsubtle. Which concerned me. He didn’t seem to worry about being noticed, which probably meant there were others. Probably also meant that they wanted me to notice.

I got into the next available cab, a white Mercedes, and said, “Grand Hotel, per favore.”

The watcher was in a cab immediately behind mine, I saw at once. Probably by now there was another vehicle involved, perhaps two or three. After about forty minutes of crawling through the morning rush-hour traffic, the cab pulled up the narrow Via Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and in front of the Grand Hotel. At once, four liveried bellmen descended upon the cab to remove my luggage, load it onto a cart, help me out of the car, and escort me into the hotel’s subdued, elegant lobby.

I tipped each one of them more than generously and gave my cover name at the reception desk.

The clerk smiled, said, “Buon giorno, signore,” and quickly inspected his reservation sheets. A troubled expression crossed his face. “Signore… ah, Mr. Mason?” he said, looking up apologetically.

“Is there a problem?”

“There appears to be, sir. We have no record-”

“Perhaps under my company’s name, then,” I offered. “TransAtlantic.”

After a moment he shook his head again. “Do you know when these were made?”

I slammed my open palm down on the marble surface of the reception desk. “I don’t care, dammit!” I said. “This damned hotel screwed up-”

“If you need a room, sir, I’m sure-”

I signaled to the bell captain. “No. Not here. I’m sure the Excelsior doesn’t make these kinds of mistakes.” To the bell captain I commanded: “Bring my bags around to the service entrance. Not the front, the back. And I want a taxi to the Excelsior, on the Via Veneto. At once.”

The bell captain bowed slightly and gestured to one of the bellboys, who turned the cart with my luggage around and began to push it toward the back of the lobby.

“Sir, if there is some kind of mistake, I’m sure we can straighten it out very quickly,” the reception clerk said. “We have a single room available. In fact, we have several small suites available.”

“I don’t want to trouble you,” I said haughtily as I followed the luggage cart to the rear of the lobby, toward the service entrance.

Within minutes a cab pulled up to the rear of the hotel. The bellboy loaded the suitcase and carry-on bag into the Opel’s trunk, I tipped him handsomely, and got in.

“The Excelsior, signore?” the driver said.

“No,” I said. “The Hassler. Piazza Trinità dei Monti.”

The Hassler overlooks the Spanish Steps, one of the most pleasant locations in Rome. I had stayed here before, and the Agency had booked a room for me here, at my request. The Grand Hotel episode, of course, had been a ruse, and it seemed to have worked-I had lost the followers. I didn’t know how long I could stay here unobserved, but for the time being, things seemed to be okay.

Exhausted now, I showered and collapsed onto the king-size bed, slipped between the luxurious, crisply ironed linen sheets, momentarily at peace, and drifted into a deep, much-needed sleep, which was troubled by apprehensive dreams about Molly.

A few hours later I was awakened by the distant honking of a horn somewhere near the Spanish Steps. It was midafternoon, and the suite was flooded with light. I rolled over, picked up the phone, and ordered a cappuccino and a bite to eat. My stomach was growling.

I looked at my watch and calculated that the business day was just beginning in Boston. I placed a call to a bank in Washington where I still maintained an old but active account I’d opened years ago. My broker, John Matera, had indeed wired my Beacon Trust “earnings.” (Earnings, of course, was the one thing they weren’t.) No sense, I figured, in making it easy for the CIA to monkey around with my money. I knew their tricks and was determined not to trust them fully.

The coffee came fifteen minutes later, served in a large, deep gold-rimmed cup, with beautifully presented sandwiches: thick slices of moist white bread topped with paper-thin slices of prosciutto, arugula, a few slices of pecorino fresco, and ringed with beautiful deep red slices of tomato, glistening with fragrant olive oil.

I felt as alone as I’d ever felt. Molly, I was sure, was fine-was, in fact, being protected as much as she was being kept hostage. Still, I worried about her, about what they were telling her about me, how scared she was, how she was holding up. But I was convinced that she would not buckle; she would instead make her captors’ lives hell.

I smiled to myself, and just then the phone rang.

“Mr. Ellison?” came the American-accented voice.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Rome. You’ve picked a nice time to come.”

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s much more comfortable here than it is in the States this time of year.”

“And a lot more to see,” my CIA contact said, completing the coded exchange.

I hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, in the soft light of a late Rome afternoon, I came out of the Hassler. The Spanish Steps swarmed with people, standing, sitting, smoking, taking pictures, shouting at each other, laughing at one another’s jokes. I surveyed the bustling scene, felt terribly out of place amid the vivacity, and, my stomach already knotted with tension, got into a cab.

THIRTY-ONE

At the Piazza della Repubblica, not far from Rome’s main train station, I rented a car at Maggiore, using my phony Bernard Mason driver’s license and gold Citibank Visa card. (Actually, the credit card itself was real; but the bills run up by the fictitious Mr. Mason were paid, through a Fairfax, Virginia, law firm, by the CIA.) I was given a gleaming black Lancia as big as an ocean liner: the sort of car that Bernard Mason, nouveau riche American businessman, would undoubtedly hire.

The cardiologist’s office was located a short drive away, on the Corso del Rinascimento, a noisy, traffic-snarled main street just off the Piazza Navona. I parked in an underground lot a block and a half away and located the doctor’s building, whose entrance bore a brass plaque that was engraved DOTT. ALDO PASQUALUCCI.

I was early for my appointment, almost forty-five minutes, and I decided to walk over to the piazza. For a variety of reasons, I knew it was best to adhere to the schedule set for me. I was to meet the cardiologist at eight that evening-unusually late in the day, but deliberately so. The inconvenience, I suppose, was designed to further my legend: this was the only time that the reclusive American tycoon, Bernard Mason, could meet the physician. Thus inconvenienced, Dr. Pasqualucci would presumably be more inclined to be cooperative and deferential. Pasqualucci was considered one of the finest cardiologists in Europe, which was surely why the former KGB chief had consulted him. So it was logical that Mr. Mason, who resided several months of the year in Rome, would seek out his services. All Pasqualucci knew was that this American had been referred by another physician, an internist whom Pasqualucci knew casually, and that a fair degree of discretion was called for, since Mason’s extensive business empire would suffer incalculable financial harm if word got out that he was being treated for a cardiac problem. Pasqualucci did not know that the physician who had referred Mason was in fact on a CIA retainer.

At this time of the evening the baroque ocher edifices of the Piazza Navona were illuminated dramatically with klieg lights, a stunning sight. The square bustled with people, crowding into cafés, garrulous and excited and electric. Couples strolled, absorbed in each other, or eyeing others; in another time they would have promenaded. The piazza was built on the ancient ruins of the Stadium of the emperor Domitian. (I’ll always remember that it was Domitian who once said, “Emperors are necessarily wretched men since only their assassination can convince the public that the conspiracies against their lives are real.”)

The evening lights glinted and sparkled off the spouting water of the two Bernini fountains to which people always seemed to gravitate: the Fountain of the Four Rivers in the square’s center and the Fountain of the Moor at the south end. It was an odd place, the Piazza Navona. Centuries ago it was used for chariot races, and later the popes ordered the place flooded so that mock naval battles could be waged.

I walked through the crowd, feeling somewhat alienated from the others, their effervescent high spirits contrasting with my anxiety. I had spent quite a few nights like this, alone in foreign cities, and I’d always considered it oddly lulling to be surrounded by the babble of foreign voices. That night, of course, graced (or was it afflicted?) with this strange ability, I found myself increasingly confused, as thoughts blended with chatter and cries in one great indistinguishable rush.

I heard, aloud: “Non ho mai avuto una settimana peggiore!” and then, in that thought-voice: Avessimo potuto salvarlo!

And aloud: “Lui e uscito con la sua ragazza.”

And in that softer thought-voice: Poverino!

And then, another muzzy thought-voice, but this one distinctly American: damn him left me all alone!

I turned. She was obviously an American, in her early twenties, wearing a Stanford sweatshirt under an acid-washed denim jacket, walking by herself a few feet from me. Her round, plain face was set in a pout. She caught me staring at her and gave me an angry glance. I looked away, and just then I heard another phrase, in American-accented English, and my heart began to thud.

Benjamin Ellison.

But where was it coming from? It had to be close, had to be within six feet or so. Must have come from one of the dozens of people immediately surrounding me, but who? It took enormous restraint to keep from whipsawing my head around, from side to side, trying to catch a glimpse of someone who looked slightly out of place, an Agency type following me. I turned casually, heard-

can’t let him notice

– and began to accelerate my pace, striding toward the church of St. Agnes, still unable to single out the follower from the crowds, and suddenly lunged left, knocking over a white plastic café table, knocking an elderly man off balance, and plunged into the darkness of a narrow alley, which was fetid with urine. From behind I could hear shouts, a woman’s voice and a man’s, the sounds of a commotion. I ran down the alley, sensed footsteps following me, and ducked into a doorway, which appeared to be some sort of service entrance. I flattened myself against the tall wooden doors, feeling the crust of peeling paint sharp against my neck and head, and slowly bent my knees and sank toward the cold tile floor of the foyer. I could just see out through a broken glass pane in the middle of the exterior door. The darkness and shadows would, I thought, conceal me sufficiently.

Yes: a watcher.

A hulking, muscle-bound figure made its way down the alley, hands outstretched as if they were being used to keep balance. I had seen this man in the piazza, off to my right, but he had looked like every other Italian man; he had blended in too well for my unpracticed eye. Now he passed directly in front of me, moving slowly, and I saw his eyes peering directly into the tiny lobby where I knelt.

Did he see me?

I heard: run to…

His eyes stared straight ahead, not down at an angle.

I felt the cold steel of the pistol in my pants pocket, slowly withdrew it. Released the safety, and fingered the trigger tentatively.

He moved on, down the alley, peering into doorways on either side. I crept forward, watched as he reached the end of the alley, paused for a moment, and took a right.

I sat back, let out a long, slow breath. Closed my eyes for a minute, then leaned forward and glanced out again. He was gone. I had lost him for the time being.

Several endless minutes later I emerged and walked down the alley, in the direction the watcher had gone earlier, away from the piazza, and through a rabbit warren of dimly lit back streets to the Corso.

At precisely eight o’clock, Dr. Aldo Pasqualucci opened his office door and, with a slight bow of the head, shook my hand. He was surprisingly short, rotund but not fat, wearing a comfortably worn brown tweed suit with a camel sweater-vest. His face was kind. His brown eyes had a look of concern about them. His hair was black, peppered with gray, and looked recently combed. In his left hand he held a meerschaum; the air around him was vanilla-fragrant with pipe smoke.

“Please come in, Mr. Mason,” he said. His accent wasn’t Italian at all, but British, upper-class and crisp. He waved with his pipe toward the examination room.

“Thank you for seeing me at such an inconvenient time,” I said.

He dipped his head, neither assenting nor disagreeing, and said smilingly, “My pleasure. I’ve heard much about you.”

“And I you. But I must ask first…”

I paused, concentrated… and found nothing audible.

“Yes? If you can please sit over here and remove your shirt.”

As I sat on the paper-covered examination table and took off my suit jacket and shirt, I said, “I need to make sure I can count on your absolute discretion.”

He took a blood-pressure cuff from the table behind him, wrapped it around my arm, pressed the Velcro closures together, and said, “All of my patients can count on complete confidentiality. I’d have it no other way.”

Then I said loudly, deliberately provocative: “But can you guarantee it?”

And in the instant before Pasqualucci replied, pumping the bulb until the cuff squeezed my upper arm uncomfortably, I heard:… pomposo… arrogante…

He was standing so close to me that I could feel and smell his tobacco-scented breath hotly against me, sense a tension in him, and I knew I was reading his thoughts.

In Italian.

He was bilingual, I had been briefed: Italian-born but raised in Northumbria, Great Britain, and schooled at Harrow and then Oxford.

So what did that mean? What did it mean to be bilingual? Would he speak in English while thinking in Italian, was that how it worked?

He said, this time with considerably less warmth, “Mr. Mason, as you well know, I treat some very prominent and very reclusive individuals. I shall not reveal their names. If you feel uncomfortable about my discretion, please feel free to leave right now.”

He had left the cuff pumped up to its maximum rather too long, so that my arm throbbed. At least half deliberately, I suspected. But now, as if punctuating his declaration, he released the pressure valve, which gave off a loud hiss.

“As long as we understand each other,” I said.

“Fine. Now, Dr. Corsini said that you have been suffering from occasional fainting spells, that once in a while your heart races seemingly without reason.”

“Correct.”

“I want to take a full history. Maybe a Holter monitor, maybe a stress-thallium test, we’ll see. But first I want you to tell me in your own words what brings you in here.”

I turned around to face him and said, “Dr. Pasqualucci, my sources tell me that you also treat a certain Vladimir Orlov, formerly of the Soviet Union, and that concerns me.”

He sputtered, “I said-as I say-you are free to see another cardiologist. I can even recommend one to you-”

“I am merely saying, Doctor, that it worries me that Mr. Orlov’s files, or charts, or whatever they’re called, are here in your office. If ever there’s a break-in because of… shall we say, interest in him on the part of any intelligence agency, then aren’t my files, too, vulnerable? I want to know what security precautions you take.”

Dr. Pasqualucci looked at me hawkishly, angrily, his face reddening, and I began to receive his thoughts with an astonishing clarity.

An hour or so later I maneuvered the Lancia through the loud, crazed, snarling traffic toward the outskirts of Rome, to the via del Trullo, and then turned right down the via S. Guiliano, a modern and rather desolate section of the city. A few yards up on the right I located the bar and pulled over.

It was one of those all-purpose bars-cum-everything-else, a little white-painted stucco building with a striped yellow awning, white plastic outdoor furniture neatly stacked in front. A Lavazza coffee sign bore the inscription: ROSTICCERIA-PIZZERIA-PANINOTECA-SPAGHETTERIA.

It was twenty minutes before ten o’clock, and the place swarmed with teenagers in leather jackets, jostling with gray-haired laborers drinking at the bar. A jukebox blasted out an old American song I recognized: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Whitney Houston, I decided.

My CIA contact, Charles Van Aver-the man who had called me at the hotel earlier in the day-wasn’t there. It was too early, and in any case he would probably be in his car in the parking lot out back. I settled on a plastic stool at the bar, ordered an Averna, and watched the crowd. One of the teenagers was playing a card game that seemed to involve a lot of slapping of cards against the deck. A large family gathered around a too-small table, toasting one another. No trace of Van Aver, and-with the sole exception of me-no one seemed to be there who didn’t belong.

In the cardiologist’s out-patient office, I was able to confirm what I had first observed with Dr. Mehta, that a bilingual person thinks in two languages, a peculiar sort of melange. Dr. Pasqualucci’s thoughts were an odd twisting, blending of Italian and English.

My Italian was sufficiently workable to enable me to make out the sense of what he was thinking.

Concealed in the floor of his supply closet, a small room that evidently held cleaning substances, mops and brooms, photocopy paper, computer disks, typewriter ribbons, and the like, was a concrete-reinforced safe. It held samples of controlled substances, the files of an unpleasant malpractice case he had been involved in over ten years ago, and several patient files. These patients included several prominent Italian politicians of rival parties; the chief executive of one of Europe’s largest automotive empires; and Vladimir Orlov.

As Dr. Pasqualucci placed a cold stethoscope on my chest and listened for a long, long time, I agonized over how I could possibly get him to think the combination to the safe, how I could ever get to it, when all of a sudden I heard something, an almost-but-not-quite-distinct buzz, like a shortwave radio coming into and out of tune, the words:

Volte-Basse…

and Castelbianco

And again: Volte-Basse… Castelbianco.… and Orlov…

And I knew then as much as I had to know.

Still Van Aver hadn’t appeared. I had memorized his photograph: a large, flush-faced man, a hard-drinking southerner of sixty-eight. He wore his thick white hair so long that it curled over the collar at the back of his neck, at least in the most recent Agency file photo. His nose was large and webbed with the broken veins of an alcoholic. An alcoholic, Hal Sinclair used to say, is a person you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

At quarter after ten I paid the bill and slipped quietly out the restaurant-bar’s front door. The parking lot was dark, but I could make out the usual assortment of Fiat Pandas, Fiat Ritmos, Ford Fiestas, Peugeots, and a black Porsche. After the din of the bar, I enjoyed the quiet of the dark lot, inhaling the cold air that somehow, in this part of Rome, seemed cleaner and crisper. A moped buzzed by, its flat, high-pitched whine piercing.

In the farthest row of cars was a gleaming olive Mercedes, license plate ROMA 17017. And there he was, asleep in the driver’s seat, in an old man’s slouch. I suppose I had expected that he’d have the motor running, impatient to set out for the three-hours-plus drive north to Tuscany, but the car was dark. Neither was the interior light on; Van Aver was, I figured, sleeping off the vast quantities of booze he regularly consumed, according to his personnel file. An alcoholic, yes, but a man who’d been around, who knew everyone, and so his peccadilloes were tolerated.

The windshield was partially fogged. As I approached, I considered whether I should insist that I drive, whether that would offend Van Aver’s overendowed ego. I slipped into the car and found myself automatically straining to hear his thoughts, or at least those fragments I’d found I could perceive when someone is sleeping.

But there was nothing. A complete silence. I found it peculiar, illogical-

– and in a moment I was seized by a dizzy, vertiginous rush of adrenaline.

I could see Van Aver’s long white hair curling at the back of his neck, against his navy blue turtleneck sweater, mouth open in what appeared to be a snore, and beneath it the old man’s throat gaped grotesquely wide open. A terrible deep red stain crept down his jacket lapels, down his sweater, his pale, wrinkled neck a steaming, still-flowing lake of blood that my eyes at first refused to accept. I could see at once that Van Aver was dead, and I bolted from the car.

THIRTY-TWO

I ran out into the via del Trullo, my heart pounding, and found the rented car. I fumbled for a few moments with the key until I was finally able to unlock the door and sank into the front seat. Exhaling and inhaling slowly, measuredly, I managed to get a grip on myself.

You see, I had all of a sudden been plunged back into that nightmarish time in Paris, I found myself flashing back persistently, almost kaleidoscopically, on that hallway in the rue Jacob, on the sight of the two bodies, one of them my beloved Laura…

Whatever the mystique of clandestine intelligence work, it usually does not include murder and mayhem. That is by far the exception, not the rule, and although we were all trained to deal with the eventualities of bloodshed in the theater of the Cold War, rarely did such a thing actually intrude upon one’s life.

Most clandestine operatives in fact see very little violence during their careers-a great deal of stress and anxiety, but very little outright violence. And when they encounter carnage, they customarily react the way anyone would: they are repelled and sickened; a fight-or-flight instinct takes over. Most operatives who are unlucky enough to face much bloodshed in their work will burn out early and retire.

But with me, something different happened. Exposure to blood and mayhem deadened me, tamped something down inside me. It switched something off: the essential human horror of violence. Instead, I became enraged, focused, tranquil. It was as if I’d been injected intravenously with a sedative.

As I struggled to make sense of what had just happened, I methodically ran down a list of possibilities. Who else had known that I was meeting with Van Aver? Who had Van Aver told? Who, that is, had he told-and would order him killed? And for what reason?

I would have liked to believe that Van Aver had been murdered by the same person or persons who had been following me since my arrival in Rome. Which begged the question of why I hadn’t been eliminated. Obviously whoever had cut Van Aver’s throat had preceded me by some time, so it was unlikely that he had been murdered by someone following me to this rendezvous (and in any case, I had taken elaborate precautions not to be followed leaving Pasqualucci’s).

That indicated that it was someone, or some group, within the CIA who had had Van Aver killed. Someone who knew he was going to meet me, someone who had intercepted whatever communication had taken place between Toby Thompson in Washington and Van Aver in Rome.

And yet, the more I thought it through, the more I had to concede the possibility that the culprits weren’t necessarily CIA at all-that they might have been ex-Stasi.

So that line of deduction didn’t help one bit.

Then what about motive? It couldn’t have been me they were after-Van Aver and I looked nothing alike; no one could have made that mistake. And presumably there had been other chances to get me, if that was the objective.

It wasn’t as if Van Aver possessed some fund of information that someone wanted me not to gain access to. His mission, I had been briefed by Toby, was to escort me to Tuscany once I had learned Orlov’s whereabouts, and to…

To get me in to see Orlov. I didn’t know the protocol; I didn’t know what would get me in to see the retired KGB chairman. Certainly I couldn’t just knock on the man’s door.

Could that be it? Could the motive for killing Van Aver have simply been to keep me from getting to Orlov? To “discourage” me, frustrate me, make it as difficult as possible? To keep me from learning about the “Wise Men”?

Suddenly I jolted upright.

My reasoning had been faulty. I had been late for my meeting with the CIA man. Deliberately, tactically so; but late all the same.

Like most field agents, Van Aver was probably impeccably precise in his timing. Whoever had surprised him there, knife in hand…

Had expected him to be meeting someone.

Me.

Whether they knew whom Van Aver was meeting… They knew he was meeting someone.

Had I been on time, might I now be slumped in the front seat beside Van Aver with a severed carotid?

I leaned back against the seat cushion and exhaled slowly.

Possible? Yes, of course.

Anything was possible.

By the time I had checked out of the Hassler and loaded my belongings in the trunk of the Lancia, it was well after midnight. The A-1 autostrada was fairly free of traffic, except for the occasional thundering delivery truck.

From the Hassler’s concierge I had secured a very good map of Tuscany, a Touring Club Italiano map that appeared both comprehensive and accurate. It was a simple matter for me to commit it to memory. And then I had located a small town called Volte-Basse, not far outside of Siena, three hours to the north.

It took some time to acclimate to Italian drivers, who are not really reckless-compared to Boston drivers, the rest of the world is tame-but just elegantly aggressive. For a time concentrating on the amber-lit road calmed me, enabled me to think clearly.

So I watched the road and thought. I drove in the left lane at around 120 kilometers an hour. Twice I pulled off the road suddenly and waited with the engine and lights off, to make sure no one was following me. Elemental tradecraft, but it works. No one appeared to be following me, although I couldn’t be sure.

A car approached from behind, drew closer, flashed its high beams, and my stomach tensed. Now it was almost upon me, and I floored the accelerator and swung the wheel to the right.

The other car was trying to pass, that was all.

My nerves were frayed. This is the way they pass in Italy, I told myself. You’re losing it. Get a grip.

I found myself talking aloud to myself. “Stay with it, Ben,” I said. And, “You’re there.” And, “You’ll make it.”

The thing was, by attaining this… talent… I had become a freak. I had no idea how much longer I would have it, but it had already changed my life forever, and had come close several times to getting me killed. And most disturbingly, the talent, and everything it brought with it, had transformed me into the very thing I never wanted to be again, the ruthless, fearless automaton created by my CIA work.

This form of ESP I had was, I now believed, a terrible thing. Not fantastic and wonderful, but in truth horrible. One should not be able to penetrate the protective walls that surround others.

So now I had been plunged into the middle of something that had taken my wife away from me and turned me back into the ice man and threatened to kill me as well.

Who were the bad guys? Some faction of CIA?

No doubt I would know soon. In the town of Volte-Basse, in Tuscany.

It was, I discovered, the tiniest of villages, a mere blip on the map. A cluster of ancient dun-colored stone buildings crowded together on either side of a narrow road. Number 71, which led directly into Siena. There was a bar, a small grocer/butcher, and not much else.

And at three-thirty in the morning the town was utterly still, shrouded in silence and darkness. The map I’d memorized, comprehensive as it was, indicated nothing called “Castelbianco,” and there was no one around to ask at this time of the morning, or, really, night.

I was exhausted, badly in need of a rest, but the road was far too exposed. My instincts told me to pull off somewhere concealed. I headed away from Siena on 71, through the modern town of Rosia, and up into the wooded hills beyond. Immediately past a stonecutting yard I spotted a turnoff for a private estate, an immense tract of Tuscan forest with a castle planted quite a ways into it. The road was tiny and dark, its surface a treacherous paving of gravel and large stones. The Lancia bumped and scraped its way over the path. Soon I located a copse, and pulled the car into it so that I was invisible, at least as long as it remained dark.

I shut off the engine, retrieved from the trunk one of the blankets that I had guiltily stolen from the Hassler, and threw it over me. I reclined the front seat as far back as it would go and listened to the engine tick as it cooled, feeling very alone, until I was fast asleep.

THIRTY-THREE

Bruised and groggy, I awoke at sunrise and experienced a momentary sense of dislocation. Where was I? Not at home in my comfortable bed, snuggled up against Molly, I remembered with a sinking feeling, but in the front seat of a rented car somewhere in a forest in Tuscany.

Tilting the seat back upright, I started the car up, backed out of the copse, and drove a few miles into the town of Rosia. The air was chilly, and the sun, which was just edging over the horizon, cast golden beams against the terra-cotta buildings. Everything was still, utterly quiet until a broken-down delivery truck thundered by, through the town center, then groaning, whining as the driver downshifted to take it up the winding hill to the stone quarry I’d passed the night before.

Rosia seemed to consist of two main streets, the rows of buildings low-slung and red-roofed, evidently built in the middle of this century. Most of the buildings contained small shops-a bakery, a hardware store, a few fruit and vegetable places (FRUTTA & VERDURA), a newsstand. At this time of the morning they were all closed except for a Jolly Caffè Bar-Alimentari bar-cum-delicatessen down the quiet street, from which I could hear male voices. I walked up to it. Workers were having their coffee, reading sports papers, sparring verbally. They looked up as I entered, fell silent, looked me over curiously. I picked up scattered thoughts in Italian, of course, and not of any consequence.

Dressed as I was in a pair of somewhat rumpled pants and a heavy woolen sweater, they probably didn’t know what to make of me. If I were one of the foreigners (most often British) who owned or rented the nearby Tuscan villas at exorbitant rates, why hadn’t they seen me before? And what was this crazy foreigner doing awake at six o’clock in the morning?

I ordered an espresso and sat down at one of the small round plastic tables. The workers’ conversations slowly resumed, and when my coffee arrived, a small Illy-Caffè cup filled with steaming dark espresso topped with a golden-tan layer of crèma, I took a long, appreciative sip and felt the caffeine do its work in my bloodstream.

Thus fortified, I got up and approached what appeared to be the most senior of the workers, a potbellied, round-faced, balding man whose face was covered with gray stubble. He was wearing a grimy white apron over a navy blue work uniform.

“Buon giorno,” I said.

“Buon giorno,” he replied, regarding me with suspicion. He spoke with the soft, gentle accents of Tuscany, in which a hard C becomes an H, a hard ch becomes a soft sh.

In my rudimentary Italian, I managed to say: “Sto cercando Castelbianco, in Volte-Basse.” I’m looking for Castelbianco.

He shrugged, turned to the others.

“Che pensi, che questo sta cercando di vendere l’assicurazione al Tedesco, o cosa?” he muttered: Think this guy’s trying to sell the German guy insurance, or what?

The German: Is that what they thought Orlov was? Was that his cover legend here, a German émigré?

Laughter all round. The youngest of them, a dark-skinned, gangly man in his early twenties who looked like an Arab, said: “Digli che vogliamo una parte della sua percentuale.” Tell him we want part of his commission. There was more laughter.

Another one said, “Pensi che questo sta cercando di entrare nella professione del muratore?” You think this guy’s trying to get into the rock business?

I laughed companionably along with them. “Voi lavorate in una cava?” I asked. You guys work in the quarry?

“No, è il sindaco di Rosia,” the youngest one said, slapping the oldest on the shoulder. “Io sono il vice-sindaco.” No, he’s the mayor of Rosia, he was saying, and I’m the deputy mayor.

“Allora, Sua Eccellenza,” I said to the balding man, and asked whether they were doing stonework for the “German.” “Che state lavorando le pietre per il… tedesco… a Castelbianco?”

He waved his hand at me dismissively, and they all laughed again. The youngest one said, Se fosse vero, pensi che staremmo qua perdendo il nostro tempo? Il tedesco sta pagando i muratori tredici mille lire all’ora!” If we were, you think we’d be wasting our time here? The German’s paying stonemasons thirteen thousand lire an hour!

“You want veal, this is the guy to see,” another said of the older man, who got up, brushed his hands against his apron (which I now realized was spattered with animal blood), and walked toward the door. He was followed by the man who’d just spoken.

After the butcher and his assistant had left, I said to the swarthy young man: “So where’s Castelbianco anyway?”

“Volte-Basse,” he said. “A few kilometers up the road toward Siena.”

“Is Castelbianco a town?”

“A town?” he said with an incredulous laugh. “It’s big enough to be a town, but no. It’s a tenuta-an estate. Most of us kids used to play at Castelbianco years ago, before they sold it.”

“Sold?”

“Some rich German just moved in there. They say he’s German, I don’t know, maybe he’s Swiss or something. Very secretive, very private.”

He described for me where Castelbianco was located, and I thanked him and left.

An hour later I found the estate on which Vladimir Orlov had gone into hiding.

If, indeed, the information I had “gotten” from the cardiologist was right. At that point I didn’t know for certain. But the talk at the bar about a reclusive “German” seemed to confirm it. Did the townspeople think Orlov was some East German grandee who had gone into hiding when the Wall came down? The best covers follow the contours of reality.

Set on a hill overlooking Siena, Castelbianco was a magnificent ancient villa built in the Romanesque style. It was large and somewhat shambling; restoration was obviously being done on one wing. The villa was surrounded by gardens that were probably once beautiful but were now overgrown and in disarray. I found it at the end of a winding road in the hills above Volte-Basse.

Castelbianco had no doubt been a Tuscan family’s ancestral home, and centuries before that had probably been a fortified bastion of one of the many Etruscan city-states. The forest that surrounded the disheveled gardens overflowed with silvery-green olive trees, fields of enormous sunflowers, and grapevines, great cypresses. I realized quickly why Orlov had chosen this particular villa. Its location, the way it was set high upon a hill, made it easy to secure. A high stone fence surrounded the estate, topped, I saw, with electrified wire. Not impenetrable-virtually nothing was impermeable to someone skilled in black-bag jobs-but it did a fairly good job at keeping out the unwanted. From a tiny stone booth, recently constructed, at the only entrance, an armed guard checked all visitors. The only visitors seemed to be, just as I’d learned that morning, workers from Rosia and the area, stonemasons and carpenters who arrived in dusty old trucks, were carefully looked over, and proceeded in to do their day’s work.

Probably Orlov had brought this guard with him from Moscow. And if one got past this guard, there would certainly be others within. So crashing the gates seemed like an eminently bad idea.

After a few minutes of surveillance, from the car and on foot, I devised a plan.

A few minutes’ drive away was the sprawling town of Sovicille, the capital of this area, this commune west of Siena, but as unassuming a capital city as I had ever seen. I parked in the center of town, in the Piazza G. Marconi, in front of a church, next to a San Pellegrino bottled-water truck. The square was peaceful, disturbed only by the lewd whistling of a bird in a cage in front of a Jolly Caffè, the chatter of a few middle-aged women. There I spotted the yellow rotary-dial sign of a public telephone, and as I walked toward it, the peace was broken by the loud ringing of the town bell.

I entered the café and ordered a coffee and a sandwich. For some reason, there is no coffee in the world like Italian coffee. They don’t grow it, but they know how to brew it, and in any truck stop or cheap dive in Italy you can get better cappuccino than you can in the finest so-called “Northern Italian” restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

I sipped, and I thought, which is something I had done quite a bit of since leaving Washington. Yet for all my cogitation, I still had no idea where things stood.

I was in possession of the most extraordinary talent, but what had I been able to do with it? I had tracked down a former head of Soviet intelligence-a neat bit of espionage that, frankly, the CIA would certainly have been able to accomplish, given more time and a little ingenuity.

And now what?

Now I would, if everything went as planned, find myself in proximity with the old KGB spymaster. Perhaps I’d learn why he had met with my late father-in-law. Perhaps not.

This much I knew, or thought I knew: Edmund Moore’s fears had been borne out. Toby had confirmed it. Something was going on, something involving CIA, something substantial and frightening. Something, I suspected, of global consequence. And it was accelerating. First Sheila McAdams, then Molly’s father. Then Senator Mark Sutton. And now Van Aver, in Rome.

But what was the pattern?

Toby had sent me to find out what I could from Vladimir Orlov. I had almost been killed in the process.

For what?

For learning something that Harrison Sinclair knew? Something he was killed for knowing?

Embezzlement, elemental greed, was not an adequate explanation. My instincts told me it was something more, something much greater, something of enormous and pressing concern to whoever the conspirators were.

And if I was fortunate, I would learn it from Orlov.

If I was fortunate. A secret that certain people of immense power wanted kept secret.

And as likely as not, I’d learn nothing. They would release Molly, I felt confident, in any case, but I would return home empty-handed. And then what?

I would never be safe, and neither would Molly. Not as long as I possessed this terrible gift; not as long as Rossi or any of his cronies knew where to find me.

Dispirited now, I left the café and found, on the winding main street, Via Roma, a small store called Boero, whose window displayed ammunition and hunting supplies for this hunting-obsessed region. The cases and boxes in the inelegant display bore such names as Rottweil, Browning, Caccia Extra. What I didn’t find there I managed to turn up in a much fancier hunting-supply store in Siena, a place on the tiny Via Rinaldi called Maffei, which boasted pricy hunting jackets and accessories (for those wealthy Tuscans, I imagined, who wanted to look fashionable while they went out for a day’s sport hunting, or who wanted to at least look like they hunted). Next, I arranged the transfer of a great deal of money from my old Washington account to an American Express office in London, and from there to Siena, where it was given to me in American dollars.

Finally there was enough breathing room-and I had sufficiently collected my thoughts-to place a telephone call. On Via dei Termini in Siena I located an SIP office (the Italian telephone company) where, from one of the booths, I dialed an international number.

After the customary clicks and hums and staticky interludes, the phone on the other end was answered on the third ring, as it was supposed to be.

A female voice said, “Thirty-two hundred.”

I said, “Extension nine eighty-seven, please.”

Another click, and the timbre of the connection was altered almost imperceptibly, as if the call were being routed through some special, insulated fiber-optic cable. Likely it was: from a communications outpost near Bethesda, to a switching station in Canada (Toronto, I believe) and back to Langley.

A familiar male voice came on the line. Toby Thompson.

“The Cataglyphis ant,” he said, “goes out in the noonday sun.”

This was a coded exchange he had devised, a reference to the Saharan silver ant, which is able to withstand temperatures higher than any other animal in the world, as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

I responded: “And they sprint faster than any other animal, too.”

“Ben!” he said. “What the hell are you-where the hell-?”

Could I trust Toby? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but it was best to take as few chances as possible. After all, what if Alex Truslow were right and the Agency was infiltrated? I knew that the security precautions of the telephone connection, the multiple switchbacks and so forth, would give me more than eighty seconds before my location could be traced, so I would have to speak quickly.

“Ben, what’s going on?”

“You might want to fill me in, Toby. Charles Van Aver is dead, as I’m sure you know-”

“Van Aver-!”

As far as I could divine through the miracle of modern telecommunications, Toby sounded genuinely shocked. I glanced at my watch, and said, “Look into it. Ask around.”

“But where are you? You haven’t checked in. We agreed…”

“I just wanted you to know that I will not be checking in according to your schedule. It’s not secure. But I’ll be in touch. I’ll call back tonight between ten and eleven my time, and I want to be connected immediately with Molly. You can do it; you guys are wizards. If the connection isn’t made within twenty seconds, I’ll disconnect.”

“Listen, Ben-”

“One more thing. I’m going to assume your… apparatus is leaky. I suggest you plug the leaks, or you’ll lose contact with me entirely. And you don’t want that.”

I hung up. Seventy-two seconds: untraceable.

I strolled through the crowds along Via dei Termini, preoccupied, and found a kiosk that had a good selection of foreign newspapers: the Financial Times and The Independent, Le Monde, the International Herald-Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung. I picked up a copy of the Trib and glanced at the front page as I continued walking. The lead story, of course, was the German election.

And a small headline below the fold on the left-hand side of the page read:

U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE CORRUPTION IN CIA

Wholly absorbed, I jostled a glamorous young Italian couple, both attired in olive green. The male, who was wearing Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, shouted out some imprecation in Italian I didn’t quite understand.

“Scusi,” I said as menacingly as I could.

Then I noticed the headline at the top left: ALEXANDER TRUSLOW NAMED TO HEAD CIA.

White House sources say that Alexander Truslow, a longtime CIA official who was acting director of the CIA in 1973, will be named as the new director. Mr. Truslow, who heads an international consulting firm based in Boston, vowed to launch a major cleanup of the CIA, which is being rocked by the allegations of corruption.

Things had begun to make sense. No wonder Toby had spoken of a “grave urgency.” Truslow represented a threat to some very powerful people. And now, having just been named as Harrison Sinclair’s replacement, he was in a position to do something about the “cancer,” as he called it, which was overtaking the Agency.

Hal Sinclair had been killed, as had Edmund Moore, and Sheila McAdams, and Mark Sutton, and perhaps-probably-others.

The next target was obvious.

Alex Truslow.

Toby was right: there was no time to lose.

THIRTY-FOUR

At a few minutes after three in the afternoon I drove up to the stone quarry near where I had spent the previous night.

One hour and fifteen minutes later I was seated in the front passenger seat of a beat-up Fiat truck, pulling up to the main gate of Castelbianco. I was wearing work clothes, heavy blue twill trousers and a light blue work shirt, well worn and covered in dust. Driving the truck was the gangly, dark-skinned young worker I’d met at the bar in Rosia early that morning.

His name was Ruggiero, and he turned out to be the son of an Italian man and a Moroccan émigré woman. Correctly sizing him up as cooperative, pliable, and very susceptible to a bribe, I had found him at the quarry and taken him aside to ask for information.

Or, rather, to pay for it. I explained that I was a Canadian businessman, a real-estate speculator, and I was willing to pay handsomely for information. Slipping Ruggiero five ten-thousand-lire notes (about forty dollars), I told him I needed to somehow get to the “German” in order to talk business-specifically, to make a generous (if somewhat illegal) cash offer for the Castelbianco property. I had a potential buyer; the “German” would turn a quick, easy profit.

“Hey, wait a second,” Ruggiero said. “I don’t want to lose my job.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I replied. “Not if we do it right.”

Ruggiero supplied me with all the information I needed about the renovation taking place at Castelbianco. He told me that a member of the housekeeping staff dealt directly with the quarry, placing orders for marble and granite tiles. Apparently, the “German” was overseeing a rather thoroughgoing renovation; the crumbling wing was being restored with deep green Florentine marble tiles for the floor and granite for the terrazzo. He had hired expert stonemasons, real old-world craftsmen, from Siena.

Ruggiero drove a hard bargain. It cost me seven hundred thousand lire-more than five hundred dollars-for a few hours of his time. He called his contact at Castelbianco and informed him that the last order of Florentine marble they had delivered, three days before, was short, as it turned out. An employee who’d since been fired had made a dreadful mistake. The remainder of the order would be delivered immediately.

It was unlikely that anyone at Castelbianco would argue over the quarry’s willingness to supplement the earlier order, and indeed, no one did. In the worst case-if, somehow, Orlov’s staff became suspicious, tallied up the marble already delivered, and learned that no mistake had actually been made-then Ruggiero would simply say that he’d been misinformed. And nothing would happen to him.

Minutes later we were at the gate of Castelbianco. The guard emerged from his stone booth, holding a log sheet on a clipboard, and approached the truck, blinking in the sun.

“Sí?”

His intonation and accent were such that, had we been a few hundred miles to the north, I could quite easily imagine him saying “Da?” with just the same brusqueness. With his close-cropped yellow hair, his healthy, ruddy complexion, he was unmistakably of Russian peasant stock, the sort of complaisant, beefy thug so often employed at the Lubyanka.

“Ciao,” Ruggiero said.

The guard nodded with recognition, made a check mark on the visitors’ log, glanced at the load of marble slabs we were hauling, then saw me.

And nodded again.

I gave him the barest shrug of acknowledgment and scowled as if I could hardly wait for this shift to be over.

Ruggiero revved the engine and guided the truck slowly between the massive stone pillars. The dirt road wound past a few small stone houses with slanted roofs, which I assumed belonged to workers. Chickens and ducks roamed the tiny brown yards in front of the houses, chortling and honking angrily. A couple of workers were spreading white powder from a large sack of fertilizer over a sparse patch of lawn.

“His people live there.”

I grunted, not wanting to ask who “his people” were, if indeed Ruggiero knew.

A small flock of sheep was scattered on a hillside on our left. They had slender pink faces, quite different in appearance from any sheep I had seen in America, and bleated suspiciously, in chorus, as we passed.

Up ahead, the house loomed. “What’s it like inside?” I asked.

“Never been inside. I’ve heard it’s nice, but a little rundown. Needs work. The German got it cheap, I heard.”

“Good for him.”

We rounded a bend above a narrow ravine, passed another low stone building. This one had no windows.

“Rat house,” Ruggiero said.

“Hmm?”

“I’m joking. Half joking. It’s where they used to keep the food garbage. It swarms with rats, so I stay away from it. Now they use it to store stuff.”

I shuddered at the image. “How do you know so much about this place?”

“Castelbianco? My friends and I used to play around here when we were kids.” He shifted into neutral, coasted the truck up next to a terrace where several hunched, sun-bronzed middle-aged men were cutting and fitting limestone tiles in an ornate pattern of concentric circles. “In those days, when Castelbianco belonged to the Peruzzi-Moncinis, they’d let kids from Rosia play here. They didn’t care. Sometimes we helped out with chores.” He reached behind to the backseat, pulled out two pairs of coarse canvas gloves, and handed me a pair. As he pulled at a lever that mechanically lowered the load of marble to the ground, he said, “If you get someone to buy it from the German, try to find someone who’ll get rid of the barbed wire. This place used to belong to the whole comune.”

He jumped out of the cabin, and I followed him around to the back, where he began to lift marble slabs and set them gently down in a neat pile near the terrace.

“Che diavolo stai facendo, Ruggiero?” one of the masons shouted, turning toward us and waving a hand, asking what the hell he was doing.

“Calmati,” Ruggiero said, and kept working. Take it easy. “Sto facendo il mio lavoro. É per l’interno, credo. Che ne so io?” Just doing my job, he was saying. I joined him in unloading the marble. The thin slabs, rough on one side, smooth and finished on the other, weren’t heavy, but were fragile, and we had to set them down carefully.

“No one told me anything about a delivery of marble,” the same mason, who appeared to be a foreman, continued in Italian, his hands gesticulating. “The marble was last week. You guys fuck up or something?”

“I just do what they tell me,” Ruggiero said, and gestured to the house. “The last delivery was short, so Aldo offered to make it up. Anyway, it’s none of your fucking business.”

The mason picked up a trowel, smoothed a line of cement, and said resignedly, “Fuck you.”

We worked in silence for a while, lifting, carrying, setting down, finding a rhythm. I said quietly, “The guys know you, huh?”

“He does. My brother worked for him for a couple of years. Real asshole. You want us to finish unloading this stuff?”

“Almost,” I said.

“Almost?”

As we worked in silence, I surveyed the house and grounds. Up close, Castelbianco was no palazzo; it was large, and in its way magnificent, but at the same time shabby and in disrepair. Perhaps a million dollars of renovation would restore it to a grandeur it hadn’t seen for centuries, but Orlov was barely spending a fraction of that. I wondered where he had gotten the money, but then, why should the former head of Soviet intelligence not have found clever ways to pocket some of the unlimited budget he once controlled, divert hard currency funds to Swiss accounts? And what was he paying his security guards, who might number half a dozen? Not much, I suspected, but then, he was providing these fellows asylum, protection from the arrest and imprisonment they’d face back home in Russia for having so faithfully served the now-discredited KGB. How quickly things had reversed course: the feared, mighty officers of state security, the sword and shield of the Party, were now hunted down like rabid dogs.

But it bothered me that I had been able to get into the grounds of Castelbianco so easily. What sort of security was this for a man in fear for his life, a man driven to strike a deal with the head of the CIA to give him protection, like some shopkeeper in Chicago buying protection from the minions of Al Capone?

The security was modest: there appeared to be no snipers, no closed-circuit cameras. Yet this made a certain sense. His real security system was his anonymity, which apparently was so successful that even my own employers didn’t know where he was. Too much security would have been a… well, I could not help thinking “red flag.” Too thorough a system would have attracted undue attention. An eccentric rich German might employ a few guards, but too sophisticated a system would have been risky. So I was inside, and according to the information I had received, Orlov was inside, too. The problem was, how was I going to get into the house? And more to the point, once inside, how would I get out?

For what must have been the twentieth time, I mentally rehearsed my plan, and then signaled to my Italian accomplice to put down the marble slabs and follow me.

“Aiutatemi!”’ Help me! “Per l’amor di Dio, ce qualcuno chi aiutare?” Knocking wildly at the heavy wooden door that opened directly from the outside to the kitchen, Ruggiero was bellowing, “For the love of God, can someone help me?” His right forearm was a frightful mess, a long gash bleeding profusely.

Squatting in the bushes nearby, behind a rusty set of metal barrels that held food refuse, I watched. A noise inside signaled that someone had heard his desperate knocking. Slowly, with a squeak of the hinges, the door swung open to reveal a rotund old woman wearing a green canvas smock over a shapeless floral-print housedress. Her brown eyes, small circles in a large mass of wrinkles beneath a wild flyaway mane of gray hair, widened suddenly when she saw Ruggiero’s wound.

“Shto eto takoye?” she said in a high, scared voice. “Bozhe moi! Pridi, malodoi chelovek! Bystro!” What’s this? she was saying in Russian. My God, come in, young man!

Ruggiero replied in Italian: “Il marmo… Il marmo é affilato…” The marble is sharp.

She was, I presumed, the Russian housekeeper, perhaps a servant who had worked for Orlov in his days of power. And as I anticipated, she behaved with all the motherly concern of a Russian woman of her generation. She naturally wouldn’t have guessed that Ruggiero’s wound had not been caused by an accident with the sharp-edged marble tiles but had instead been created by me, using stage makeup from a shop in Siena.

Neither did the poor woman suspect that the instant she turned her back to direct this young Italian man into the kitchen for first aid, someone else would jump from the bushes to subdue her. Swiftly, I clamped a chloroform-soaked rag over her mouth and nose, smothering her scream, and supporting her large, awkward body when it went limp.

Ruggiero quietly closed the kitchen door. He glanced at me, alarmed, no doubt thinking: what kind of “Canadian investor” is this? But his assistance had been bought and paid for, and he would not let me down.

From his childhood days playing at Castelbianco, Ruggiero had known where the entrance to the kitchen was. Already, as far as I was concerned, he had earned his money. When I pulled the coil of slender nylon rope from my overalls, he helped me tie the housekeeper up, taking care that the rope not chafe her, and placing a gag in her mouth, secured by rope, for when she came to. Then, silently, he helped me move the unconscious body from the onion-fragrant kitchen into the large pantry.

He shook my hand. I gave him the final payment, in American dollars, and with a quick nervous smile, he said, “Ciao,” and was gone.

A small, dark set of stone steps led from the kitchen up to a dark corridor, off of which appeared to be unoccupied bedrooms. I crept noiselessly, making my way by feel as much as anything else. Somewhere in the house I heard a faint buzzing, but it seemed quite far off, as if from miles away. There were none of the normal noises a house makes, though, even an ancient castle such as this.

I came to an intersection of two corridors, a bare landing that held only two small, shabby wooden chairs. The insistent buzzing noise was closer, louder now. It came from somewhere below. I followed it downstairs, turning left, going straight for a few feet, then left again.

Slipping my hand into the front pocket of my overalls, I touched the Sig-Sauer. I felt the reassuring cold of the pistol’s steel.

Now I stood before high oak double doors. The buzzing came, in irregular intervals, from within.

I grabbed the pistol and, crouching as low to the ground as possible, slowly pulled one of the doors open, not knowing what or whom I’d see inside.

It was a large, empty dining room with bare walls and bare floors and an immensely long oak table set for lunch for one person.

Lunch, evidently, had been eaten.

The single diner, who sat at one end of the table, buzzing furiously for a housekeeper who was not able to answer his calls, was a small, bald old man, an innocuous-looking man wearing thick, black-framed glasses. I had seen pictures of the man hundreds of times before, but I had no idea how small Vladimir Orlov actually was.

He was wearing a suit and tie, strangely: who would come to see him, hiding as he was in Tuscany? The suit wasn’t smartly British, as so many modern Russians in positions of power seemed to favor; it was old-style, boxy, of Soviet or Eastern European manufacture, probably several decades old.

Vladimir Orlov: the last head of the KGB, whose likeness, stiff and unsmiling, I had seen countless times in Agency files, in newspaper photographs. Mikhail Gorbachev had brought him in to replace the traitorous KGB chief who had plotted to overthrow Gorbachev’s government, during the last convulsions of Soviet power. We knew little about the man, except that he was deemed “reliable” and “friendly to Gorbachev” and other traits vaporous and unprovable.

Now he sat before me, furled and small. All the power seemed to have been drained out of him.

He looked up at me, scowled, and said in clipped Siberian-accented Russian, “Who are you?”

Not for a few seconds was I able to reply, but when I did, it was with a smoothness that I hadn’t expected. “I’m Harrison Sinclair’s son-in-law,” I said in Russian. “I’m married to his daughter, Martha.”

The old man looked as if he’d seen a ghost. His heavy brow lowered, then shot up; his eyes grew narrow, then widened. He seemed to pale at once. “Bozhe moi,” he whispered. Oh, my God. “Bozhe moi.”

I simply stared, my heart hammering, not understanding what he meant, who he thought I was.

He got slowly to his feet, scowling and half pointing at me accusingly.

“How the hell did you get in here?”

I didn’t reply.

“You are foolish to come here.” His words were a whisper, barely audible. “Harrison Sinclair betrayed me. And now we will both be killed.”

THIRTY-FIVE

I walked slowly into the cavernous dining room. My footsteps echoed against the bare walls, the high vaulted ceilings.

Beneath his glacial calm, his imperious demeanor, Vladimir Orlov’s eyes flicked back and forth with great anxiety.

Several seconds of silence passed.

My thoughts raced. Harrison Sinclair betrayed me. And now we will both be killed.

Betrayed him? What did this mean?

Orlov spoke now, his voice clear and resonant and reverberating: “How dare you appear before me.”

The old man reached a hand to the underside of the dining table and depressed a different button. From somewhere in the hallway I heard a long, continuous buzzing noise. Footsteps came from somewhere in the house’s interior. The housekeeper, probably returned to consciousness by now but unable to move or be heard, was not answering his summons. But perhaps one of the guards had heard the noise, suspected that something might be wrong.

I withdrew the Sig from the overalls pocket, leveled it at the KGB chairman. I wondered whether Orlov had ever had a gun pointed at him in earnest before. In the circles of intelligence in which he had always worked, at least according to the career assessments I’d read, one’s weapons were not guns or Uzis or poison darts, but fitness reports and memoranda.

“I want you to know,” I said, now holding the gun under the table, “that I have no intention of harming you. We must have a brief chat, you and I, and then I will be gone. When the guard appears, I want you to assure him everything’s all right now. Otherwise, you’ll most certainly die.”

Before I could elaborate, the door to the dining room flew open, and a guard whom I hadn’t seen before leveled an automatic at me, calling out: “Freeze!”

I smiled casually, gave the old man the briefest glance, and, after the barest moment’s hesitation, he told the guard, “Go on. Thank you, Volodya, but I’m fine. It was a mistake.”

The guard lowered the gun, sized me up-dressed as a workingman as I was, he remained suspicious-untensed slowly, and said, “Sorry.” He withdrew and closed the door quietly behind him.

I approached the table and took a seat next to Orlov. Sweat glistened on his forehead; his face, up close, looked ashen. Glacial and imperious, yes-but deeply frightened at the same time and trying desperately not to show it.

I was sitting a few feet from him, too close for his comfort, and he turned his head away as he spoke. A disgusted expression crossed his face.

“Why are you here?” he croaked out hoarsely.

“Because of an agreement you reached with my father-in-law,” I said. There was a long pause, during which I concentrated, trying to hear that distinct voice, but getting nothing.

“You have been no doubt followed. You endanger both of us.”

Not answering, I compressed my lips in deep concentration, and suddenly heard a noise, a nonsense phrase, something I didn’t understand. A wisp of a thought, surely, but nothing that registered.

“You’re not Russian, are you?” I said.

“Why are you here?” Orlov said, twisting in his chair. His elbow caught a serving plate and shoved it, clatteringly, against other dishes. His voice gradually gathered strength, grew louder. “You fool!”

I heard another floating phrase as he spoke, something I didn’t understand, something in a foreign language. What was it? It wasn’t Russian, it couldn’t be, it sounded unfamiliar. I grimaced, closed my eyes, listened, heard a stream of vowels, words I couldn’t decode.

“What is it?” he asked. “Why are you here? What are you doing?” He moved his high-backed carved oak chair back. It squealed loudly against the terra-cotta floor.

“You were born in Kiev,” I said. “Is that right?”

“Leave!”

“You’re not Russian-born, are you? You’re Ukrainian.”

He got up and started backing out of the room slowly.

I got to my feet, too, and pulled the Sig out again, reluctant to threaten him again. “Stay there, please.”

He froze.

“Your Russian has a slight Ukrainian accent. Your Gs give you away.”

“What are you here for?”

“Your native language is Ukrainian. You think in Ukrainian, don’t you?”

“You know that,” he snapped. “You didn’t need to come here, to endanger me, to learn something that Harrison Sinclair must have told you.” He took a step toward me, as if to menace, a clumsy attempt to regain the psychological advantage. His old Stalinist suit hung on his frame like a scarecrow’s. “If you have something to say to me, or to give to me, it had better be of earthshaking consequence.”

Another step. He resumed: “I will assume it is, and I will give you five minutes to explain yourself, and then you had better be gone.”

“Sit, please,” I said, gesturing with the barrel of the gun to his chair. “This will not take long. My name is Benjamin Ellison. As I said, I am married to Martha Sinclair, the daughter of Harrison Sinclair. Martha inherited the entirety of her father’s estate. Your contacts-I am sure you have extensive contacts-can confirm I am who I say I am.”

He seemed to relax-and then he lunged, seeming to lose his footing as he vaulted toward me, hands outstretched. With a loud, almost subhuman, guttural sound-a choked, twisted aaaghgh!-he threw himself at me, grabbing my knees, trying to throw me off balance. I twisted, then grabbed his shoulder and forced him to the ground.

He sprawled on the floor at the base of the oak table, gasping, his face crimson. “No,” he gasped. His eyeglasses clattered to the ground a foot or so from his head.

Keeping the gun trained on him, I reached to retrieve his glasses, and with my free arm I somewhat awkwardly helped him up. “Please,” I said, “please don’t try that again.”

Orlov sagged into the nearest dining chair like a marionette, exhausted yet wary. It has always fascinated me that world leaders, once out of power, are so palpably diminished in an almost physical sense. I remember once meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kennedy School in Boston, shaking his hand after a lecture he gave a few years after he was so unceremoniously booted out of the Kremlin by Boris Yeltsin. And Gorbachev struck me as a small, very mortal, very ordinary person. I felt a pang of sympathy for the man.

A Russian phrase.

I heard it, heard his thoughts: a recognizable phrase, in Russian, amid a stream of Ukrainian, like a slug of uranium embedded in graphite.

Yes; he was born in Kiev. At the age of five his family moved to Moscow. Like the physician in Rome, he, too, was bilingual, though he thought mainly in Ukrainian, with the occasional bit of Russian interspersed.

The phrase he thought translated as wise men.

“You know very little,” I said, feigning great assurance, “about the Wise Men.”

Orlov laughed. His teeth were bad, gapped and uneven and stained. “I know everything, Mr… Ellison.”

I watched his face closely, concentrating, seeing what I could pick up. Again, most of it seemed to be in Ukrainian. Here and there I could pick up cognates, words that sounded similar to those in Russian, or English, or German. I heard Tsyurikh, which had to be Zurich. I heard Sinclair, and something that sounded like bank, although I couldn’t be sure.

“We must talk,” I said. “About Harrison Sinclair. About the deal you struck with him.”

Again I leaned close to him, as if thinking deeply. A stream of strange words came at me now, low and fuzzy and indistinct, but of them one word screamed out at me. It was, again, Zurich, or something that sounded like it.

“Deal!” he scoffed. The old spymaster gave a loud, dry laugh. “He stole billions of dollars from me and from my country-billions of dollars!-and you dare to call this a deal!”

THIRTY-SIX

So it was true. Alex Truslow was right.

But… billions of dollars?

Was this all about money? Was that it? Money, throughout history, has motivated most of the great acts of evil, when you come right down to it. Was money why Sinclair and the others were killed, why the Agency was, as Edmund Moore warned me, being torn apart?

Billions of dollars.

He regarded me arrogantly, almost superciliously, and attempted to straighten his glasses.

“And now,” he said with a sigh, switching to English, “it is only a matter of time before my own people find me. Of that I have no doubt. I’m not entirely surprised that you people tracked me down. There is no place on earth-no place on earth one would bear to live-where one can’t eventually be found. But what I don’t know is why-why you decided to endanger my life by coming here, whatever your reasons. That was enormously foolish.” His English was excellent, apparently fluent, and British-accented.

Inhaling sharply, I said: “I was extremely cautious in getting here. You have little to worry about.” His expression did not waver. His nostrils flared slightly; his eyes, steady, betrayed nothing.

“I am here,” I continued, “to put things right. To rectify the wrong my father-in-law did to you. I am prepared to offer you a great deal of money for your assistance in locating the money.”

He pursed his lips. “At the risk of being vulgar, Mr. Ellison, I would be extremely interested to know your definition of ‘a great deal.’”

I nodded and got up. Replacing the gun in my pocket, and backing up just beyond his range, I reached down and raised the legs of my overalls, easing the canvas up to expose the banded wads of American dollars strapped to my calves. I released the Velcro restraints that I had purchased at a sporting goods store in Siena, and the money came off each leg in two segments.

Those I placed on the table.

It was a great deal of money-probably more than Orlov had ever seen, and certainly more than I had ever seen-and it had its persuasive effect.

He scanned the wads, rifled through them, apparently satisfying himself cursorily that it was real. He looked up and said, “There is-what?-perhaps three-quarters of a million dollars here?”

“An even million,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, his eyes wide. And then he laughed, a harsh, derisive caw. Theatrically, he pushed the bundles toward me. “Mr. Ellison, I am in very difficult financial straits. But as much as this is-it is nothing compared to what I was supposed to receive.”

“Yes,” I said. “With your help, I can locate the money. But we must first talk.”

He smiled. “I will accept your money as a good-faith payment. That proud I am not. And, yes, we will talk. And then we will come to an agreement.”

“Fine,” I said. “In that case, let me put my first question to you: Who killed Harrison Sinclair?”

“I had hoped you would be able to tell me that, Mr. Ellison.”

“But it was Stasi agents,” I said, “who carried out the order.”

“Quite likely, yes. But whether it was Stasi or Securitate, it had nothing to do with me. Certainly it would not have been in my interest to eliminate Harrison Sinclair.”

I cocked a brow questioningly.

“When Harrison Sinclair was killed,” Orlov said, “I and my country were cheated out of over ten billion dollars.”

I felt my face flush, hot and prickly. From everything I could tell, he was speaking the truth. My heart thudded slowly and evenly.

Certainly there was nothing modest about Orlov’s Tuscan villa, but neither was he living in great wealth, as some of those high-level Nazis did in Brazil and Argentina in the years after the Second World War. A great sum of money would purchase not only a life of luxury but, far more important, protection for a lifetime.

But ten billion dollars!

Orlov continued: “What was that memoir written by the CIA Director under Nixon, William Colby? Honorable Men, isn’t that what it was called?”

I nodded warily. I didn’t much like Orlov, though for reasons having nothing to do with ideology or the bitter rivalry people used to imagine existed between the KGB and the CIA. Hal Sinclair once confided to me that when he was station chief in various world capitals, some of his best buddies were his opposite numbers in KGB station. We are-I should say were-far more alike than different.

No, I found Orlov’s smugness repellent. Moments ago he had been lunging at me like an old woman; now he sat there like a pasha-and thinking mostly in Ukrainian, for God’s sake.

“Well,” Orlov continued, “Bill Colby was, is, an honorable man. Perhaps too honorable for his profession. And until he betrayed me, I thought Harrison Sinclair was, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How much of this did he tell you?”

“Very little,” I admitted.

“Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union,” he said, “I secretly contacted Harrison Sinclair, using back channels that had not been used in many years. There are-were, rather-ways. And I asked his help.”

“To do what?”

“To remove from my country most of its gold reserves,” he said.

I was astonished, even overwhelmed… but it made a certain sense. It gibed with what I knew, what I had read in the press as well as heard from spook friends of mine.

The Central Intelligence Agency had always calculated that the Soviet Union had tens of billions of dollars in gold reserves, in their central vaults in and around Moscow. But then suddenly, immediately after the hard-line Communist coup d’état failed in August 1991, the Soviet government announced that it had a mere three billion dollars in gold.

This news had sent shock waves throughout the world financial community. Where on earth could all that gold have disappeared to? There were all manner of reports. One reliable one had it that the Soviet Communist Party had ordered 150 tons of silver, eight tons of platinum, and at least 60 tons of gold to be hidden abroad. It was alleged that Communist Party officials may have hidden as much as fifty billion dollars in Western banks, in Switzerland, Monaco, Luxembourg, Panama, Liechtenstein, and a whole array of offshore banks, such as the Cayman Islands.

The Soviet Communist Party, it was reported, laundered money furiously in its last years of existence. Heads of Soviet enterprises were creating fake joint ventures and shell companies to spirit money out of the country.

In fact, the Yeltsin government even went so far as to hire an American investigating firm, Kroll Associates-one of Alex Truslow’s chief competitors, by the way-to track down the money, but nothing ever turned up. It was even reported that one massive transfer to Swiss banks was ordered by the Party’s business manager, who committed suicide-or was murdered-a day or so after the coup collapsed.

Might it have been Orlov’s former comrades, seeking to stop me from tracking down the gold, who killed the CIA man Charles Van Aver in Rome?

I listened in dull amazement.

“Russia,” he said, “was falling apart.”

“You mean the Soviet Union was falling apart.”

“Both. I mean both. It was clear to me and to everyone else with a brain that the Soviet Union was about to be cast on the ash heap of history, to use Marx’s tired phrase. But Russia, my beloved Russia-it was about to collapse as well. Gorbachev had brought me in to run the KGB after Kryuchkov had attempted a coup. But the power was slipping from Gorbachev’s fingers. The hard-liners were pilfering the country’s riches. They knew Yeltsin would take over, and they were lying in wait to destroy him.”

I had read and heard a great deal about the mysterious disappearance of Russia’s assets, in the form of hard currency, precious metals, even artwork. This was not news to me.

“And so,” he went on, “I came up with a plan to spirit out of the country as much of Russia’s gold as I could. The hard-liners would try to regain power, but if I could keep their hands off the country’s wealth, they would be powerless. I wanted to save Russia from disaster.”

“So did Hal Sinclair,” I said, as much to him as to myself.

“Yes, exactly. I knew he would be sympathetic. But what I was proposing frightened him. It was to be an off-the-books operation, in which the CIA helped the KGB steal Russia’s gold. Move it out of the country. So that one day, when it was safe, it could be returned.”

“But why did you need the help of the CIA?”

“Gold is very difficult to move. Extraordinarily difficult to move. And given how carefully I was being watched, I could not have it moved out of the country. My people and I were under constant scrutiny, constant surveillance. And I certainly could not have it liquidated, sold-it would be traced back to me in a second.”

“And so you two met in Zurich.”

“Yes. It was a very complicated procedure. We met with a banker he knew and trusted. He set up an account system to receive the gold. He agreed to my condition, that I be allowed to ‘disappear.’ He had all pertinent location data on me deleted from the CIA’s data banks.”

“But how did Sinclair-or the CIA-manage to get it out?”

“Oh,” he said wearily, “there are ways, you know. The same channels that were used to smuggle defectors out of Russia in the old days.”

These channels, I knew, included the military courier system, which is protected by the Vienna Convention. This particular method was used to extract several famous defectors from behind the Iron Curtain. I remember hearing gossip about one legendary defector, Oleg Gordievsky, on the Agency rumor grapevine, to the effect that he’d been taken out in a furniture truck. It wasn’t true, but at least it was plausible.

He continued: “An entire military aircraft is treated as a diplomatic pouch, allowed to leave the country uninspected. And of course there are sealed trucks. Quite a few methods that the CIA has access to, which we did not, because we were being watched so closely. There were informants everywhere, even among my own personal secretaries.”

Something didn’t entirely click, however. “But how did Sinclair know he could trust you? How the hell could he be assured you weren’t one of the bad guys?”

“Because,” Orlov said, “of what I offered him.”

“Explain.”

“Well, he wanted to clean up CIA. He believed it was rotten through and through.

“And I gave him the evidence that it was.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

Orlov looked up at the door as if he expected one of his guards to appear. He sighed.

“In the early 1980s we finally began to develop the technology to intercept the most sophisticated communications between your CIA headquarters and other government agencies.” He sighed again, then gave a perfunctory smile. It was as if he’d told the exact story before.

“The satellite and microwave equipment on the roof of the Soviet embassy in Washington began to pick up a broad range of signals. They confirmed information we had already received from a penetration agent at Langley.”

“Which was?”

Another perfunctory smile. I began to wonder whether that was simply the way he smiled, a quick twitch of the mouth, the eyes unchanging, wary. “What was the CIA’s great mission from its founding until, oh, 1991?”

I smiled, one case-hardened cynic to another. “To defeat world communism and generally make life hell for you guys.”

“Right. Was there ever a time when the Soviet Union was realistically a threat to the United States?”

“Where do I begin? Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia? Hungary? Berlin? Prague?”

“But to the United States.”

“You had the bomb, don’t let’s forget.”

“And we were as afraid to use it as you were. Only you used it; we did not. Did anyone at Langley seriously believe that Moscow had either the means or the will to take over the world? And what were we supposed to have done with the world once we took possession-run it into the ground the way, I’m sorry to say, our great esteemed Soviet leaders did the once-great Russian empire?”

“There was self-delusion on both sides,” I conceded.

“Ah. But this… delusion… certainly kept the CIA working overtime for years, did it not?”

“What’s your point?”

“Simply this,” Orlov said. “Your great mission now is to defeat corporate espionage, is that right?”

“So I’m told. It’s a different world now.”

“Yes. International corporate espionage. The Japanese and the French and the Germans all want to steal valuable trade secrets from your poor, beleaguered American corporations. And only the Central Intelligence Agency can make America safe for capitalism.

“Well, by the mid-1980s, the KGB was the only intelligence service in the world equipped to fully monitor communications coming out of CIA headquarters. And what we learned simply confirmed the darkest suspicions of some of my most deeply-dyed Communist brethren. From intercepts obtained between Langley and its outposts in foreign capitals, Langley and the Federal Reserve, et cetera, we learned that CIA had for years been rather busily engaged in directing its formidable espionage abilities against the economic structures of ostensible allies like the Japanese and the French and the Germans. Against private corporations in these countries. All for the sake of protecting American national security.”

He paused, turned to look at me, and I said, “So? Normal part of business.”

“So,” Orlov continued, settling comfortably back in his chair, and lifting both palms at once as if he’d made his point. “We thought we’d picked up the contours of a normal money-laundering operation-you know, money flows out of Langley’s accounts at the Federal Reserve in New York to the various CIA stations around the world. Wherever it’s needed to fund covert operations for democracy, yes? New York to Brussels, New York to Zurich, to Panama City, to San Salvador. But no. Not at all.”

He looked at me and twitched another smile. “The more our financial geniuses dug-” He noticed my skepticism, and said, “Yes, we did have a few geniuses among all the fools. The more they dug, the more they confirmed their suspicions that this wasn’t standard money laundering at all. Money wasn’t just being channeled. Money was being made. Money was being amassed. Earned from corporate espionage. Intercept after intercept proved this.

“Was it the CIA as an institution? No. Our asset inside Langley confirmed that it was just a few people. Privateers. These operations were controlled by a small cell of individuals in CIA.”

“The ‘Wise Men.’”

“An ironic name, I must assume. A tiny group of public servants inside CIA was becoming enormously rich. Using the intelligence they obtained from these espionage operations to enrich themselves. Rather handsomely, too.”

The fact is, it’s quite common for CIA operatives to skim from their budgets, their funds, which are fluid and poorly documented (for reasons of secrecy: no CIA director who’s ordered a covert operation in some third-world country wants to leave a paper trail for some congressional oversight committee). Many operatives I have met make a habit of leeching-tithing, some of them call it-ten percent of the funds to which they have access, and squirreling it away in a Swiss numbered account. I never did it, but those who did, did it to provide themselves with a security blanket, protection in case anything went wrong. The green-eyeshade accounting types back in Langley routinely write off these sums, knowing full well where they’ve gone.

I said as much to Orlov, who shook his head slowly in response. “We are talking about vast sums of money. Not tithing.”

“Who were-are they?”

“We had no names. They were too protected.”

“And how did they amass their fortunes?”

“It doesn’t take a deep understanding of business or microeconomics, Mr. Ellison. The Wise Men were privy to the most intimate conversations and strategy sessions in boardrooms and corporate offices and automobiles in Bonn and Frankfurt and Paris and London and Tokyo. And with the intelligence thereby gathered… Well, it was a simple matter to make strategic investments in the stock markets of the world, particularly New York, Tokyo, and London. After all, if you knew what Siemens or Philips or Mitsubishi was up to, you knew what stock to buy or sell, isn’t that right?”

“So it wasn’t embezzlement, really, at all?” I said.

“Not at all. Not embezzlement. But manipulation of stock markets, violations of hundreds of American and foreign laws. And the Wise Men did quite well, really. Their bank accounts in Luxembourg and Grand Cayman and Zurich flourished. They made quite a fortune. Hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.”

He looked up again at the double doors, and went on, a small look of triumph on his pinched face. “Think of what we could have done with the evidence-the transcripts, the intercepts… The mind reels. We couldn’t have asked for anything better to use in propaganda. America is stealing from its allies! We couldn’t have anything better. Once we leaked that, NATO would have been destroyed!”

“My God.”

“Oh, but then came 1987.”

“Meaning what?”

Orlov shook his head slowly. “This is not known to you?”

“What happened in 1987?”

“Have you forgotten what happened to the American economy in 1987?”

“The economy?” I asked, puzzled. “There was the great stock market crash in October 1987, but apart-”

“Exactly. ‘Crash’ may be an overstatement, but certainly the American stock markets collapsed on, I believe, October 19, 1987.”

“But what does that have to do with-”

“A stock market ‘crash,’ to use your word, is not necessarily a disaster to one who is prepared for it. Very much the opposite; a group of savvy investors can make huge profits in a stock market crash, by short selling, futures and arbitrage, and other means, correct?”

“What are you saying?”

“I am saying, Mr. Ellison, that once we knew what these Wise Men were doing, what their conduits were, we were able to follow their activities quite closely-unknown to them.”

“And they made money in the 1987 crash, is that it?”

“Using computerized program trading and fourteen hundred separate trading accounts, calibrating precisely with Tokyo’s Nikkei and pulling the levers at exactly the right time, and with the right velocity, they not only made vast sums of money in the crash, Mr. Ellison, they caused it.”

Dumbfounded, I could do no more than stare.

“So you see,” he continued, “we had some very damaging evidence of what a group within the CIA had done to the world.”

“And did you use it?”

“Yes, Mr. Ellison. There was a time when we did.”

“When?”

“When I say ‘we,’ I refer to my organization. You recall the events of 1991, the coup d’état against Gorbachev, instigated and organized by the KGB. Well, as you well know, your CIA had advance information that this coup was being planned. Why do you think you did nothing to forestall the plan?”

“There are theories,” I said.

“There are theories, and there are facts. The facts are that the KGB possessed detailed, explosive files on this group that called itself the Wise Men. These files, once released to the world, would have destroyed America’s credibility, as I’ve told you.”

“And so the CIA was made inert,” I said. “Blackmailed by the threat of disclosure.”

“Precisely. And who would give up such a weapon? Not a dedicated opponent of the United States. Not a loyal KGB man. What better proof could I offer.”

“Yes,” I said. “Brilliant. Who knows of the existence of these files?”

“Only a handful of people,” he said. “My predecessor at the KGB, Kryuchkov, who is alive but fears for his life too much to talk. His chief aide, who was executed-no, excuse me, I believe The New York Times published a story that said he had ‘committed suicide’ just after the coup, am I right? And, of course, I.”

“And you gave him these amazing files.”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

A brief shrug, a twitch of a smile. “Because the files had disappeared.”

“What?”

“Corruption was rampant in Moscow in those days,” Orlov explained. “Even more rampant than it is now. The old order-the millions of people who worked in all the old bureaucracies, the ministries, the secretariats-the entirety of the Soviet government knew that their days were numbered. Factory managers were selling off their goods to the black markets. Clerks were selling off files in the Lubyanka offices of the KGB. Boris Yeltsin’s people had taken many files from KGB headquarters, and some of those seized files were changing hands! And then I was told that the file on the Wise Men had disappeared.”

“Files like that don’t simply disappear.”

“Of course not. I was told that a rather low-level file clerk in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate had taken the file home with her and sold it.”

“To whom?”

“A consortium of German businessmen. I was told she sold it to them for something over two million deutsche marks.”

“About a million American dollars. But surely she could have gotten far more.”

“Of course! That file was worth a great deal of money. It contained the tools to blackmail some of the highest-ranking officials in the CIA! It was worth far, far more than this foolish woman sold it for. Greed can make one irrational.”

I suppressed the urge to smile. “A German consortium,” I mused. “Why would a group of Germans be interested in blackmailing the CIA?”

“I didn’t know.”

“But you do now?”

“I have my theories.”

“Such as?”

“You are asking me for facts,” he said. “We met in Zurich, Sinclair and I-in conditions of absolute secrecy, naturally. By this time I had left the country. I knew I would never return.

“Sinclair was furious to learn that I no longer had the incriminating files, and he threatened to cancel the deal, to fly back to Washington and put an end to this. We quarreled for many hours. I tried to make him believe the truth, that I was not deceiving him.”

“And did he?”

“At the time I thought he did. Now I do not.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought we had a deal, and as it turned out, we did not. I left Zurich for this house-which Sinclair, incidentally, had found for me-and awaited further word. Ten billion dollars was now in the West. Gold that belonged to Russia. It was an enormous gamble, but I had to trust in Sinclair’s honesty. More than that, in his own self-interest. He wanted to keep Russia from becoming a right-wing, Russian-chauvinist dictatorship. He, too, wanted to spare the world that. But I think it was the files. The fact that I did not have the Wise Men files to give him. He must have felt that I was not playing fair. Why else would he have double-crossed me?”

“Double-crossed you?”

“The ten billion dollars went into a vault in Zurich. Sitting in a vault beneath Bahnhofstrasse with two access codes required to secure its release. But I could not gain access to it. And then Harrison Sinclair was killed. And now there is no hope of taking back the gold. So I hope you understand that I certainly had no interest in having him killed, now, did I?”

“No,” I agreed. “You would not. But perhaps I can help you now.”

“If you have Sinclair’s access codes-”

“No,” I said. “There are no codes. None were left to me.”

“Then I am afraid there is nothing you can do.”

“Wrong. There is something I can do. I need the name of the banker you met with in Zurich.”

And at that moment the tall double doors at the far end of the dining room flew open.

I jumped to my feet, not wanting to pull out my gun in the event that it was one of his guards again, in which case everything should look normal; I could not risk appearing to be threatening the master of the house.

I glimpsed a flash of deep blue cloth, and knew at once. Three uniformed Italian policemen entered, pistols directed at me.

“Tieniti le mani al fianco!” one of them commanded. Keep your hands at your sides.

They advanced into the room, in SWAT formation. My pistol was useless at this point; I was outnumbered. Orlov backed away from me until he was against a wall, as if avoiding the line of fire.

“Sei in arresto,” the other said. “Non muoverti.” Don’t move-you’re under arrest.

I stood there dumbly, confused. How could this have happened? Who had called them? I didn’t understand.

And then I saw the small black call button set into the broad oak leg of the dining table, at the point at which it rested on the terra-cotta floor. It was the sort of button you could set off by tapping your foot, the way bank tellers can, unseen, summon the police. It would set off a noiseless alarm far away-in this case, I suspected, as far away as the municipal police headquarters in Siena, which explained why they took so long to arrive. Police, no doubt, in the pay of this mysterious “German” émigré who required excellent security.

That lunge that Orlov had made at me, his only clumsy move. He knew I would push him to the ground, that he’d be able to roll over and set off the emergency button with his hand or knee or foot.

But something was wrong!

I looked at the ex-KGB chief and saw that he was terrified. Of what?

He was looking at me. “Follow the gold!” he croaked. Meaning what exactly?

“The name!” I shouted out to him. “Give me the name!”

“I can’t say it!” he croaked, his hands flailing, indicating the policemen. “They-”

Yes. Of course he could not say it aloud, not in front of these men. “The name,” I repeated. “Think the name!”

Orlov looked at me, baffled and desperate. Then he turned to the policemen.

“Where are my people?” he said. “What have you done with my-”

Suddenly, he appeared to jerk upward. There was a spitting sound, a sound I knew at once, and I turned and saw that one of the policemen was targeting Orlov with a submachine gun, its automatic fire cutting a grotesque swath into the old man’s chest. His arms and legs danced around for a second as he expelled one last, horrifying scream. Blood flew everywhere, spattering the stone floors, the walls, the burnished dining table. Orlov, his neck half severed from his body, was crumpled into a nightmarish, bloodied heap.

I let out an involuntary shout of horror. I had pulled out my pistol, outmanned though I realized I was, but there was no point.

Suddenly there was silence. The submachine gun-fire had stopped. Numbly, I raised my hands and gave myself up.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The carabinieri led me, handcuffed, through the vaulted door of Castelbianco, and slowly over to a beat-up blue police van.

They looked and dressed like carabinieri, but of course they were not. They were murderers-but whose? Dazed from the horror, I could barely think straight. Orlov had summoned his own people, his protection, only to be surprised when others had arrived. But who were they?

And why hadn’t they killed me as well?

One said something quickly and quietly in Italian. The other two, surrounding me closely, nodded and guided me into the back of the van.

It was not the proper time to move, to do anything sudden, so I went along with them bovinely. One of the policemen sat across from me in the back of the van, while another took the wheel and the third kept watch from the front seat.

None of them spoke.

I watched my police escort, a chubby and dour young man. He sat maybe two feet from me.

I concentrated.

I “heard” nothing; just the loud muffled roar of the engine as the van negotiated the dirt road out of the estate. Or so I assumed, since there were no windows in the back of the van. The only illumination came from a dome light. My wrists, cuffed in front of me at my lap, chafed.

I tried, again, to empty my mind, to concentrate. In the last week or so this had become reflexive. I would free my mind as much as possible of distracting thoughts-let it become a blank slate, in a way; a receiver. And then I would hear the eddies and floes of thoughts in that slightly altered tonality that indicated I wasn’t actually hearing anything spoken aloud.

I made my mind as blank, as receptive as possible, and in time… I “heard” my name… and then something else that sounded familiar… in that faint, floating way that told me it was thoughts.

In English.

He was thinking in English.

He wasn’t a policeman, and he wasn’t Italian.

“Who are you?” I asked.

My escort looked up at me, betraying only for an instant his surprise, then shrugged mutely, hostilely, as if he didn’t understand.

“Your Italian is excellent,” I said.

The van’s engine quieted, then stalled. We had stopped somewhere. It couldn’t be far outside the estate-we had been moving for only a few minutes-and I wondered where they had taken me.

Now the doors to the van slid open, and the other two climbed in. One covered me with a gun while the other gestured to me to lie down. When I had done so, he began to attach black nylon restraints to my ankles.

I made it as difficult for him as possible-kicking, wriggling. But with a crisp Velcro crunch he managed to fasten the wide black bands, binding my feet together. Then he discovered the second pistol, concealed in a holster at my left calf.

“One more, guys,” this one said triumphantly.

In English.

“Better not be any others,” said the one who seemed to be in charge. His voice was deep, raspy, cigarette-husky.

“That’s it,” the other said, running his hands along my legs and arms.

“All right,” the one in charge said. “Mr. Ellison, we’re colleagues of yours.”

“Prove it,” I said, lying prone. All I could see was the dome light immediately above me.

There was no response. “You can choose to believe us or not,” the one in charge said. “Makes no difference to us. We just have to ask you a couple of questions. If you’re completely honest with us, you have nothing to worry about.”

While he was speaking, I felt something cold and liquid spread over my bare arms, then my face, neck, then ears: a viscous liquid was being applied with a brush.

“Do you know what this is?” the fake policeman in charge asked.

I could taste the sweetness at the edge of my mouth.

“I can guess.”

“Good.”

The three of them hoisted me out of the dark van, into the blinding brightness of the day. There was no point to struggling now. I wasn’t going anywhere. Looking around as I was carried out of the van, I saw trees, brush, a flash of barbed wire. We were still on the grounds of Castelbianco, not far from the entrance, in front of one of the small stone buildings I had noticed on the way in.

They set me down on the ground just before the building. I could smell the loamy earth, then the putrescent odor of rotting garbage, and I knew where I was.

Then the one in charge said: “All you have to do is tell us where the gold is.”

Lying prone on the ground, the back of my head cold from the moist earth, I said, “Orlov wouldn’t cooperate. I barely had the chance to talk with him.”

“That’s not true, Mr. Ellison,” the middle one said. “You’re not being honest with us.” He lowered a small, shiny object, which I now saw was a razor-sharp scalpel, to my face, and I closed my eyes instinctively. God, no. Don’t do it.

There was a swift stroke across my cheek. I felt the shock of cold metal, then a needlelike, sharp pain.

“We don’t want to cut you too badly,” the senior one said. “Please, just give us the information. Where is the gold?”

I felt something hot and sticky oozing down the right side of my face. “I have no idea,” I said.

The scalpel was now resting on my other cheek, cold and oddly pleasant.

“I really dislike this, Mr. Ellison, but we don’t have any choice. Again, Frank.”

I gasped out, “No!”

“Where is it?”

“I told you, I have no-”

Another stroke. Cold, then stingingly hot, and I felt the blood on my face, running into the sticky bait-liquid they’d painted on me. Tears sprang to my eyes.

“You know why we’re doing this, Mr. Ellison,” the man in charge said.

I tried to wriggle over onto my stomach, but two of them were holding me firmly down. “Goddamn you,” I said. “Orlov didn’t know. Is that so hard for you to understand? He didn’t know-so I don’t know!”

“Don’t make us do it,” the elder said. “You know we will.”

“If you let me go, I can help you find it,” I whispered.

He gestured with his pistol, and the junior two picked me up, one at my head, the other at my feet. I thrashed wildly, but my mobility was limited, and they had a firm grasp on me.

Now they thrust me into the cold, dark dankness of the tiny stone building, putrid with the high, ripe odor of rotting garbage. I heard rustling. There was another smell, too, something acrid, like kerosene or gasoline.

“They removed the trash yesterday,” the elder said, “so they’re quite hungry.”

More rustling.

The crinkle of plastic; more rustling, this time more frantic-sounding. Yes; gasoline or kerosene.

They set me down, my feet bound. The only light in the tiny, awful chamber came in from the door, against which I could see silhouetted two of the false carabinieri.

“What the hell do you want?” I croaked.

“Just tell us where it is, and we will take you out.” It was the raspy, deep voice of the one in charge. “It’s that simple.”

“Oh, God,” I couldn’t help saying aloud. Never let them see your fear, but it was uncontainable now. A scratching, more rustling. There had to be dozens of them.

“Your personnel file,” he went on, “tells us you’re extremely phobic of rats. Please, help us out, and this will all be over.”

“I told you, he didn’t know!”

“Lock it, Frank,” the one in charge barked out.

The door to the stone house was slammed shut and bolted. For an instant, all was pitch-black, and then, as my eyes acclimated to the dark, everything took on a doleful amber cast. From all around there was scurrying, rustling. Several large, dark shapes moved on either side of me. My skin prickled.

“When you’re ready to talk,” I heard from outside the stone house, “we’ll be here.”

“No!” I yelled. “I’ve told you everything I know!”

Something ran across my feet.

“Jesus…”

From outside I heard a hoarse voice addressing me: “Did you know that rats are what you might call ‘legally blind’? They operate almost entirely by sense of smell. Your face, with its blood and its coating of sweet liquid, will be irresistible to them. They will gnaw at you out of desperation.”

“I don’t know anything more,” I bellowed.

“Then I feel very sorry for you,” the hoarse voice came again.

I felt something large and warm and dry and leathery brush against my face, against my lips, several of them, then many of them, and I couldn’t open my eyes, and I felt sharp incisions along my cheeks, sharp, unbearable jabs, a papery whisk-whisk sound, a tail whipping against my ear, moist feet against my neck.

Only the knowledge that my captors were standing outside, waiting for me to succumb, kept me from bellowing in terrible, indescribable fear.

THIRTY-NINE

Somehow-somehow-I was able to keep my mind focused.

I managed to wriggle upright, hurling off the rats as I did so, brushing them off my face and neck with my hands. In a few minutes I had the nylon restraints off, but little good that would do me, as the men waiting outside no doubt figured: the only way out of this massive stone structure was the door, which was securely bolted.

I felt around for a gun until I realized that of course they had taken both of them. I had a few rounds of ammunition strapped to my ankles, beneath my socks, but they were useless without something to fire them.

As my eyes grew used to the dark, I made out the source of the fuel odor. Several gallon cans of gasoline were stacked against one wall, beside an assortment of farm equipment. The “rat house,” as my Italian friend had called it, may have been for storing garbage, but it also stored materials used in repairing Orlov’s land-paper sacks of cement, plastic bags of fertilizer, rakes, fertilizer spreaders, mortar tools, scattered two-by-fours.

As the rats bustled about me-I kept my limbs in constant motion to discourage them from attempting to crawl on me-I surveyed the meager assortment of tools for a way out. A rake, I calculated, would hardly survive an assault on the steel-reinforced door, nor would any of the other farm tools. Gasoline seemed the most obvious means of assault-but assault on what? And what could I ignite it with? I had no matches. And what if I did spill out the gasoline and manage somehow to set it afire? Then what? I would burn alive. That would benefit no one but my captors. Utter foolishness. There had to be a way.

I felt the dry whisk of a rat’s tail against my neck, and I shuddered.

From outside, a deep voice intoned: “All we need is the information.”

The obvious thing to do was to make up information, pretend to break down and blurt it out.

But that would never wash. They would expect that; they would be too well briefed. I had to get out of there.

It was impossible; I was no Houdini; but I had to get out of there. The rats, fat brown little creatures with long, scaly tails, scurried around my feet, making little grunting noises. There were dozens of them. A few had climbed up the walls; two of them, crouched atop a fifty-pound bag of fertilizer, leapt toward me, scenting the blood that was congealing on my cheeks. Horrified, I flung out my hands to brush them away. One bit my neck. I thrashed wildly, managing to stomp a few to death.

I knew I would not survive here much longer.

It was the fertilizer bag that first caught my eye. In the dimness I was able to make out a label:

CONCIME CHIMICO FERTILIZZANTE

A yellow, diamond-shaped label proclaimed it to be an “oxidizer.” The stuff was used on grass, usually. Thirty-three percent total nitrogen content, the label stated. I moved closer, squinted. Derived of equal parts of ammonium nitrate and sodium nitrate.

Fertilizer.

Was it possible…?

It was an idea. The likelihood of its working was not especially high, but it was worth it. There was simply no other way out.

I reached down and removed the Colt.45 magazine from the strap underneath my left sock. They had taken the gun but overlooked the slim magazine.

It was full: it contained seven rounds. Not much, but it might do. I extracted all seven rounds from the clip.

A voice from outside the rat house: “Enjoy the rest of the day, Ellison. And the night, too.”

Containing my horror, I made my way across the rat-crowded stone floor to one wall. One by one I jammed each cartridge into a narrow crack in the mortar. Now there was a row of them, their blunt gray tips sticking out.

With a rusty old pair of pliers I’d found, I whacked the nose of each bullet to loosen the tight friction fit between bullet and cartridge case. Carefully, I closed the jaw of the pliers over each bullet tip, pulling at it, wiggling back and forth, until the bullet came out of its casing. This part of the cartridge was the projectile, the business part, the part that was propelled into a target. But I had no need of it. I needed, instead, what remained in each cartridge: the propellant and the primer.

A trio of rats squirmed over my feet, one scampering over my knee, clawing at the fabric of my shirt, trying to make its unspeakable way up to my face. I gasped in terror, shuddered, slapped at the rats, knocked them to the stone floor.

Now, barely recovering, I removed each brass cartridge casing from the crack in the wall and slowly dumped the small amount of propellant from each one onto a scrap of paper I’d torn from one of the cement sacks. The six cartridges yielded a good little pile of propellant, a dark gray substance made of tiny irregular spheres of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin.

By far the riskiest step was next: removing the primers. These are the small nickel cups, situated at the base of each cartridge, that contain a small quantity of the high-explosive tetracene. They are also extremely sensitive to percussive force. And, struggling as I was in the dark, surrounded by scurrying rats, my concentration was not at its height. Yet this had to be done with great caution.

So I searched the small stone house quickly for something like a drill bit, but there was nothing even approximating it. A thorough search of every dark corner of the small structure might have yielded me something usable, but I simply could not bring myself to plunge my naked hands into a dark, squirming niche. I am not proud of my terror of rats, but we all have our phobias, and this one was, as I’m sure you agree, not entirely irrational. I would have to make do with the ballpoint pen in my pocket. It would do adequately. I removed its ink cartridge.

Very, very carefully, I inserted the tip of the ink cartridge into the flash hole at the base of the casing and nudged the first percussion cap out. The second one went much more easily, and in a matter of minutes I had extracted each of the primer cups from six of the cartridges, leaving one intact.

I felt something dry and scaly brush against the back of my neck, and I shivered. My stomach knotted instantly.

As dexterously as I could, I slipped each primer into the intact cartridge, stacking them up, one atop the other. Into the remaining space I poured the entire pile of propellant, then packed it down tight with a forefinger.

I had, now, a tiny bomb.

Next, I located a suitable length of two-by-four, a (rusty) length of pipe, a discarded soft-drink bottle, a cloth rag, a large rock, and an almost-straight long nail. This search took several minutes, an eternity it seemed, with the rats writhing across the ground, an ineffably horrifying moving carpet, it seemed to me. My stomach remained knotted, a tight, sore muscle of tension. I found myself shivering almost constantly.

With the rock I hammered the nail into the lumber until its point had just emerged from the other side. Now the fertilizer. Of the several fifty-pound bags, two had a nitrogen content that ranged from eighteen to twenty-nine. One had a total nitrogen content of thirty-three percent. That was the one I selected. I tore open the bag and scooped out a handful, sprinkling it onto another large scrap of cement-bag paper. A small claque of rats wriggled their way up to the pile, their whiskers twitching with curiosity and greed. With the soda bottle I knocked them away. Their bodies were far more solid and muscular than I had anticipated. If I had to speak, I could not have done so, I was so paralyzed with fright, but somehow my autonomic nervous system kept me working away robotically.

Rolling the soda bottle over the smooth, rounded prills of fertilizer yielded a fine powder. Repeating this process several times, I obtained a large pile of well-powdered fertilizer. In ideal conditions this step wouldn’t have been necessary, but these were hardly ideal conditions. For one thing, the sensitizing agent should have been something like nitromethane, the blue fluid used by hot-rod enthusiasts to increase the octane in fuel. But there was nothing of the sort around. There was only gasoline, which would have to do, though it was far less effective. So powdering the nitrogenous fertilizer, thereby decreasing the diameter of the prills, increasing the surface area of the stuff and making it more reactive, was the least I could do.

I uncapped the can of gasoline and gently poured it over the fertilizer powder. There was a great rustling among the teeming rats; sensing danger, they scurried away, turned ghastly little pirouettes, backed up into the recesses of the chamber.

Gingerly, I packed the sensitized fertilizer into the rusty length of pipe, which I’d capped off by dropping in a stone just large enough to block off the end entirely. The pipe was about a half inch in diameter, which was about right. Into the nitrate I wedged the cartridge that I’d prepared.

I surveyed my handiwork and felt a sudden desperate, sinking feeling that the jerry-rigged bomb would not go off. The basic ingredients were there, but it was wildly unpredictable, especially given how hastily I had assembled the thing.

Now, with as much force as I could muster, I wedged the pipe into a crack in the ancient mortar between two stones of the wall.

The fit was extremely tight.

Yes. It might work.

If it did not work… If it deflagrated instead of detonated, it would fail miserably, filling this minuscule space with toxic fumes that would overwhelm me, probably kill me. There was a possibility, too, that a misfire of the pipe bomb would maim or blind me, or worse.

I placed the long two-by-four atop the protruding pipe bomb, the nail point just touching the base of the cartridge. Holding my breath, my heart thudding rapidly, I wrapped the filthy rag around my eyes, lifted the rock I’d used as a hammer a few moments before.

Held it in my right hand directly over the nail in the two-by-four.

And, pulling the rock back two feet or so, I hurled it with enormous force at the nail head.

The explosion was immense, unbelievably loud, a thunderclap, and suddenly everything around me was a nightmarish glaring orange visible even through the dirty rag tied tightly over my eyes, a vicious hailstorm of rocks and fire, a cataract of shrapnel, and my entire world was a ball of crimson fire, and this was the last thing I remembered.