Extraordinary Powers

Los Angeles Times

Gemany to Rearm, Acquire Nuclear Weapons Move Supported by Washington, Western Leaders

BY CAROLYN HOWE

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Relieved that Germany has resolutely turned away from neo-Nazism, the United States and a majority of governments around the world have lent their support to new Germany Chancellor Wilhelm Vogel’s bid to “restore Germany’s national pride”…

FIFTY-THREE

“Wer ist denn das?” Vogel called out. Who is this? “Wo ist der Leibwächter?” Where is the bodyguard?

Truslow’s silver hair, I now saw, was still neatly combed; his face was red from the scalding heat, or from anger, but probably from both.

I came nearer to him.

And to me, in a voice soft and caring and gentle, he said: “Please, Ben, stop right there. For your own sake. Don’t worry. I’ve just told them you are a friend, that you must not be harmed. Nothing will be done to you. You will not be hurt.”

He must be killed, I heard. He must be killed at once.

“We’ve been looking all over for you,” Truslow continued sweetly.

Ellison must be eliminated, he thought.

“I must say,” he went on soothingly, “this is the last place in the world I expected to find you. But you’re safe now, and-”

I hurled the tray at Truslow, scattering glass mineral water bottles everywhere. One hit Vogel in the stomach; the others shattered loudly on the tiled floor.

Truslow commanded in German: “Halten Sie diesen Mann auf. Er darf hier nicht lebend herauskommen!”

“Stop this man!” he had shouted. “He must not be allowed to leave here alive!”

I leapt through the door and ran with all my might, with as much speed as I could muster, toward the nearest exit, into the Romerplatz, Truslow’s words echoing in my head. And I knew that for the last time, Alexander Truslow had lied to me.

Molly had the Mercedes idling for me at the Friedrichsbad’s side entrance. She threw the car into gear, sped to the city’s outskirts, and found the autobahn A8. Echterdingen International Airport was only sixty miles or so east, a few miles south of Stuttgart.

For a long time, I didn’t speak.

Finally, I told her what I had seen. She reacted just as I had, with shock, horror, and then white-hot anger.

We both knew now why it was that Truslow had recruited me, why it was that Rossi had deceived me into becoming an Oracle Project subject, why they were so elated to discover that the experiment had worked on me.

A great deal now made sense.

Aloud, as we barreled down the autobahn in Molly’s skilled hands, I pieced it together. “Your father didn’t commit any crime,” I told her. “He wanted to do whatever he could to save Russia. So he agreed to help Vladimir Orlov empty out the Soviet treasury of its gold reserves, help move it abroad, hide it. He had it moved to Zurich, where some of it was put into storage in a vault, and some of it was converted into liquid assets.”

“But where did it go from there?”

“It fell under the control of the Wise Men.”

“Alex Truslow, you mean.”

“Right. By asking me to help track down this missing fortune-which he told me had been diverted by your father-he was actually using me, using my talent, to locate the half of the gold he couldn’t get access to. Because your father had locked it away in the Bank of Zurich.”

“But who’s the co-owner of the account?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Truslow must have suspected that Orlov had stolen the gold. That’s why he employed me to find Orlov, which the CIA hadn’t been able to do.”

“And once you found him-?”

“Once I found him, I could read his thoughts, presumably. And learn where he had put the gold.”

“But Dad was co-owner of the account. So no matter what, Truslow would need my signature!”

“For some reason, Truslow must have wanted us to get to Zurich. What was it that the banker said-by accessing the account, its status was altered from dormant to active?”

“Meaning what?”

“I don’t know.”

Molly hesitated, let an eighteen-wheeler pass us. “And what if the Oracle Project hadn’t been successful on you?”

“Then he might not have found the gold. Or he might have. But in any case, it would have taken much, much longer.”

“So you’re telling me that Truslow used the five billion he did have access to as-as a fulcrum, to cause the German stock market crash?”

“It fits, Molly. I can’t be certain, but it fits. If Orlov’s information is right, and the Wise Men-read Truslow, and probably Toby, and probably others-”

“Who now run CIA-”

“-Yes. If the Wise Men really used Agency intelligence to gather inside information on foreign markets, and were able somehow to engineer the U.S. stock market crisis of 1987, it must have been these same people who pulled off the far bigger German one.”

“But how?”

“You channel a paltry few billion dollars-deutsche marks-secretly and suddenly into the German stock market. Used swiftly and suddenly, by experts with access to computer trading accounts, it can be used to acquire vast sums of money on credit in order to destabilize an already weak market. To seize control of much larger assets. To buy and sell on margin, buy and sell, using computerized program trading, at a speed possible only in this age of computers.”

“But for what?”

“For what?” I echoed. “Look at what’s happened. Vogel and Stoessel are about to control Germany. Truslow and the Wise Men now control CIA…”

“And?”

“And-I don’t know.”

“But who’s going to be killed?”

I didn’t have the answer to that exactly, but I knew that there was a leak-someone who knew about this conspiracy between Truslow’s people and Stoessel’s, between Germany and America. And this person, whoever it was, was about to testify before the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence hearings on corruption in CIA. “Corruption,” that is, masterminded by the new Director of Central Intelligence, Alexander Truslow.

A secret witness was about to blow the whole thing in two days. If he (or she) was not killed first.

At Echterdingen Airport I tracked down a private airline and a pilot who was about to go home for the evening. I offered him double what he normally got for flying to Paris, and he turned around, donned his flight jacket, and guided us to his small plane. He radioed ahead for clearance to land, received it, and then we took off.

At something after two in the morning we arrived at Charles de Gaulle, went through the briefest of customs formalities, and got a cab into Paris. We got off at the Duc de Saint-Simon, on the rue Saint-Simon in the seventh arrondissement, woke the night clerk who dozed at the concierge desk, and wheedled a spare room. She was not happy about being disturbed. Molly halfheartedly insisted upon accompanying me on my nocturnal mission, but she was feeling queasy from the pregnancy and was easily dissuaded.

Paris, to me, wasn’t just one of the world’s great cities; it was, or at least it had become, a stage set for my recurrent nightmares. Paris wasn’t the Île and the Left Bank and the rue Royale. It was the rue Jacob, that dark, narrow, echoing street where Laura and my future child were murdered and James Tobias Thompson III was paralyzed for life in a sequence that repeated and repeated itself, became more and more ritualized and grotesque and artificial. Paris had become a synonym for tragedy.

Yet I had no choice but to return.

Now I found myself in a depressing second-floor-walk-up photographer’s studio on a seedy strip along the rue de Sèze. Below were forbidding little black-painted storefronts marked with signs that read SEX SHOP and VIDEO and SEXODROME and LINGERIE LATEX CUIR and the flashing green crosses of the Grande Pharmacie de la Place.

What appeared to have been once a tiny one-bedroom flat had been converted haphazardly over the years into a dismal little combination pornographic photographer’s studio and porno-video rental outfit. I sat on a grimy molded plastic chair, waiting for Jean to finish his work. Jean-I never knew his last name and didn’t care to know it-did a healthy sideline business producing excellent false documents, passports, and licenses, largely for freelance operatives and small-time crooks. I had had occasion to do business with him a few times before, during my Paris assignment, and found him to be reliable and a good craftsman.

Could I trust him? Well, nothing in this life is certain, I suppose. But Jean had all the motivation in the world to be trustworthy. His livelihood depended upon his reputation for discretion, which a single act of betrayal would tarnish forever.

I had spent forty-five minutes glancing dully through a dog-eared movie magazine, having grown bored with inspecting the empty video boxes on display on his counter. There were more fetishes and variations in the porno biz than I had ever imagined (“Spanking” and “Hard” and “Trisex” and some deviations I’d never heard of), and all of them were available on video now.

It was after midnight. The photographer had locked the front door and drawn the shade to guard against what little street traffic might come by at that time of night. From the inner room I heard the whir of a hot-air photographic dryer.

At last Jean appeared from the darkroom. He was a small, wizened man in premature middle age, bald and worried-looking, wearing small round wire-rim glasses. He smelled strongly of potassium permanganate solution, which he’d used to artificially age the documents.

“Voilà,” he said, placing the papers on the counter with a flourish. He smiled with some pride. The job had not been terribly difficult: he had been able to work with the entire set of CIA-prepared documents that Molly and I had been given, in effect recycling them, reusing our photographs, and altering numbers where necessary. He had provided one set of Canadian passports and two sets of American ones for us. Molly and I were now fully documented as either American or Canadian citizens.

I inspected all four sets carefully. He did meticulous work. He also charged outrageously. But I was in no position to negotiate.

I nodded, paid him his small ransom, and walked down to the street. There was the whine of mopeds, the acrid stench of diesel fumes. Even at this time of night people roamed the streets of Pigalle, searching for quick gratification. A scraggly gang walked by, who looked to be of college age, dressed in the latest French take on the sixties-leather jackets in black or brown or American-type varsity letter jackets (the effect marred by odd emblazoned slogans like “American Football,” which only made them seem all the more counterfeit); long hair, rolled-up jeans, and orthopedic-looking oxford shoes of the sort you might see nuns wearing. Someone roared by on an enormous motorcycle, a Honda Africa Twin 750.

In the next few minutes I placed several phone calls to old contacts from my CIA days. None of them was connected in any official way to governmental intelligence services; each worked mainly on the wrong side of the law (a difficult distinction in the espionage trade): from a souvlaki shop owner who laundered money for others (at a fee, naturally) to an armorer who custom-altered weapons for assassins and hit men. I succeeded in waking each one of them up with the exception of one night owl who seemed to be out at some dance club with a bimbo and a cellular phone. Finally, through an old friend who had been useful as an expediter years before, I located what my French operative friends sometimes call an ingénieur, an “engineer,” or a fellow skilled at clever circumventions of the international telephone systems. Within the hour I was at the ingénieur’s apartment, in a decrepit 1960s-vintage high-rise in the twentieth arrondissement, off the Avenue de la République. He eyed me through the peephole for a few seconds, and then opened the door. His apartment, scantily furnished with cheap furniture, smelled of stale beer and sweat. He was small and pudgy, wearing a pair of dirty, paint-spattered jeans and a stained white Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt under which bulged an enormous potbelly. Obviously he had been sleeping, like most of the rest of Paris; his hair was disheveled and his eyes were half shut. Without so much as a grunt of social pleasantry, he thrust his thumb toward a smudged white telephone on a coffee table topped with fake-wood-grain Formica that was chipped around the edges. Next to the coffee table was a hideous mustard-yellow sofa whose stuffing was coming out in several places. The phone was precariously balanced atop a set of Paris phone directories.

The ingénieur didn’t know my name and naturally didn’t ask. He had been told only that I was an homme d’affaires, but then, probably all his clients were hommes d’affaires. He was making a very quick five hundred francs for allowing me to use an untraceable phone.

Actually, the call I was about to place was traceable, but the trace would come to a grinding halt somewhere in Amsterdam. From there, though, the link was routed through a series of pass-throughs to Paris, but no electronic tracing equipment yet invented could track it that far.

The ingénieur took my money, grunted porcinely, and shuffled off to another room. Had I had more time, I would have preferred a more secure arrangement than this one, but it would have to do.

The receiver was smudged with greasy fingerprints, I noted disapprovingly, and it smelled like pipe smoke. I punched in the number, and a sequence of strange tones followed. Presumably, the signal was gavotting somewhere around Europe, under the Atlantic Ocean, and perhaps even back to Europe, before it made its by-now-feeble way to Washington, D.C., where the Agency fiber-optic telecommunications system would enrich the signal and put it through its own electronic paces.

I listened for the familiar clicks and hums, waited for the third ring.

On the third ring the female voice announced, “Thirty-two hundred.” How could the same woman always answer the phone, no matter the time of day or night? Maybe it wasn’t even a human voice at all, but a high-quality synthesized one.

I responded: “Extension nine eighty-seven, please.”

Another click and then I heard Toby’s voice.

“Ben? Thank God. I heard about Zurich. Are you-”

“I know, Toby.”

“You know-”

“About Truslow and the Wise Men. And the Germans, Vogel and Stoessel. And the surprise witness.”

“Jesus Christ, Ben, what the hell are you talking about? Where are you?”

“Give it up, Toby,” I bluffed. “It’s all about to come out anyway. I’ve pieced enough of it together. Truslow tried to have me killed, which was a serious mistake.”

There was a quiet whoosh of static faintly in the background.

“Ben,” he said at last. “You’re mistaken.”

I checked my watch and saw that the connection was ten seconds old by now, long enough to trace the call… to Amsterdam. They would pinpoint my location as Amsterdam, which would be useful misdirection.

“Naturally,” I replied sardonically.

“No, please, Ben. There are things going on that can’t be understood… without a full perspective. These are dangerous times. We need the help of people like you, and now with your ability, it’s all the more-”

And I slowly hung up the receiver.

Yes. Toby was involved.

I returned to our hotel and got quietly into bed next to Molly, who was sleeping soundly.

Troubled and sleepless, I got out of bed, fetched the copy of Allen Dulles’s memoirs that Molly’s father had left to me, and began to leaf through it aimlessly. It isn’t even that great a book, but it was all I had in the hotel room, and I needed to run my eyes over something, needed to distract my whirling thoughts. I skimmed a passage about the Jedburghs, who were parachuted into France; and about Sir Francis Walsingham, who was Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster in the sixteenth century.

I looked again over the codes that Hal Sinclair had left for us, for me, to find, and I thought about his cryptic note in the vault in Zurich that told of a safe-deposit box in a bank on the Boulevard Raspail.

And I thought, for the millionth time, about Molly’s father and the secrets he had bequeathed us, the secrets within secrets. I wondered…

It was a hunch more than anything else, certainly nothing well grounded, that inspired me to get out of bed a second time and retrieve a razor blade from my shaving kit.

Publishers in America used to print books of a higher quality in the old days, and by the old days I mean as recently as 1963. Underneath the gray, red, and yellow jacket of The Craft of Intelligence, the heavy pasteboard case was covered with a fine-woven cloth and embossed with the publisher’s insignia. The binding was sewn, not glued, of black and white cloth. I examined the jacketless book, turning it over and over and inspecting it from all angles.

Could it be? How clever was the old spymaster anyway?

Carefully, I sliced open the binding with the razor blade. I lifted back the black cloth of the binding, peeled away the brown kraft paper liner, and there it was, glinting at me like a beacon, a signal from Harrison Sinclair’s grave.

It was a small, oddly shaped brass key stamped with the number 322: the key to what I assumed was the explanation, the answer to the mystery, somewhere in a vault on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris.

FIFTY-FOUR

We strode quickly along the rue de Grenelle the next morning toward the Boulevard Raspail and the Banque de Raspail.

“An assassination is scheduled to occur in two days, Ben,” Molly said. “Two days! We don’t know who the victim will be; all we know is that unless the surprise witness testifies, we’re all as good as dead.”

Two days: I knew it; I thought of the ticking clock virtually all the time. But I didn’t reply.

A neatly dressed older man in a blue overcoat walked toward us, his short white hair slicked back, brown almond eyes behind rectangular glasses. He smiled politely. I glanced in the window of a storefront marked IMPRIMERIE, which featured a display of cartes de visite pinned on a corkboard, samples of their handiwork. In the glass I caught the reflection of a woman, admired her figure, and then realized it was Molly; and then saw the reflection of a small red and white Austin Mini Cooper moving along slowly behind us.

I froze.

I had seen that same car from our hotel window last night. How many other little red Austins were there with white tops?

“Shit,” I exclaimed, slapping my hand against my forehead in a large, theatrical motion.

“What?”

“I forgot something.” I pointed in back of me without turning. “We’ve got to go back to the hotel. Do you mind?”

“What’d you forget?”

I took her arm. “Come on.”

Shaking my head, I pulled her around and walked back up the street toward the hotel. The Austin, which I now saw in a quick, furtive glance was being driven by a young bespectacled man in a dark suit, sped up and disappeared down the street.

“You forget the documents or something?” Molly asked as I turned the key in the room door. I put a finger to my lips.

She gave me a worried glance.

I closed and locked the door, immediately tossing my leather portfolio on the bed. I emptied it of the sets of documents, then held it up to the light, unzipping each compartment, running my fingers along each fold, scrutinizing it closely.

Molly mouthed one word: What?

I said aloud, “We’re being followed.”

She looked at me questioningly.

“It’s okay, Molly. You can talk now.”

“Of course we’re being followed,” she said, exasperated. “We’ve been followed since-”

“Since when?”

She stopped, frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Think. Since when?”

“Jesus, Ben, you’re-”

“-the expert. I know. All right. There was someone waiting for me when I arrived in Rome. I was tailed pretty much constantly in Rome. Lost them in Tuscany, I assume.”

“In Zurich-”

“Right. We were followed in Zurich, to the bank and afterward. Probably in Munich, though it’s hard to tell. But I sure as hell wasn’t followed last night.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, the truth is, I don’t know for absolute certain. But I was pretty damned careful, and I walked around a bit after I met with the documents guy, and if there was any indication, I sure as hell didn’t see it. And I’m trained to look for this sort of thing. That skill doesn’t go away no matter how much patent law you practice.”

“So what are you saying?”

“That you were followed.”

“And that’s supposed to be my fault? We left the airport together, you had the taxi take a pretty circuitous route-you said you were sure we weren’t being followed. And I didn’t leave the hotel.”

“Let me see your purse.”

She handed it to me, and I dumped the contents onto the bed. She watched in dismay. I went through everything carefully, then inspected the purse and its lining. I examined, too, the heels of our shoes; unlikely, though, since they hadn’t been out of our sight. No.

Nothing.

“I guess I’m like your black cat,” she said.

“More like the bell on a sheep,” I said distractedly. “Ah.”

“What?”

I reached over and carefully lifted her locket and chain off her neck, pulling it up and over her head. I popped the round gold case open, and saw inside only the ivory cameo.

“For God’s sake, Ben, what are you looking for? A bug or something?”

“I figured it was worth a look, right?” I handed it back to her, and then a thought occurred to me, and I took it back.

I popped the locket open again, then looked very closely at the inside of the lid. “What’s inscribed on the inside of this?” I asked.

She closed her eyes, trying to recall. “Nothing. The inscription’s on the back.”

“Right,” I said. “Which made it pretty easy.”

“Easy for what?”

I had a small jeweler’s tool attached to my key chain, which was on the bed, and I grabbed it and inserted the tiny beveled screwdriver into the lid. A gold disc, roughly the size of a quarter and about an eighth of an inch thick, popped out. Attached to it was a tiny coil of wire almost as thin as a human hair.

“Not a bug,” I said. “A transmitter. A miniaturized homing device with a range of up to six or seven miles. Emits an RF signal.”

Molly gaped at me.

“When Truslow’s people captured you in Boston, you were wearing this, weren’t you?”

She took a long while to respond. “Yes…”

“And then, when they sent you to Italy, they returned this to you with the rest of your things.”

“Yes…”

“Well, then. Of course. Of course they wanted you with me. For all our precautions, they’ve known our location every second. At least, every second you’ve had the locket with you.”

“Right now, too?”

I answered slowly, wishing not to alarm her any more than necessary. “Yeah,” I said. “I’d say it’s a pretty fair guess they know where we are right now.”

FIFTY-FIVE

The small, elegant, jewellike Banque de Raspail at 128 Boulevard Raspail in Paris’s seventh arrondissement was a small, private merchant bank that seemed to cater to an exclusive clientele of wealthy, discreet Parisians who desired excellent personal service they apparently believed they could not find in banks open to the unwashed masses.

Its interior was an advertisement for its exclusivity: there wasn’t a customer in sight. And in fact it barely resembled a bank at all. Faded Aubusson carpets covered the floor; clustered here and there along the walls were Biedermeier chairs upholstered in Scalamandre silk, fragile-looking Italian busts and urn lamps perched atop Biedermeier side tables. Architectural engravings in gilt frames hung in precise quadrants on the walls, completing the effect of stately elegance and great solidity. I, of course, would not have placed my money in a bank that spent so much on overhead, but I’m not French.

Both Molly and I knew we were operating under enormous time pressure. Two days remained before the assassination, and we still didn’t know who the target was.

And now they-they being Truslow’s agents, perhaps in addition to agents working for Vogel and the German consortium behind him-had pinpointed our location. They knew we were in Paris. They might not know why; they might not know about Sinclair’s cryptic note concerning the Banque de Raspail; but they knew we were here for some reason.

And though I hadn’t permitted myself to talk about this to Molly, I knew the odds were great that we would be killed.

True, I was worth a great deal to American intelligence because of my psychic ability, but now I represented, more than anything, a threat. I knew about what Truslow’s people were doing in Germany, or at least I knew a piece of it. I had no documentary proof, no evidence, nothing solid; so even if I went public now-if I called, say, The New York Times-I simply wouldn’t be believed. I would be dismissed as a raving lunatic. Molly and I had to be eliminated. That was the only logical course for Truslow’s people.

But if only we could make it-forge on ahead to determine who was to be assassinated two days from now in Washington, foil the assassination, make it public, let the sunlight in-we would be safe. Or so I believed.

The clock was ticking.

But who could it be? Who could the surprise witness be? Might it be an assistant of Orlov’s, a Russian, someone he had entrusted with the truth? Or perhaps it might be a friend of Hal Sinclair’s, someone in whom he had confided.

I even briefly considered the most far-fetched possibility of all. Toby? Who else, after all, knew so much? Was it Toby who would be appearing suddenly before the Senate two days from now, testifying against Truslow, blowing the whole conspiracy sky-high?

Ridiculous. For what possible reason?

Frightened, strung out, and at our wit’s end, Molly and I had quarreled at the Duc de Saint-Simon, until finally we came up with a workable plan. We had to leave the hotel as soon as possible, in a matter of moments. Yet we had to go to the Boulevard Raspail; we had to see what it was that Molly’s father had left behind. We couldn’t take the chance of overlooking any piece of the puzzle. Maybe we’d turn up nothing; maybe the box would be empty; maybe there would no longer be a safe-deposit box in his name at the bank. But we had to know. Follow the gold, Orlov had urged. We had done so. And now the trail of the gold led inexorably to this small private bank in Paris.

So, realizing there were few courses of action left to us, we had quickly packed our bags and had the bellboy send them on to the Crillon, tipping him generously for his discretion. Molly explained to him that we were doing advance work for a prominent foreign statesman, that it was vitally important that our whereabouts be kept a secret, that he disclose to no one where he had dispatched our luggage.

The cameo locket, however, was a different matter. I had little doubt that the RF transmitter contained within the locket would in a matter of minutes draw the watchers to the Saint-Simon. Destroying it was one solution, but not the best. Diversion was always better. I took the locket with me and strolled aimlessly out of the hotel toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Across from the Rue du Bac Métro station is a café that is almost always crowded. I entered, sidled up to the bar, and ordered a demitasse. Jammed up next to me was a very soigné middle-aged woman with copper-colored hair up in a chignon, clutching an enormous, capacious handbag of green leather and reading a crisp new copy of Vogue. Ever so casually I slipped the locket into the woman’s handbag, finished my coffee, left a few francs, and returned to the hotel. Since these transmitters send the RF signal along the line of sight, our followers would be flummoxed, at least temporarily: as long as my Vogue-reading friend continued to circulate in crowds, they’d never be able to pinpoint the signal, never be able to determine where in the throngs it was coming from.

We had left the hotel separately and by different means of egress-I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that it was highly unlikely we were followed-and from a rendezvous point at the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, we made our way back, in a taxi, across the Seine on the Pont de la Concorde, down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, until it branched off onto the Boulevard Raspail.

A few sultry, exquisitely dressed young women sat busily working at mahogany tables a good distance from the glass and mahogany doors through which Molly and I entered, and a couple of them looked up with pique, annoyed at this interruption. They radiated attitude, but with a particularly French patina. Then a young man rose from one of the tables and hastened toward us anxiously, as if we were there to rob the bank and take everyone hostage.

“Oui?”

He stood before us, blocking us with an awkward stance. The young banker wore a navy serge double-breasted suit of exaggerated cut, and perfectly round black-framed glasses of the sort the architect Le Corbusier used to wear (and, after him, generations of affected American architects).

I deferred to Molly, who was the one with the official business there. She was wearing one of her odd but somehow stylish outfits, some sort of a black linen shift that would be equally appropriate on the beach or at a White House dinner. As usual, no one could carry off eccentricity the way she could. She began explaining, in her very good French, her situation: that she was the legal heir to her father’s estate, that as a matter of routine she sought access to his safe-deposit box. I watched the two of them speak, as if from a great distance, and pondered the strangeness of the situation. Her father’s estate. Here we were, tracking down her father’s assets, which seemed to include a vast fortune that didn’t belong to him.

The silent spouse, I followed the two of them around the foyer to the banker’s table to conduct our business. Although this was only the second bank I had visited in the course of this drama that had overtaken Molly and me since I’d attained this freakish telepathic ability, it seemed as if I had done nothing but go into bank after bank in the last week or so. The ritual, the forms, everything was entirely, cloyingly familiar.

And as we sat there, I found myself dipping into that particular recess of my brain with which I’d also become so familiar, that strange place into which floated words and phrases. Thoughts. I had some French, as they say, which is to say that I was reasonably conversant in the language, and I waited for the banker’s Gallic thoughts to voice themselves…

… And nothing came.

For a moment I was gripped by a familiar fear: had this peculiar talent, which had been visited upon me so suddenly, now vanished just as suddenly? Nothing was coming across. I thought of the afternoon walking around Boston, after leaving the Corporation, when I was overcome by the incredible profusion of the thoughts of others, the rush of phrases, the thoughts of others, giddy and angry and remorseful, those scraps that came at me without my really having to concentrate at all.

And I wondered at that moment whether it might all be fading away to nothing.

“Ben?” I suddenly heard Molly say.

“Yes?”

She looked at me curiously. “He says we can get into the box now if we’d like. All I have to do is fill out a form.”

“Then let’s do it now,” I said, knowing she was trying to divine my intentions. If you had the power, Mol, you wouldn’t have to ask, I thought.

The banker took from a drawer a two-page form evidently designed for one purpose alone: intimidation. When she had filled out the form, he glanced it over, pursed his lips, then got up and consulted an older man, probably his superior. A few minutes later he returned, and with a nod he led us into an interior room lined with tarnished brass compartments that ranged from about four inches square to roughly three times that. He inserted his key in one of the smaller boxes.

He pulled the brass-fronted box from its slot and carried it to a nearby private conference room, where he placed it on a table, explaining to us that the French system required two keys to open a safe-deposit box: one belonging to the client, and the other to the bank. With a curt smile and a perfunctory nod, he left us alone in the room.

“Well?” I said.

Molly shook her head, a little gesture that conveyed so much-apprehension, relief, wonderment, frustration-and inserted in the second lock the tiny key that her father had hidden in the binding of Allen Dulles’s memoirs. Harrison Sinclair, rest in peace, never lacked a sense of irony.

The brass plate at the front of the box popped open with a tiny click. Molly reached her hand inside.

My breath caught for an instant. I watched her intently. I said, “Empty?”

After a few seconds she shook her head.

I let out my breath.

She pulled out from the safe-deposit box’s dark recesses a long gray envelope measuring perhaps nine inches by four inches. Quizzically, she tore open the envelope and pulled out its contents: a typewritten note, a yellowed scrap of a business envelope, and a small black-and-white glossy photograph. A moment later I heard her sharp intake of air. “Oh, dear God,” she said. “Dear God.”

FIFTY-SIX

I stared at the photograph that had so taken her aback. It was the most ordinary-looking snapshot taken from a family album: three inches by four, 1950s scalloped edges, even a crusty brown spot of dried mucilage on the back. A lanky, athletic-looking, handsome man stood arm in arm with a dark-haired, dark-eyed young beauty; in front of them, grinning mischievously, was a tomboyish little girl of three or four, twinkling light eyes, her dark hair cut in perfect bangs and tied in loose braids on either side.

The three of them were standing on the worn wooden steps of a large wooden house or a lodge, from the looks of it; the sort of ramshackle, comfortable summer house you might find on Lake Michigan or Lake Superior or in the Poconos or the Adirondacks, or on the banks of any rustic lake in any part of the country.

The little girl-Molly; there was no question about it-was a blur of hyperactivity, her image just barely captured by the wink of an aperture, for one sixty-fourth of a second or whatever it was. Her parents looked both proud and comfortable: a heart-melting family tableau that was so all-American, it was almost kitsch.

“I remember that place,” Molly said.

“Hmm?”

“I mean, I don’t actually remember much about it, but I remember hearing about it. It was my grandmother’s place in Canada somewhere-my mother’s mother. Her old house on some lake.” She fell silent, continued staring at the photo, probably culling the details: an Adirondack chair on the porch behind them, missing one slat; the large, uneven stones that made up the front of the rough-hewn house; her father’s seersucker jacket and bow tie; her mother’s prim floral summer dress; the India rubber ball and baseball glove lying on the steps beside them.

“How odd,” she said. “Sort of a happy memory. Anyway, the place isn’t ours anymore. Unfortunately. My parents sold it when I was still little, I think. We never went there again, except that one summer.”

I picked up the scrap of envelope, which bore an address or a portion of an address in a spidery European scrawl: 7, rue du Cygne, ler, 23. Paris, clearly, but what was it? Why here, locked away in a vault?

And why the photograph? A signal, a message to Molly from her late father-from (you’ll pardon the triteness) beyond the grave?

And I picked up the letter, which had been composed on some ancient manual typewriter and was rife with cross-outs and typos, and was for some reason addressed “To My Beloved Snoops.”

I looked up at Molly, about to ask what the hell that salutation was all about, when she smiled sheepishly and explained: “Snoops was his pet name for me.”

“Snoops?”

“For Snoopy. My favorite cartoon character when I was a kid.”

“Snoopy.”

“And… and also because I liked to open locked drawers when I was a little girl. Look into things that were deemed none of my business. Stuff that all little kids do, but if your father was CIA station chief in Cairo, or deputy director of Plans, or whatever he was, you get chided a little too much for your curiosity. Curiosity killed the cat, and all that. So he used to call me Snoopy, and then Snoops.”

“Snoops,” I said, trying it out impishly.

“Don’t you dare, Ellison. You hear me? Don’t you fucking dare.”

I turned back to the letter, so badly typed on creamy Crane’s ecru stock, under the Harrison Sinclair letterhead, and began to read:

TO MY BELOVED SNOOPS:

If you’re reading this-and of course you’re reading this, else these words will never be read-let me first express, for the millionth time, my admiration. You are a wonderful doctor, but you’d also have made a first-class spy if only you didn’t have such disdain for my chosen profession. But I don’t mean by that any hostility: in some ways you were right to take such a dislike to the intelligence trade. There is much in it that’s objectionable. I just hope someday you come to appreciate what’s noble in it, too-and not out of some sense of filial obligation or loyalty or guilt. When your mother’s cancer had progressed to the point that it was clear she wouldn’t be around for more than a few weeks, she sat me down in her hospital room-no one could hold court like your mother-and told me, with a wag of her index finger, that I should never interfere in the way you choose to live your life. She said you would never follow the conventional patterns, but in the end, wherever you wound up, no one would have a more level head, a firmer grasp on reality, a better perspective, than “dear Martha.” So I trust you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you.

For reasons that will soon become apparent, there’s no record of this box among my papers, in my Last Will and Testament, or any other place. In order to have found this note, you’ll have found the key I left (sometimes the simplest and most old-fashioned ways are the best) and also have gotten into the vault in Zurich.

Which means that you have found the gold, which I’m sure you’ll agree requires some explanation.

I’ve never much liked chases and hunts, so please believe that my intention was not to make things difficult for you-but to make things difficult for anyone else. Nothing in this game is foolproof, but if you’ve gotten this far, you’ll understand why I’ve done this. Everything is for your protection.

I am writing this a few hours after a momentous meeting in Zurich with Vladimir Orlov, whose name you may recognize as the last chairman of the KGB. I made an arrangement with him that I must explain to you, and I learned certain things from him as well, which I must tell you.

Because I am about to be killed. I’m sure of it. By the time you read this, I may or may not be dead, but I wanted you to know why.

As you know better than anyone, Snoops, money has never held an attraction for me, beyond what one needs for food and shelter. So I trust when you’re told that I was corrupt, an embezzler, and whatever else they may say about me now that I’m gone, you’ll know the truth. You know it’s nonsense.

But what you may not know is that as I write this, I’ve received a number of threats against my life, some of them hollow, some quite serious. They began (no surprise) shortly after I was appointed Director of Central Intelligence, when I took it upon myself to clean house, launched my foolhardy crusade to clean up CIA. I loved the place; I believed in the place. Ben, I’m sure you understand that the way no outsider can.

Something terrible is happening deep within the bowels of CIA. There is a small group that over the years abused the intelligence they were privy to in order to amass huge sums of money. I set out, from my first day as director, to unmask them. I had my theories, but I needed proof.

The atmosphere around Langley at that time was like a tinderbox, ready to combust at the slightest spark from a congressional investigating committee, or an enterprising reporter from The New York Times. There was a lot of open talk in the hallways about getting rid of me. Some of the old boys hated me even more than they used to hate Bill Colby! I happen to know that several highly placed, extremely influential Washington power brokers went to see the President to urge that I be replaced.

You see, there were rumors floating around of corruption on a breathtaking scale. I had heard tales of a small, faceless group of past and present intelligence officials known as the Wise Men, who met in conditions of extreme secrecy. These Wise Men were said to be involved in massive fraud. It was believed that they were using intelligence gathered by the Agency to make huge amounts of money. But no one knew who these people were. Apparently they were so influential, so well connected, they had been able to elude detection.

And then one day I was contacted directly by a European businessman-Finnish, actually-who claimed to represent, as he put it, a “former world leader” who had “information” that might be of interest to me.

Protracted negotiations were begun, long before I even learned that the person he represented was none other than the last head of the Soviet KGB, Vladimir Orlov, who was living in a small dacha outside Moscow and wanted to leave the former Soviet Union and go into exile.

Orlov, the intermediary let me know, had an interesting proposition for me.

He needed my help in saving Russia’s gold reserves from the hard-liners who would any day, he believed, unseat the Yeltsin government. If I would help him remove a massive quantity of gold-ten billion dollars!-he would be prepared to give me a valuable file he had on certain corrupt elements in the CIA.

Orlov, the intermediary said, had in his possession a file documenting, in extraordinary detail, massive corruption within the CIA. Vast sums of money amassed over the years by a small group of CIA insiders, making phenomenal money using intelligence gathered from corporate espionage around the world. He had all names, locations, amounts, records. Full evidence.

I, of course, agreed. I would have agreed to help him anyway-you know how badly I wanted to keep Russia from returning to dictatorship-but the lure of this file made his offer irresistible.

As it turned out, Orlov appeared in Zurich without this file-it had been stolen out from under him, a fact that made me nervous indeed. Initially, I suspected a blackmail attempt, but I deduced he was genuinely a victim. And having gone this far, I had to complete the deal.

But I needed help in making such an enormous transaction-help that originated outside the Agency. Removed from any possible taint of corruption. It was imperative, given the huge sum of money we were dealing with. Also, all the financial arrangements had to be handled completely off the books.

So I turned to the one Agency man who was now an outsider, a man whose personal integrity was above reproach: Alexander Truslow. It was the biggest mistake I ever made.

I made Truslow the joint owner of the account at the Bank of Zurich to which I moved half the gold. That meant that neither one of us could move the gold without the other’s consent. And the gold could be moved or sold only when the account was activated-a mechanism that was triggered by access by either party. If ever a problem arose, I figured, we were both protected from any blame. I could not be accused of grand larceny on a world scale.

The other half we arranged to be transshipped by container through Newfoundland, by the St. Lawrence Seaway, into Canada. Or, I should say, Truslow arranged this.

But now something frightens me deeply. I fear for my life. As you know, Ben, we have people at Langley who are really quite skilled at making a murder look like a natural death.

So I am not long for this world.

I have only very recently learned that Wilhelm Vogel, who is running for chancellor of Germany, is being controlled by an enormously powerful German cartel. They seek, secretly, to rearm and rebuild Germany. Their intention is to control not only Germany, but through it, a unified Europe.

Their partners are this group within the CIA. The arrangement, I am told, amounts to a peaceful division of spoils. The CIA element will, through fronts, control the CIA, and by extension the economy of the Western Hemisphere. The German cartel will get Europe. All will become enormously, even inconceivably, rich. It is a new, corporate neo-Fascism-seizing control of the levers of government during this fragile and uncertain time.

The leader of the Americans is Alexander Truslow.

And I am powerless to do anything about it.

But I believe I will soon have a way to stop it. There are documents to reveal. They must come out.

If I am killed, you two must find them.

To that end, I leave each of you a gift.

I left very little in my estate to pass on to you, which hardly pleases me. But now I’d like to bequeath to each of you a small gift-both of them gifts of knowledge, which, after all, is the most valuable possession.

For you, Snoopy, it’s a memento of a very happy time in your life, in mine, and in your mother’s. The real riches, as you’ll learn, are to be found in the family. This photograph, which I think you’ve never seen, always conjures up for me a very happy summer we three spent.

You were only four, so I’m sure you don’t remember much if anything of it. But I, a confirmed workaholic in those early days as well, was compelled to take a month off after my emergency appendectomy. I think perhaps my body was telling me to spend a little more time with my family.

You loved it there-you caught frogs in the pond, learned to fish, to throw a softball… You never stopped moving, and I’ve never seen you so happy. I’ve always believed that Tolstoy was dead wrong when he wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina that all happy families are alike. Every family, whether happy or unhappy (and our family has been both) is as unique as a snowflake. I am allowed, my dear Snoops, to be sentimental and cornball once in my lifetime.

And for you, Ben, I give you an address of a couple who may or may not be alive by the time you read this. I fervently hope at least one of them is alive to tell you a very important tale. Bring this scrap with you; it will serve as your admission ticket, a passkey of sorts.

Because I believe what they have to tell you will relieve you of the terrible burden you’ve been carrying around with you for so long.

In no way, Ben, were you responsible for the death of your first wife, as this couple will confirm. How I wish I could have shared this with you when I was alive. But for various reasons, I could not.

You will soon understand. Someone-I think it was La Rochefoucauld or one of those seventeenth-century French aphorists-put it best: We can rarely bring ourselves to forgive those who have helped us.

And one last literary reference, a line from Eliot’s “Gerontion”: After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

All my love,

Dad

FIFTY-SEVEN

Tears coursed down Molly’s cheeks, and she bit her lower lip. She blinked rapidly and stared at the note, then finally looked up at me. I didn’t know where to begin, what to ask about. So I wrapped my arms around her, gave her a big, long hug, and said nothing for a long while. I felt her rib cage hiccup with quiet sobs. After a minute or two her breathing became more regular, and she pulled away from me. Her eyes shone, and for an instant they were the eyes of the four-year-old in the photograph.

“Why?” she said at last.

“Why… what?”

Her eyes searched my face, back and forth, back and forth, and yet she was silent, as if trying to decide for herself what she really meant. “The photograph,” she said.

“A message. What else could it be?”

“You don’t think it could be… a simple, straightforward gift from… the heart?”

“You tell me, Molly. Is that like him?”

She sniffled, shook her head. “Dad was wonderful, but you’d never call him straightforward. I think he learned how to be cryptic from his friend James Jesus Angleton.”

“Okay. So where was your grandmother’s house in Canada?”

Again she shook her head. “God, Ben, I was four. We spent exactly one summer there. I have virtually no recollection of it.”

“Think,” I said.

“I can’t! I mean, what is there to think about? I don’t know where it was! Somewhere in French Canada, probably in Quebec. Jesus!”

I put my hands on either side of her face, held her head steady, stared directly into her eyes.

“What are you-cut it out, Ben!”

“Try it at least.”

“Try-hey, hold on there. We have an agreement. You assured me-you promised me-you wouldn’t try to read my thoughts.”

trem… tremble… trembling?…

It was just a fragment, a word or a sound I suddenly heard.

“You’re trembling,” I said.

She looked at me quizzically. “No, I’m not. What are you-”

“Tremble. Trembling.”

“What are you-?”

“Concentrate! Trembling. Tremble. Trem-”

“What are you talking about?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “No, I do know. I do know. I heard you-you thought it-”

She looked back into my eyes, by turns defiant and bewildered. Then, a moment later, she said, “I really have no idea-”

“Try. Think. Trembling. Trembley? Canada. Your grandmother. Trembley or something? Was that your grandmother’s name?”

She shook her head. “She was Grandmother Hale. Ellen. Grandpa was Frederick. No one in the family was Trembley.”

I sighed in frustration. “Okay. Trem. Canada. Trembling. Canada…”

… tromblon…

“There’s something more,” I said. “You’re thinking-or maybe you’re subvocalizing-something, some thought, some name, something your conscious mind isn’t entirely aware of.”

“What do you-?”

Impatient, I interrupted: “What’s ‘Tromblon’?”

“What?-oh, my God-Tremblant. Lac Tremblant!”

“Where-?”

“The house was on a lake in Quebec. I remember now. Lac Tremblant. Beneath a big, beautiful mountain called Mont-Tremblant. Her house was on Lac Tremblant. How did I know that?”

“You remembered it. Not enough to speak it, but it was there anyway, in your brain. Probably you heard the name mentioned dozens of times when you were little, and you stored it.”

“And you think that’s important?”

“I think that’s crucial. I think that’s why your father left that photograph of a place no one would be able to recognize but you. A place that’s probably to be found in no records anywhere. So that if anyone got into this box somehow, they’d come to a dead end. The most anyone else except you could do would be to identify you and your parents, but then they’d be stymied.”

“I was almost stymied myself.”

“I suppose he counted on you to summon it up, track it down, something. This was for you. I’m quite sure of it. Your father left that for you to find.”

“And-”

“And to go there.”

“You think that’s where the… the documents are?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me greatly.” I stood up, straightened my pants and jacket.

“What are you doing?”

“I don’t want to waste another minute.”

“Where? Where are we going?”

“You’re staying here,” I said. I looked around the conference room.

“You think I’m safe here?”

“I’ll tell the bank manager we’ll require the use of this room for the rest of the day. No one is to be admitted. If we have to pay a rental charge for the use of it, we’ll pay. A locked conference room inside a bank vault-we’re not going to get more secure than that, at least not on more than a moment’s notice.” I turned to leave.

“Where are you going?” Molly called out.

By way of reply, I held up the scrap of envelope.

“Wait. I need a phone in here. A phone-and a fax machine.”

“For what?”

“Just get it, Ben.”

I glanced at her with surprise, nodded, and left the room.

Rue du Cygne-the street of the swan-was a small, quiet street just a few blocks from what was once the Marché des Innocents, the great central market of Paris, the place Emile Zola called le ventre de Paris, “the belly of Paris.” After the old neighborhood was cleared in the late 1960s, a number of gargantuan and impressively ugly modernistic structures were put up, including Le Forum des Halles, galleries and restaurants, and the biggest subway station in the world.

Number 7 was a shabby late-nineteenth-century apartment building, squat and dark and musty inside. The door to apartment 23 was of thick, splintery paneled wood that had, long ago, been painted white and was now quite gray.

Long before I had reached the second floor, I could hear the low, menacing bark of a large dog from within the apartment. I approached and knocked.

After a long time, during which the dog’s bark grew more shrill and insistent, I heard slow footsteps, the tread of an old man or woman, and then the rattle of a metal chain, which I assumed was the door being unbolted from the other side.

The door swung open.

For an instant, the barest fraction of a second, it was like being in a horror film-the footsteps, the rattle of a chain-and the face of the creature that now stood in the shadows of the opened door.

It was a woman; the clothes were those of an old woman of bent posture, and the hair atop the head was long, silver-gray, and pulled back in a loose chignon. But the old woman’s face was almost unspeakably ugly, a mass of welts and growths and lumps surrounding a kindly pair of eyes and a small, deformed, twisted mouth.

I stood in shocked silence. Even if I had the wherewithal to speak, I had no name, nothing more than an address. I stepped forward and wordlessly showed her the yellowed scrap of envelope. In the background, from the depths of the dark apartment, the dog whined and strained.

Wordlessly, too, she squinted at it, then turned and was gone.

A few seconds later, a man came to the door who appeared to be around seventy. Once, you could tell, he had been strong, even stocky; his coarse gray hair had once been jet black. He was now frail, but he still walked with a pronounced limp, and the long, thin scar on one side of his face, at the jawline, once an ugly, inflamed red, had faded to a pale, etiolated white. Fifteen years had aged him dramatically.

The man whose face and figure I knew I would never forget, because I had seen it night after night after night.

The man I had last seen limping away from the rue Jacob fifteen years ago.

“So,” I said with more calmness than I would ever have believed I could summon. “You’re the man who killed my wife.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

I did not remember seeing his eyes, which were a watery gray-blue: vulnerable eyes that did not belong to a KGB “wet-work” specialist, to the man who had dispatched my beautiful young wife, fired off a shot to her heart without a moment’s thought.

I remember only the thin red scar at his jawline, the shock of black hair, the plaid hunter’s shirt, the limp.

A would-be defector, a KGB filing clerk in the Paris station who identified himself as “Victor,” has information to sell. Information he says he’s discovered in the archives in Moscow. Something to do with a cryptonym, MAGPIE.

He wants to defect. In exchange, he wants protection, security, comfort, all the things we Americans are known to dispense to defecting spies like some sort of intelligence Santa Claus.

We speak. We meet on the Faubourg-St. Honoré. We meet again at a safe-house flat. He promises us earthshaking, really explosive stuff, from a file on MAGPIE. Toby’s interest is piqued. He is quite interested in MAGPIE.

We arrange to meet at my apartment on the rue Jacob. It is safe, because Laura is gone, I think. I arrive late. A man in a plaid shirt, a thatch of black hair, is limping away. I can smell blood, sharp and metallic, warm and sour, a stomach-turning odor that screams at me, louder and louder as I mount the stairs.

Can that really be Laura? It’s not possible, certainly it can’t be, that contorted body, that white silk nightgown, the large bright red stain. It’s not real, it cannot be. Laura’s out of town; she’s in Giverny; this isn’t her; there is a resemblance, that’s all, but it can’t be…

I am losing my mind.

And Toby. That tangle of a human form on the floor of the hallway: Toby, barely alive, paralyzed for life.

I have done this.

I have done this to both of them. To my mentor and friend. To my adored wife.

“Victor” examined the scrap of envelope, and then looked up. His gray-blue eyes regarded me with an expression I couldn’t quite place: fright? Or nonchalance? It could have been anything.

Then he said to me: “Please come in.”

The two of them, “Victor” and the deformed woman, sat side by side on a narrow couch. I stood, gun trained on them, flushed with anger. A large color television set was on, its volume muted, playing some old American situation comedy I didn’t recognize.

The man spoke first, in Russian.

“I didn’t kill your wife,” he said.

The woman-his wife?-sat with her trembling hands folded in her lap. I could not bring myself to look at her face.

“Your name,” I said, also in Russian.

“Vadim Berzin,” the man replied. “This is Vera. Vera Ivanovna Berzina.” He inclined his head slightly toward her, sitting at his right.

“You are ‘Victor,’” I said.

“I was. For a few days that is what I called myself.”

“Who are you, really, then?”

“You know who I am.”

Did I, in fact? What did I actually know of the man?

“Did you expect me?” I asked.

Vera shut her eyes, or, rather, they seemed to disappear into the swells of flesh. I had seen a face like hers before, I now recalled, but only in photos and films. The Elephant Man, a powerful film based on the true story of the famous Elephant Man, the Englishman John Merrick. He had been terribly disfigured with neurofibromatosis, von Recklinghausen’s disease, which can result in skin tumors and deformities. Was that what this woman had?

“I expected you,” the man said, nodding.

“But you’re not afraid to let me into your apartment?”

“I didn’t kill your wife.”

“You won’t be surprised,” I said, “that I don’t believe you.”

“No,” he said, smiling wanly. “I am not surprised.” He paused, then said: “You can kill me, or both of us, very easily. You can kill us right now if you want to. But why would you want to? Why, before you listen to what I have to tell you?”

“We have been living here,” he said, “since the death of the Soviet Union. We bought our way out, as did so many of our comrades in the KGB.”

“You paid off the Russian government?”

“No, we paid off your Central Intelligence Agency.”

“With what? Dollars stashed away somewhere?”

“Oh, come. Whatever few dollars we could scrape together over the years are nothing to the great and wealthy Central Intelligence Agency. They don’t need our grimy dollar bills. No, we bought our way out with the same currency all KGB officers-”

“Of course,” I said. “Information. Intelligence, stolen from KGB files. Like all the rest of them. I’m surprised you had any interested buyers, after what you did.”

“Ah, yes,” Berzin said sardonically. “I tried to entrap a bright young CIA officer whom Moscow Center had a grudge against. So I arrange a false defection, right out of the textbook, yes?”

I said nothing, and he went on. “I show up, but the young CIA officer is not there. And so-because vengeance is not selective-I kill the young CIA officer’s wife and wound an older CIA man. Do I have this right?”

“Approximately.”

“Ah. Ah, yes. A good tale.”

I had lowered my gun while he spoke, but now I raised it again, slowly. I believe that few things evoke truth the way a loaded gun does in the hands of someone who knows how to use it.

For the first time, his wife spoke. She cried out, actually, in a clear, strong contralto: “Let him speak!”

I glanced quickly at the disfigured woman, then turned back to her husband. He did not look frightened; on the contrary, he seemed almost amused, entertained by the situation. But then his expression turned suddenly grave. “The truth,” he said, “is this: When I arrived at your apartment, I was met by the older man, Thompson. But I didn’t know who he was.”

“Impossible-”

“No! I had never met him, and you hadn’t told me who would be joining you. For reasons of compartmentalization, I’m sure. He said he was assigned to vet me, that he wanted to begin the interrogation right then. I agreed. I told him about the MAGPIE document.”

“Which is?”

“A source in American intelligence.”

“A Soviet mole?”

“Not quite. A source. One of ours.”

“Code-named MAGPIE?” I used the Russian word soroka, for the bird.

“Yes.”

“So it was a KGB code name.” There was a long line of KGB code names taken from the names of birds, far more colorful than anything we ever came up with.

“Yes, but, again, it wasn’t a mole, strictly speaking. Not a penetration agent, exactly. More like an agent we had managed to turn, bend our way, just enough to be of use.”

“And MAGPIE was…?”

“MAGPIE, as it turned out, was James Tobias Thompson. Certainly I had no idea I was addressing the source himself, since I didn’t know the real name-KGB files are far too compartmentalized for that. And there I was, chirping away about a file I wanted to sell on a sensitive Soviet operation, and there was the agent right there in front of me, listening with great interest as I tried to sell him information that would blow his cover.”

“My God,” I said. “Toby.”

“Suddenly he became violent, this Thompson. He lunged at me, pulled a gun on me, a gun with a silencer, and demanded that I give him the document. Well, I was not so foolish as to bring it with me, not before we had made a deal. He threatened me; I told him I did not have the document with me. And he was about to kill me, I believe, when all of a sudden we both turned and saw a woman come into the room. A beautiful woman in white, in a white nightgown.”

“Yes. Laura.”

“She had heard everything. Everything I said, everything Thompson said. She told us she had been asleep in the other room, ill, and that the noise had awakened her. And now, suddenly, all became confusing. I took advantage of the interruption to get to my feet, try to escape. As I ran, I pulled out my own service revolver to protect myself, but before I could cock the pistol, I felt my leg explode. I looked, and I saw that Thompson had shot me. He had shot me, but he had not killed me, his aim had slipped in his haste, but by then I had my revolver out, and he froze, and I fired at him, out of self-defense. And then I leapt into the hallway, down a landing, and managed to get away before he could kill me.”

All I wanted to do was to sink down onto the floor, cover my eyes, seek refuge in sleep, but I needed my entire reservoir of willpower now. Instead, I lowered myself to a large boxy armchair, clicked the safety back on, and continued to listen in silence.

“And as I ran down the stairs,” Berzin continued, “I heard another silenced shot, and I knew he had either killed himself or had killed the woman.”

The disfigured old woman’s eyes were closed, I noticed; they had been closed for much of his narration. A long, long silence ensued. I could hear the far-off buzz of mopeds, a roar of a truck, the laughter of children.

At last I was able to speak. “A plausible story,” I said.

“Plausible,” Berzin said, “and true.”

“But you have no proof.”

“No? How closely did you examine your wife’s body?”

I didn’t answer. I had not been able to bring myself to look at Laura’s corpse.

“Exactly,” Berzin said gently. “But if someone with expertise in ballistics had inspected the wounds, he would have discovered that the shot had been fired by a gun belonging to James Tobias Thompson.”

“Easy to say,” I said, “when the body’s been in the ground fifteen years.”

“There must have been records.”

“I’m sure there were.” I didn’t add: But none that I had access to.

“Then I have something you will find useful, and if you will let me get it, I will have settled my debt to Harrison Sinclair. Your father-in-law, yes?”

“He’s the one who got you out of Moscow?”

“Who else would have enough influence?”

“But why?”

“Probably so that someday I could tell you this story. It’s on top of the television set.”

“What is?”

“The thing I want to show you. To give you. On the television set.”

I turned my head slightly to look at the television set, which was now playing a rerun of M*A*S*H. Atop its wooden console was an array of things: a bust of Lenin of the sort you used to be able to buy anywhere in Moscow; a lacquered dish that appeared to be in use as an ashtray; a small stack of Russian-language, Soviet-published collections of verse by Aleksandr Blok and Anna Akhmatova.

“It’s in the Lenin,” he said with a smirk. “Uncle Lenin.”

“Stay there,” I said, walked over to the television and lifted the small, hollow iron head. I turned it over. A tag on its base said BERIOZKA 4.31, meaning that it had been purchased from one of the old Soviet hard-currency stores for four rubles and thirty-one kopeks, once a fair amount of money.

“Inside,” he said.

I rattled the bust, and something inside it shifted. I removed a scrunched-up loose ball of what appeared to be scrap paper, and then a small oblong came out. I took it in one hand and examined it.

A microcassette tape.

I looked at Berzin questioningly. From one of the other rooms the dog (which I assumed had been tied up or somehow restrained) began to whimper.

“Your proof,” he said, as if that explained everything.

When I didn’t respond, he went on: “I wore a wire.”

“To the rue Jacob?”

He nodded, pleased. “A tape made in Paris fifteen years ago bought me my freedom.”

“Why the hell did you wear a wire?” An answer occurred to me, but it made no sense: “You weren’t actually defecting, were you? You were working for the KGB even then, right? Planting information?”

“No! It was for protection!”

“Protection? Against whom? Against the people you wanted to defect to? That’s ludicrous!”

“No-listen! This was a microcassette recorder the Lubyanka had given me for ‘provocations,’ entrapments, all of that. But that time I wore it to protect myself. To record any promises, assurances, even threats. Otherwise, if ever there was a dispute about what was promised me, it would be my word against yours. And I knew that if I had a tape recording, it would be useful somehow. What else did I have?” He took his wife’s hand, which I noticed was somewhat disfigured with small tumors, but nowhere near as badly as her face. “This is for you. A tape recording of my meeting with James Tobias Thompson. It is the proof you want.”

Stunned, I approached the two old people, pulled a chair very close to them, and sat. It was far from easy, given how my mind was whirling, but I bent my head and concentrated, focused, until I seemed to be hearing something, a syllable here, a phrase there, and then I was quite sure I could hear something, I was certain I had tuned in on his desperate, anxious thoughts, which fairly shouted at me.

Very quietly, methodically, I said in Russian: “It is very important to me that you are telling the truth about this whole thing-about my wife, about Thompson, about everything.”

He spoke: “Of course I am!”

I didn’t respond; I listened, the quiet of the room broken only by the dog’s loud whimpering, but then something flooded into my consciousness.

Of course I am telling you the truth!

But was he, in fact? Was he thinking this? Or was he instead about to say this-two very different things? What made me think that I possessed the ability to divine the truth?

Clutched by this uncertainty as I was, I was hardly prepared for the next thing I heard.

A woman’s voice, pleasant and deep, a contralto, but not a spoken voice.

A thought voice, calm and assured.

You can hear me, can you not?

I looked up at the woman, and her eyes were once again closed, vanished into that frightful landscape of welts and tumors. Her small mouth appeared to be arched slightly upward into a crude semblance of a smile; a sad, knowing smile.

I thought: Yes, I can.

And, looking at her and smiling, I nodded.

A beat of silence went by, and then I heard: You can hear me, but I cannot hear you. I do not have the ability you have. You must speak aloud to me.

“The tape-” Berzin began to say, but his wife put a finger to her lips to shush him. Puzzled, he fell silent.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I can. How do you know?”

She continued to smile, her eyes still closed.

I know of these things. I know of James Tobias Thompson’s projects.

“How?” I said.

While my husband served as a clerk in Paris, I was kept behind in Moscow. They liked to do that-to keep the husband and wife separated so that they would have leverage over you. My job, in any case, was very important. Too important for me to give up. I was the chief secretary to three successive KGB chairmen. I was, in effect, the gatekeeper. I handled all of their secret papers, their correspondence.

“And so it was you that found the MAGPIE file.”

Yes, and many other files.

Berzin said, bewildered: “What is going on?”

His wife said soothingly, “Vadim, please. Silent for a few moments. I will explain all.”

And she went on, her thoughts as clear and understandable as her spoken voice.

All of my life I have had this disease. Her left hand fluttered toward her face. But when I reached my forties, it attacked my face, and soon I became… unsuitable… to occupy a position of such visibility. The chairmen and their aides could no longer bear to look at me. Just as you cannot bear to look at me. And so they removed me from my job. But before I left, I took with me a document that I believed would at least let Vadim leave for the West. And when he visited me in Moscow, I gave it to him.

“But how,” I persisted, “how did you know about-about me?”

I didn’t know. I guessed. In my position, I learned of the program that Thompson was working to develop. No one at the First Chief Directorate headquarters at Yasenevo believed such a thing was possible. But I believed it was possible. I didn’t know if he would ever succeed. But I knew it was possible. It’s a remarkable, remarkable thing you have.

“No,” I said. “It’s a terrible thing.”

Before I could tell her, explain to her, she thought: Your wife’s father got us out of Russia. It was a generous and good thing for him to do. But we had more to offer than this tape.

I furrowed my brow, silently asking, What?

Her thoughts continued to flow, impassioned and clear.

This man, James Tobias Thompson. Your mentor. MAGPIE. He continued to report to Moscow. I know; I saw his reports. He tells of people inside and outside the CIA who plan to take power. They cooperate with the Germans. You must find him. Thompson will tell you. He regrets what he did. He will tell you-

Then suddenly the dog’s whimper became a sharp, loud bark.

“Something is wrong with Hunter,” Berzin said. “Let me go find out-”

“No,” I said. The sharp barking grew steadily louder, faster, more insistent.

“Something is wrong with him!” Berzin said.

Then the bark became a horrible, horrible, piercing yowl, a cry that was almost human, almost a shriek.

And then there was a terrible silence.

I thought I could hear something, a thought. My name, thought with great urgency, from somewhere very close by.

I knew the dog had just been brutally slaughtered.

And that we were next.

FIFTY-NINE

It is amazing, really, how fast you can think when your life is at stake. Both Vera and Vadim started at the dog’s earsplitting, agonized scream, and then Vera shrieked and jumped up from the couch and began awkwardly to run in the direction of the sound.

“Stop!” I called out to her. “Don’t move-it’s not safe! Get down!”

Confused and terrified, the old couple grabbed at each other, arms flailing wildly. Now the old woman began to moan loudly, and her husband sputtered in protest.

“Quiet!”

Startled, they fell silent, and immediately there was an ominous, unearthly quiet in the apartment. An absolute silence, in which I knew someone-or several people-were moving stealthily. I didn’t know the layout of the apartment, but I could surmise: the apartment was on the second floor-le premier étage, as the French designate it-and probably a fire escape wound up the rear of the building, where I assumed the kitchen was located, where the dog had been tied up-and into which the invaders had come.

The invaders. Meaning?

My thoughts raced: Who knew I was here? There was no transmitter to guide my pursuers; and I hadn’t been followed, to the best of my knowledge. Toby Thompson… Truslow… were they working together? Or at cross-purposes, against each other?

Had this old Russian émigré couple been on a watch list? Was it possible that someone with excellent access to Agency secrets-and that described either Truslow or Thompson-knew of the deal Molly’s father had struck with this couple? Yes, certainly it was possible. And I was known to be in Paris; and it would be natural to intensify a watch that might otherwise have remained dormant…

In no more than a second or two, these thoughts flashed through my brain, but as I paused momentarily, I saw that both of the Berzins were rushing, or really lumbering, toward the tiny dark hallway, presumably toward the kitchen. Fools! What were they doing? What were they thinking?

“Get back,” I said, almost shouted, but they had already reached the doorway, frantic and crazed as frightened deer, unthinking and illogical and reflexive. I lunged toward them to pull them back, to get them out of the way so that I could move unencumbered by fears of their safety, and as I moved I saw a flickering shadow in the hallway, a silhouette of a man, it seemed.

“Down!” I shouted, but at that very instant there was that sibilant, dull phut phut phut of a silenced automatic, and both Vera and Vadim began to slump forward and then topple in a grotesque, balletic slow motion, like fallen trees, great ancient trees that have been sawn at their base, and the only sound was a lowing, a deep caterwauling that suddenly emanated from the old man as he crashed to the ground.

I froze, and without thinking fired a volley of shots into the dark hallway. There was a shout, a high-pitched scream of pain that seemed to indicate I had hit someone, and several rapid, male voices shouting at once. Now the shots were returned, splintering the doorjamb. One bullet grazed my shoulder; another hit the television screen, and the set exploded. I sprang forward, grabbed the door handle, and fell against it, slamming the door to the sitting room, turning the lock as I did so.

For what? So that I could be trapped in this room? Think, dammit!

The only way out was the hallway, where the gunman or gunmen were, and that made no sense, but now what?

I had no time to think; there was time only to react as swiftly as possible, but I had put myself into this treacherous corner, and as I desperately calculated, a round of bullets was fired against the door, through the heavy wooden door.

Where now?

Jesus, Ben, move it, for Christ’s sake!

I whirled around, saw the wooden chair on which I had been sitting just a few seconds earlier, and flung it toward the window. The window shattered, the chair lodged in between slats of the aluminum venetian blinds. I raced toward the window, yanked out the chair, and used it to clear away the remaining jagged edges of glass.

Another volley of shots came behind me; the doorknob was rattled; and then more shots.

And just as the door somehow came open behind me, I leapt-without looking-out of the second-floor window and into the street.

I bent my legs, bracing for the impact, my arms spread to protect my head in case I pitched forward.

I moved, it seemed, in slow motion. Time, for a moment, had stood still. I could see myself fall, almost as if I were watching on a movie screen, see myself tuck my legs in, see the street as it zoomed up toward me, shrubbery and concrete sidewalk and pedestrians and…

And in an instant I felt myself slam against the sidewalk, a crushingly hard blow: I had landed on the bottoms of my feet and vaulted forward, almost sprung upright, my arms outstretched to restore my balance.

I was hurt; that seemed clear; and I was in great pain. But I was alive, thank God, and I could move, and as I heard the bullets whistle by from behind and above, I lurched to one side, trying to ignore the stabbing pain in my feet, ankles, and calves. I ran with a speed I didn’t even know I was capable of, instinctively down the street toward Les Halles. All around me passersby screamed and shouted, some pointing, some cringing as I tore through the crowds, but it was the crowds that would save me, I knew; the crowds would serve as underbrush to hinder the progress of any pursuers. But were there, in fact, any pursuers? Had I eluded them entirely? Were they all upstairs, in the apartment that had belonged to the Russians? Or were-

But they were not all upstairs. No. I glanced back and saw that several men in dark suits, and several more in nondescript dark street clothes, were running after me, their faces set in grimaces of determination. I zigzagged around a mound of bricks, and something about them-

Hurl the goddamn bricks at them, dammit!

– reminded me that I had something more effective than bricks; I had a good, reliable pistol, with probably ten or twelve more rounds left in it, and I whirled around and fired off one shot, aiming as precisely as I could so as not to wound anyone I didn’t intend to, and I saw one of the men in the dark suits go down, and now there was one of them, and I kept running, turning down the rue Pierre-Lescot, past a tabac and a bar, a bakery, weaving through the rush-hour crowds. I was a moving, darting, weaving target; a poor target for my one-was it one?-pursuer. He would face the choice of either stopping to aim with some degree of accuracy or to run as swiftly as he could, and my strategy seemed to be working: he chose to run, to try to overtake me. I could hear him behind me. It was just him and me now, the world had shrunk down to just him and me, life or death, no crowds, no passersby, just the man in the dark suit and fedora and black glasses coming after me, gaining on me, and I ran as I’d never run before. I was ignoring the siren of pain, ignoring the warning signs, and my body was punishing me for it. And now, as I ran, my abdomen and sides were gripped with terrible knifelike cramps. It was all I could do to keep going; my body, out of shape after years of practicing law and not tradecraft, was commanding me to stop, to give myself up: What could they really want from me now? Information? Give it to them! Was I not too valuable to hurt, someone with my ability?

Just up ahead loomed the modernistic forum of Les Halles, and as I ran toward it-why? what was the goal? was I planning to simply run myself into exhaustion, was that it?-my body warred with my mind. My poor body, racked with pain throughout now, tangled and screamed at my steely mental resolve, importuning and pleading, then cajoling silkily, Give yourself up, they won’t harm you, they won’t harm Molly, all they want is your assurance of silence, and yes they might not believe you, but you can stall for time, you can play along with them, give yourself up, save yourself…

The footsteps, accelerating now, thundered behind me, and I found myself now in some sort of ground-level parking garage, at one end of which was a door marked with a red sign: SORTIE DE SECOURS AND PASSAGE INTERDIT, and I pulled it open and shut it behind me. It gave off a rusty metallic groan, and then I was in a small, dimly lit stairwell which stank of garbage. A tall, overflowing trash barrel stood near the door.

It was made of aluminum: too light to serve as a useful obstruction.

Something slammed against the door from the other side. A foot, perhaps, or a shoulder; but the door didn’t give way. Desperately, I tipped the barrel over. Trash, trash, more trash… and a battered half of a pair of scissors. It might do; it was worth a try.

Another thud against the door, and this time it came partway open: a sliver of light winked in the twilit stairwell and then was gone. I reached down, grabbed the slender elbow-shaped steel piece, and slid it into an opening in the door hinge, as far in as it could go.

The door thundered again, but this time no sliver of light: no movement. As long as the scissor would hold, the door was secure.

I vaulted up the stairs, which led directly into a corridor, which soon gave onto a bustling arcade.

Where was it? A station-the Métro station, yes, that was it. Chatelet les Halles. The biggest underground station in the world. A maze. Many directions to go now; many directions to lose him now if-if only my body would stay with me, if only it would permit me to keep on going.

And then I knew what to do.

SIXTY

It is fifteen years earlier, and I am a young man, a younger man, freshly graduated from the CIA’s Camp Peary, newly posted to Paris, “wet behind my ears,” as my boss and friend James Tobias Thompson III liked to jibe me. Laura and I have arrived in Paris that morning, having flown TWA coach from Washington National, and I’m exhausted. Laura’s asleep in our bare apartment on the rue Jacob; I’m half asleep, sitting here in Thompson’s office in the U.S. Consulate on the rue St.-Florentin.

I like the guy; he seems to take to me. It’s a good beginning to a career I have had more than my share of apprehensions about. Most of the young field officers take an instant dislike to their superiors, who treat them as the callow and unreliable young guys they are.

“I’m Toby,” he insists. “Either we’re both on a last-name basis, in which case you’re Ellison and I have to act like some fucking marine drill sergeant, or we’re colleagues.” Then, before I can thank him, he shoves a stack of books at me.

“Memorize them,” he says. “Memorize them all.”

Some of them are guidebooks available to any tourist (Plan de Paris par Arrondissement: Nomenclature des rues avec la station du Métro la plus proche) and some are published by the Agency for internal use only (detailed, classified maps of the Paris Métro, top secret listings of diplomatic and military sites throughout the city, suggested escape routes by train and car).

“I hope you’re joking,” I say.

“Do I look like it?”

“I don’t know your sense of humor.”

“I don’t have one.” Spoken with just enough of a set to his mouth to indicate otherwise. “You’ve got a photographic memory. You can retain a hell of a lot more than the farina I’ve got upstairs.”

We laugh: he’s dark-haired, lanky, youthful in appearance.

He says: “Someday, friend, this information might come in handy.”

Someday, Toby, I now thought, eyes casting about the enormous Métro station to get myself oriented. It had been years since I’d been here. Never thought it would come in handy against you, did you?

Physically, I was a train wreck. My arms, though they hurt much less, were still bandaged; my legs, feet, ankles, all gave off sparks and spirals of fierce jabbing, searing pain like some Fourth of July firecracker.

Chatelet les Halles. At forty thousand square meters, it is the largest underground station in the world. Thanks, Toby. Came in handy, all right. Ah, me and that old photographic memory.

I glanced behind me, saw nothing, but didn’t allow myself to experience that sense of relief that means lassitude. He had doubtless followed me up the stairs, delayed only by a quarter-inch of rusty, distressed steel, which at any second would probably snap or buckle with the application of repeated force.

When you’re pursued, the biggest mistake you can make is to give in to ancient, atavistic human survival instincts like the fight-or-flight response that saved the lives of our cavemen ancestors. Instinct makes you react predictably, and predictability is the enemy.

Instead, you put yourself into your opponent’s mind, calculate as you think he would, even if it means crediting him with more intelligence than he possesses.

So what would he do?

Just about now, if the door did not yield, he’d search out the nearest alternate entrance. No doubt one would be nearby. He’d enter the station, put himself in my head, decide whether I would choose to leave the station for the street-no, too risky-or whether I would attempt to lose myself in the maze of corridors (a good possibility), or whether I would try to put the greatest distance possible between myself and him, and find the nearest train (an even better possibility).

And then, calculating, he would double back, eliminate the best (and therefore most obvious) escape route… and search for me in the concourses. Anywhere but a train platform.

I scanned the crowds. A stringy-haired teenage girl nearby was singing in French-accented English, in a dreadful twittering imitation of Edith Piaf, “On the Street Where You Live,” against a synthesized background of swelling strings and angelic obbligatos emanating from a Casio machine. People were tossing francs at the coat spread out on the floor before her, more out of pity, I guessed, than appreciation.

Everyone seemed to be moving purposively somewhere. Best I could tell, no one inside the station was coming after me.

So where was he?

The station was a bewildering array of orange correspondences signs and blue sortie signs, with trains headed toward dozens of different destinations: Pont de Neuilly, Créteil-Préfecture. Saint-Rémy-Les-Chevreuse, Porte d’Orléans, Château de Vincennes… And not just the regular Métro trains, but also the RER, the Réseau Express Régional rapid commuter trains to and from the Parisian suburbs. The place was huge, sprawling, bewildering, endless. And that was to my advantage.

For a few more seconds, at least.

I headed in the direction my pursuer would consider most obvious, and therefore-perhaps-least likely: the way the greatest flow of traffic seemed to be heading. Direction Château de Vincennes and Port de Neuilly.

To the right of the long row of turnstiles was an area marked PASSAGE INTERDIT that was cordoned off with a chain. I sprinted toward it, got a running start, and vaulted over it. A long line of people holding copies of Pariscope snaked around a booth selling half-price theater tickets (Ticket Kiosque Theater: “Les places du jour á moitié prix”), beside an odd bronze statue of a man and a woman, both artistically misshapen, reaching forlornly toward each other. I flew past an exit to the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Forum des Halles, past a cluster of three policemen equipped with walkie-talkies, guns, and nightsticks, who looked up at me with suspicion.

Two of them snapped to attention and began to run after me, shouting.

I came to an abrupt halt at a row of tall pneumatic doors, which couldn’t be surmounted.

But that’s why God invented the Sortie de Secours, the security entrance for officials only, toward which I swerved, and then, to the audible alarm of a gaggle of Métro workers, bolted through.

The shouts crescendoed behind me. A shrill traffic whistle trilled.

A clattering of footsteps.

Past a Sock Shop, then a flower stand (“Promotion-10 tulipes 35F”).

Now I came to a very long corridor, through which a set of moving conveyor belts-“people movers,” I believe they’re called-were carrying pedestrians up a gradual incline. The adjacent belt carried people back the other way, down in the direction from which I’d come. Between the two conveyor belts was a waist-high meter-wide band of metal that flowed uphill like an endless steel carpet runner.

I glanced around, and saw that the Métro security officers clambering after me were now joined by a solitary, dark-suited figure vastly outpacing them, approaching me with frightening speed, as I found myself wedged in a crowd of people who were not moving, letting the steel and rubber conveyors do all the work. Stuck.

The man in the dark suit: the exact one I wanted to lose.

And as he came closer, and I once again turned to gauge the distance that separated us, I realized that I had seen the face before.

His heavy, black-framed glasses only partially obscured the yellowish circles under his eyes. His fedora was gone, lost in the chase no doubt, revealing his thin, pale blond hair combed straight back. Gaunt, ghostly pale, thin pale lips.

On Marlborough Street in Boston.

Outside the bank in Zurich.

The same man, no question about it. A man who probably knew a great deal about me.

And a man-the thought was chilling-who took few if any pains to disguise himself.

He didn’t care if I recognized him.

He wanted me to recognize him.

I wriggled past the bottleneck of people, elbowing them out of my way, and leapt up onto the metal runner between the conveyor belts.

Stumbling, I realized that the metal surface was broken every foot or so by jutting blades of steel, put there, I was sure, to make what I was trying to do-run atop it-difficult.

Difficult, but not impossible.

What had the woman in Zurich called him?

Max.

All right, old friend, I thought.

Come after me, “Max.”

Whatever you want, come and get it.

Try.

SIXTY-ONE

Unthinkingly, I ran.

Along the metallic ledge, uphill. Around me, from either side, were gasps and screams and shouts-Who’s the madman? A criminal? What is he escaping? The answer was supplied immediately to anyone who looked a short distance down the commuter beltway and saw the uniformed officers, trilling their whistles like a French version of the Keystone Kops, wriggling through the crowds.

And now, doubtless to the amazement of onlookers, not one but two men were loping along the metal ledge, the one desperately trying to elude the other.

Max. The killer.

Barely thinking about what I was doing, I vaulted across the opposing lane of descending commuters, gaining a tenuous foothold for a second or two before I leapt over the glass siding and down, a good ten feet, to the deep stairwell below, and bounded up the stairs. I couldn’t risk looking back, couldn’t risk breaking my stride for even a second, and so I simply ran as fast as my weakened ankles would take me, all sound around me drowned out by the incessant, rapid staccato of my heartbeat, the wheezing intake and expulsion of breath from my lungs. Way up ahead of me, at the top of the stairs, was a blue sign: DIRECTION PONT DE NEUILLY. A beacon. I was a greyhound chasing a rabbit; I was a prisoner making a jailbreak. I was, in my fevered brain, anything, anything inspirational, anything that would keep me going, through the pain, ignoring my body’s screams to stop, trying to block out the silkily seductive siren calls-Give up, Ben. They won’t hurt you. You can’t win anyway, can’t outrun them, you’re outnumbered, just make it easy on yourself and give it up.

No.

He will not hesitate to “hurt” me, I replied in my manic internal dialogue. He will do what it takes.

A narrow escalator loomed just up ahead, at the top of the stairs.

Where were the… pursuers?

I allowed myself a quick glance around, a snap of the head before I headed up the escalator.

The subway cops, all three-was it three?-of them, had given up the chase. Probably radioed ahead to others.

That left one.

My old friend, Max.

He hadn’t given up, of course. Not old Max. He continued striding up the metal ledge, a solitary coiled figure approaching, accelerating…

At the top of the escalator was a small landing, and to the right, an escalator marked SORTIE RUE DE RIVOLI. Well? Which way? To the street, or to the train platform?

Stick with what you know.

For just a second I hesitated, then instead barreled ahead toward the train platform, where crowds of people were surging into and out of the train.

He was perhaps ten seconds behind me now, which meant that he, too, would pause at the landing, and if I was unlucky, he would spot me just up ahead, on the train platform, a big fat target in his crosshairs.

Keep going.

Electronic tones pealed, signaling that the train was about to depart, and I knew I wouldn’t make it. I put on one last desperate burst of speed, aiming for the nearest open door, but they all slid closed with a brusque finality when I was still twenty yards away.

And as the train pulled away, and I could hear Max entering the platform, I leapt forward crazily-toward the moving train-and grabbed at its exterior and my right hand gripped onto something solid.

A handhold.

Thank God.

Then my left hand found another handhold as I was whooshed along the platform, leaving Chatelet and Max behind, pressing my body flat against the moving train, and of course luck was no longer with me, it was a terrible idea, I was about to be killed.

My eyes wild, I saw what loomed just ahead as the front section of the train plunged into the tunnel.

A huge round mirror jutting out, mounted on the wall at the entrance to the tunnel.

The train, I could see, cleared it by a few inches, but I wouldn’t, a protruding lump of human flesh that would be sheared in two as neatly as a Sabatier knife through a wheel of cheese.

Some vestige of logic now rose to the forefront of my fevered brain: What the hell do you think you’re doing? What kind of lunacy is this? Gonna ride the train through its narrow tunnel, so you’ll be squashed like a bug, let the stone walls of the tunnel do what Max couldn’t, is that it?

I heard a long, loud cry escape from my lungs involuntarily, and, just as the enormous round metal disc rushed up to decapitate me, I released my grip on the handholds and tumbled onto the cold, hard platform.

I barely heard the gunshots around me. I was in another world, an almost hallucinatory land of fear and adrenaline. I cracked into the floor, slamming my head and shoulders, and tears of pain stung my eyes, and the pain was indescribable, white and searingly hot and blindingly bright and all-encompassing.

PASSAGE INTERDIT AU PUBLIC-DANGER.

A yellow sign just above me penetrated my haze.

I could stop, and that would be it. I could lie there, and surrender.

Or-if my body would permit it-I could plunge ahead, toward the gleaming yellow sign, toward the mouth of the tunnel, and what choice, really, was there?

Something in me, some great reserve of strength, opened up, and a flood of adrenaline pumped into my bloodstream, and I stumbled groggily forward to a small set of concrete steps. The yellow warning sign was hinged, and I shouldered it aside, almost tumbled down the few steps, into the cold darkness of the tunnel, into the tailwind of the just-departed train.

There was a footpath.

Of course there was. What was it?

The passerelle de sécurité. The gangway. Constructed for Métro repair crews to work while the trains are running if need be.

As I ran-no, limped, really-along the footpath, I could hear a sound behind me, a pneumatic sound of brakes, the slight squeal of metal, the noise of another train pulling into the platform I had just left behind.

Coming at me.

But it was safe, wasn’t it? I was safe here, was I not?

No. The path was too narrow; my body would be too close to the upcoming train, I could see that even in my adrenaline-and-fear-crazed state. And surely my pursuer wouldn’t be suicidal enough to follow me; he would know that I was as good as gone; he would know enough to just let me plunge on through the tunnels, to my inevitable death, and then I heard something, a thought, and I knew I wasn’t alone.

I turned back for an instant. He was in the tunnel with me.

I’m impressed, Max.

That’s two of us that are going to die.

And from what was now a good distance I could hear the electronic chimes ringing out, then the clattering of the closing doors, and I froze in the tunnel as the train began to move toward me.

I felt something akin to vertigo. An itch in the back of my head. All of my synapses were jumping with a chemical message of fear-

move move move move

– but I overpowered the instinct, flattened myself against the tunnel wall as the rush of wind heralded the coming of the train and I couldn’t help closing my eyes as the steel skin of the train, a terrifying blur, whooshed by, so close I was sure I could feel it brush against me.

It kept coming, and coming.

And I opened my eyes.

And with my peripheral vision I saw that Max-ten yards away, maybe-had done the same. He, too, had flattened himself against the tunnel wall.

He was illuminated stroboscopically with a dim, flickering, sickly greenish-yellow fluorescent light from a bulb directly above his head.

But there was a difference.

His eyes weren’t closed. They stared straight ahead. And not with fear: with concentration.

And there was another difference.

He wasn’t standing still.

He was sidling, ever so carefully, toward me.

Coming closer.

SIXTY-TWO

He approached, and the train kept coming. It seemed the longest train in the world.

I felt as if I were frozen in time, standing in the center of a tornado. As I sidled away from him, deeper into the tunnel, I caught sight of something just up ahead. A recess in the wall, illuminated by a fluorescent bulb. A niche. If I could…

And just a few feet ahead, there it was, a deep niche. Safety.

A little more effort, crab walking along the footpath, along the horrifying rush of air, the glass and steel and protruding steel handgrips perhaps two inches from my nose.

And I was there. In the niche. Safe.

No other underground transport system in the world has this system of gangways and niches, I remembered. I could see the page, the diagrams. There is a niche every ten meters… Between each station is an average of six hundred meters of track… Two hundred kilometers of track comprise the regular routes between stations of the Paris Métro… The third rail is extremely dangerous, charged as it is with 750 volts DC of electricity.

The recess was three feet deep.

Positively roomy.

I was able, now, to pull out the gun, release the safety, cock it, extend my hand out of the recess, and fire.

Score.

I had hit him. He grimaced in pain, and teetered forward…

And just as the very end of the train thundered past, he fell forward, onto the tracks. But he was not wounded seriously, that was clear at once by the way he braced himself, legs crouched, against falling again.

The train was gone. It was just the two of us in the tunnel. He stood on the ballast between the tracks; I huddled for protection in the narrow cave. I pulled back, out of his line of fire, but he leapt forward, gun extended, and fired.

I felt a jab of pain in my left leg: I had been hit.

Once again I pulled the trigger and heard only that small, flat, innocuous click, that taunting, sickening sound that told me the cartridge was empty. Reloading wasn’t even a consideration; I had no spare magazines.

And so I did the only thing I could: with a great, open-throated bellow I sprang forward, toward the killer. I could just make out his facial expression an instant before I pummeled him to the ground: a look of dull incuriosity, or was it disbelief? In that split-second interval he tried to take aim, but even before he could raise his pistol, we crashed to the ground, his back thudding against the steel of the tracks and the sharp gray ballast stones, and I heard his gun clatter somewhere out of his hand.

He reared up with immense strength, but I had the advantage both of surprise and of positioning-I had his arms and legs pinioned-and I was able to force him backward, one hand slamming into his throat.

He grunted, reared up again, and then spoke for the first time, a few words in a heavy-German?-accent.

“No-use,” he moaned, but I was not interested in what he had to say, I cared only about what was going through his goddamned mind, but I could hardly draw back and concentrate, there wasn’t time for that, and so I throttled and slammed against his torso.

Back toward the train platform, a glint of light was visible thirty or forty meters or so away.

And I heard a few snatches of thought-language, phrases that seemed to come at me with a bizarre urgency, loud and yet not quite distinct. You can kill me, he thought in German, you can kill me, but there is another. Another will take my place. Another-

– and for just a second, stunned, I lost my grip on his throat. He reared up again, and this time he was able to break my hold, and I fell over backward, my shoes sliding in the gravel as if in a puddle of grease. My right hand flew out as I tried to break my fall, but there was nothing to grab on to except the air, and then-

750 volts DC of electricity

– my fingertips brushed ever so close to the cold, hard steel of the third rail, but I managed to yank them away just in time, in time to see him flying through the air toward me.

I reached around for my weapon, but it was gone.

With a sudden lurch I propelled myself upward, cracking into him, sending him flying over my shoulder toward the electrified third rail as the approaching train was upon us, thundering, unbelievably loud, and I saw his legs shudder from the electricity just a split second before the train, its emergency horn bellowing, bore down on him and, oh Jesus Christ, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, the legs were still shuddering, but they ended at the hips, the lower half of his body shivered, a bleeding stump severed entirely at the waist, a quivering chunk of human flesh.

Up ahead came the thunder of another approaching train. Serenely, in a glacial calm, I climbed up to the footpath and the safety of the nearest recess. The train came, and I flattened myself against the wall of the niche. When it had passed, I made my way out of the tunnel without looking back.

SIXTY-THREE

The village of Mont-Tremblant was a tiny cluster of buildings-a couple of French country restaurants, a Bonichoix supermarket, and a hotel fronted by a green awning, oddly out of place, looking like a scale model of one of the grand hotels in Monte Carlo. Looming all around were Quebec’s Laurentian mountains, green and lush.

Molly and I had flown separately to Montreal’s two international airports from Paris on different commercial airlines, she into Mirabel via Frankfurt and Brussels; I into Dorval via Luxembourg and Copenhagen.

I had employed several standard tradecraft techniques to ensure that neither one of us could easily be followed. We’d each used the Canadian passports that my French contact in Pigalle had forged for us, which meant that both sets of American passports-in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Alan Crowell, and Mr. and Mrs. John Brewer-were still virgin; they could be used at some time in the future if an emergency arose. We had departed from different airports, Molly from Charles de Gaulle, I from Orly. Most important, we had flown first-class and on European carriers-Aer Lingus, Lufthansa, Sabena, and Air France. The European airlines still treat first-class passengers as important personages, unlike the American ones, which give their first-class fliers a bigger seat and a free drink and that’s it. As an important personage, your seat will be held until the very last moment; in fact, they usually page any first-class passenger who’s checked in but not yet boarded. For every leg of our journey we boarded at the last possible second, which meant that our forged passports were given only the most cursory of glances as we were ushered aboard.

Although we had taken circuitous routes, miraculously we were able to land within two and a half hours of each other.

I’d rented a car from Avis, picked Molly up, and began our 130-kilometer journey up 15 North. The highway could have been anywhere in the world, the industrial and then suburban outskirts of Milan or Rome or Paris or, for that matter, Boston. But by the time 15 became 117-the Autoroute des Laurentides-the broad, well-paved road cut a handsome swath through the magisterial Laurentian mountains, through Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and then Saint-Jovite.

And we sat there, over our uneaten plates of escargots Florentine and pan-fried trout, like a couple of dazed prizefighters, barely talking. We hadn’t talked on the way either.

Partly it was because we were both so exhausted, and jet-lagged on top of it. But partly we were silent, I think, because we had been through so much in the last days, together and separately, that there was far too much to talk about.

We’d gone through the looking glass: everything was getting curiouser and curiouser. Molly’s father was a victim, then a villain, and… now what? Toby had been a victim, then a savior, then a villain, and… now what?

And Alex Truslow, my friend and confidant, the crusading new director of the CIA-was in fact the leader of the faction that for years had profited illegally off the Agency.

As assassin code-named Max had tried to kill me in Boston and in Zurich and in Paris.

Who was he, really?

The answer had come in the last, amazing few moments of my telepathic ability, as the assassin and I struggled on the tracks of the Paris Métro. With one last burst of concentration I had tuned in; I had read his thoughts.

Who are you? I had demanded.

His real name was Johannes Hesse. “Max” was only his code name.

Who hired you?

Alex Truslow.

Why?

A hit.

Who was the target?

His employers didn’t know. All they knew was that the victim-to-be was the surprise witness before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Tomorrow.

Who was it? Who could it be?

Twenty-four hours or so remained.

Who was it?

So why were we here, in this isolated and remote place in Quebec? What had we expected to find? A hollow tree containing documents? A jack-o’-lantern with microfilm inside?

I had my theories now, theories that would explain everything, but the final piece of the puzzle still remained. And I was convinced that we were about to find it buried in an abandoned stone lodge on the shores of Lac Tremblant.

The registry of deeds for the village of Mont-Tremblant was located in the nearby larger town of St.-Jerome. But it turned out to be of little assistance. The stolid Frenchman who kept the records and issued licenses and did sundry other bureaucratic tasks, a man named Pierre La Fontaine, curtly informed us that all of Mont-Tremblant’s records had been entirely destroyed in a fire in the early 1970s. All that remained were deeds registered since then, and he was unable to turn up any record of the sale or purchase of a house on the lake involving the names Sinclair or Hale. Molly and I spent a good three hours combing through the records with him, to no avail.

Then we took a drive around as much of Lac Tremblant as we could, past the Tremblant Club and the other new resorts, the Mont-Tremblant Lodge, with its clay tennis courts and sandy lakefront beach, the Manoir Pinoteau, the Chalet des Chutes, and houses both elegant and rustic.

The idea, I suppose, was that either or both of us might recognize the lodge, whether (in Molly’s case) from memory or from the photograph. But no luck there either. Most of the houses were not visible from the dirt road that abutted the lake. All we could see were names on signposts, some hand-lettered, some professionally drafted. Even if we’d had the time to drive off the road, down each path to every lakefront house-and that would have certainly taken days-it would have been in fact impossible, for a number of the driveways were rather persuasively blocked to incoming traffic. And then, quite a few houses were located on the lake’s secluded northern part, which could be reached only by boat.

At the end of our little reconnaissance mission, discouraged, I pulled the car up in front of the Tremblant Club and parked.

“Now what?” Molly asked.

“We rent a boat,” I said.

“Where?”

“Here, I imagine.”

But it was not to be. There were no boat-rental places to be seen, and none of the hotels we stopped into rented boats. Evidently the town made it as difficult for tourists as possible.

Then the buzz of an outboard motor broke the silence of the beautiful, glassy lake from a distance, which gave me an idea. At Lac-Tremblant-Nord (which was in fact not at the northernmost tip of the lake, but the end of the road, beyond which there was no access) we found several deserted gray-painted aluminum and wood boat sheds. They were padlocked, of course. This seemed to be a docking area for residents of the lake who had no waterfront access.

Picking the padlocks was a matter of a few minutes. Inside was an array of small crafts, mostly fishing boats. I spotted a yellow Sunray with a seventy-horsepower outboard motor-a good, fast boat, but more important, its keys had been left in the ignition. The motor kicked right in, and a few minutes later, amid clouds of blue smoke, we were zipping along the lake.

The houses were various: modern ersatz Swiss chalets and rustic cabins, some right up on the water, some barely visible through the trees, some perched prominently on the mountainside. There was a false alarm, a stone and mortar house that at first looked right and then turned out to be a modern architect’s pun on an old lodge.

And then it appeared without warning, the old stone-fronted lodge on a gently rising hill maybe a hundred meters from the shore. A veranda faced the lake, and on the veranda were two white Adirondack chairs. It was unmistakably the house in which Molly had spent a summer. In fact, it appeared not to have changed one whit since the picture had been taken decades before.

Molly stared at it, stricken and entranced. The color drained from her cheeks.

“That’s it,” she said.

I killed the motor as close to the shore as I dared, and let it drift the rest of the way in, and then I tied it up to the rickety wooden pier.

“My God,” Molly whispered. “This is it. This is the place.”

I helped her up to the dock, then clambered out myself.

“My God, Ben, I remember this place!” Her voice was a high-pitched, excited whisper. She pointed toward a white-painted wooden boathouse. “Dad taught me how to fish there.”

She began walking down the pier toward the boathouse, lost in her nostalgic reverie, when I grabbed her.

“What-?”

“Quiet!” I commanded.

The sound was barely audible at first, a rustling of grass from somewhere near the house.

A thup thup thup.

“What is it?” Molly whispered.

I froze.

The dark shape seemed almost to fly toward us over the overgrown lawn, down the hill, the thup thup thup mingling now with a whine.

A low growl.

The growl became a loud, terrifying, warning bark, as the creature-a Doberman pinscher, I realized-bounded toward us, teeth bared.

Moving so fast it was virtually a blur.

“No!” Molly shrieked, running toward the boathouse.

My stomach turned inside out as the Doberman leapt into the air, bounding over a distance that seemed inconceivable, and just as I reached for my pistol, I heard a man’s voice commanding: “Halt!”

I heard a splash from the water behind us and whirled around.

“You could hurt yourself that way. He doesn’t like surprises.”

A tall man in a boxy navy bathing suit emerged from the water. The water cascaded from his gray beard as he rose to his full height, a deeply tanned if aging Neptune come out of the underworld.

A sight that was so illogical it failed to register in my brain.

Molly and I both gaped, eyes wide, unable to speak.

Molly rushed to embrace her father.