Extraordinary Powers

THE INDEPENDENT

Is Germany on the Verge of Collapse?

FROM NIGEL CLEMONS IN BONN

In the bleak months since the stock market crash that has plunged Germany into its worst economic and political crisis since the 1920s, many here have come to believe that this country, once Europe’s powerhouse, is on the verge of collapse.

In a violent demonstration yesterday in Leipzig, over one hundred thousand people protested the economic privation, plummeting standard of living, and sudden loss of thousands of jobs throughout the nation. There were even widespread calls for a dictator to restore Germany to its former greatness.

In recent days there have been food riots in Berlin, outbreaks of neo-Nazi and right-wing extremist terrorism, as well as an enormous rise in street crimes especially in what was formerly West Germany. The nation is nearing the end of a fiercely contested election of the next chancellor, and ten days ago the head of the Christian Democratic Party was assassinated.

Government sources here continue to blame the recent German crash on the global recession as well as on the fragility of the recently integrated national stock market, the Deutsche Börse.

Some observers pointedly recall that the last economic crisis of this magnitude, during the Weimar era, gave rise to Adolf Hitler.

ONE

The law offices of Putnam & Stearns are located in the narrow streets of Boston’s financial district, amid granite-fronted bank buildings: Boston’s version of Wall Street, with fewer bars. Our offices occupy two floors of a handsome old building on Federal Street, on the ground floor of which is a respectable old Brahmin bank famous for laundering money for the Mafia.

Putnam & Stearns, I should probably explain at this point, is one of the CIA’s “outside” law firms. It’s all perfectly legitimate; it doesn’t violate the Agency’s charter (which prohibits them from domestic shenanigans; international shenanigans are apparently okay). Fairly often, the CIA requires legal counsel in matters involving, say, immigration and naturalization (if they’re trying to spirit an intelligence defector into the country) or real estate (if they need to acquire property, a safe house, or an office or anything else that can’t be traced to Langley). Or, and this is Bill Stearns’s particular expertise, moving funds around, in and out of numbered accounts in Luxembourg or Zurich or Grand Cayman.

Putnam & Stearns, though, does a lot more than the CIA’s dirty work. It’s a general practice, white-shoe firm comprising some thirty lawyers, twelve partners, who practice a range of law from corporate litigation to real estate to divorce to estates to tax to intellectual property.

That last item, intellectual property, is my specialty: patents and copyrights, who invented what, who stole whose invention. You remember a few years back when a famous sneaker manufacturer came up with a gimmick that allowed the wearer to pump the shoe up with air, for a cost of a mere hundred and fifty dollars a pair. That was my handiwork-the legal work, I mean; I devised an ironclad patent, or as ironclad as you can realistically get.

For the last several months I had been keeping twenty-four large dolls in my office, which no doubt disconcerted my stuffier clients. I was helping a toy manufacturer out in Western Massachusetts defend his Big Baby Doll line of products. You probably haven’t heard of Big Baby Dolls. This is because the claim was settled against my client; I’m not proud of it. I did much better restraining a cookie company from using in its TV ads a little animated creature that suspiciously resembled the Pillsbury Doughboy.

I was one of two intellectual-property lawyers at Putnam & Stearns, which officially makes us a “department,” if you count the paralegals and legal secretaries and all that. This means the firm gets to advertise that we’re a full-service legal corporation, here to handle all your needs, even your copyrights and your patents. All your legal needs serviced under one roof. One-stop shopping.

I was considered a good attorney, but not because I loved it or took much interest in it. After all, as the old saw has it, lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

Instead, I am blessed with a rare neurological gift, present in less than 0.1 percent of the population: an eidetic (or photographic, as it’s colloquially known) memory. It doesn’t make me smarter than anyone else, but it certainly made my life easier in college and law school, when it came time to memorize a passage or a case. I can see the page, as if it were a picture, in my mind. This capability is not something I generally let people know about. It’s not the sort of thing that wins you many friends. And yet it is so much a part of who I am, and always has been, that I must constantly be mindful not to let it set me apart from others.

To their credit, the founding partners, Bill Stearns and the late James Putnam, spent nearly their entire earnings their first few years on interior decoration. The office, all Persian rugs and fragile antiques from the Regency period, exudes a stifling, hushed elegance. Even the ring of the telephone is muted. The receptionist, who’s (naturally) English, sits at an antique library table whose surface is polished to a high gloss. I have seen clients, real estate moguls who in their own lairs strut around barking orders to their minions, walk into our reception area as cowed and discomfited as chastened schoolboys.

It was a little over a month since Hal Sinclair’s funeral, and I was rushing to a meeting in my own office. I passed Ken McElvoy, a junior partner who had been enmeshed in some unspeakably dull corporate litigation for almost six months. He was carrying a huge stack of depositions and looked miserable, like some wretch out of Bleak House or something. I gave poor Dickensian McElvoy a smile and headed for my office.

My secretary, Darlene, gave me a quick wave, and said: “Everyone’s there.”

Darlene is the funkiest person in this firm, which isn’t hard to accomplish. She usually wears all black. Her hair is dyed a jet black; her eye shadow is midnight blue. But she’s fiercely efficient, so I don’t give her any grief.

I had called this meeting to resolve a dispute that had been carried out through the mail for more than six months. The matter concerned an exercise machine called the Alpine Ski, a magnificently designed device that simulates downhill skiing, giving the user not only the aerobic benefits you get from something like the NordicTrack, but at the same time, a serious muscular workout.

The Alpine Ski’s inventor, Herb Schell, was my client. A former personal trainer in Hollywood, he had made a bundle with this invention. Then suddenly, about a year ago, cheaply produced ads began to run on late-night television for something called the Scandinavian Skier, unmistakably a knockoff of Herb’s invention. It was a lot less expensive, too: whereas the real Alpine Ski sells for upward of six hundred dollars (and Alpine Ski Gold for over a thousand), the Scandinavian Skier was going for $129.99.

Herb Schell was already seated in my office, along with the president and chief executive officer of E-Z Fit, the company that was manufacturing Scandinavian Skier, Arthur Sommer; and his attorney, a high-powered lawyer named Stephen Lyons, whom I’d heard of but never met.

On some level I found it ironic that both Herb Schell and Arthur Sommer were paunchy and visibly in lousy shape. Herb had confided to me over lunch shortly after we met that, now that he was no longer a personal trainer, he’d grown tired of working out all the time; he much preferred liposuction.

“Gentlemen,” I said. We shook hands all around. “Let’s resolve this thing.”

“Amen,” Steve Lyons said. His enemies (who are legion) have been known to refer to him as “Lyin’ Lyons” and his small, aggressive law firm as “the Lyons den.”

“All right,” I said. “Your client has blatantly infringed on my client’s design, down to the last claimed feature. We’ve been through all this dozens of times. It’s a goddamned Chinese copy, and unless this is resolved today, we are prepared to go into federal court and seek an injunction. We’ll also seek damages, which, as you know in cases of willful infringement, are treble.” Patent law tends to be a very mild, rather dull way to earn a living-the bland leading the bland, I like to call it-and so I cherished my few opportunities to be confrontational. Arthur Sommer flushed, presumably with anger, but said nothing. His thin lips curled up in a small, tight smile. His attorney leaned back in his chair: ominous body language if ever there was such a thing.

“Look, Ben,” Lyons said. “Since there really isn’t any cause of action here, my client is generously willing to make a courtesy settlement offer of five hundred thousand. I’ve advised him against it, but this charade is costing him and all of us-”

“Five hundred thousand? Try twenty times that.”

“Sorry, Ben,” Lyons said. “This patent isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” He clasped his hands together. “We got an on-sale bar here.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I have evidence that Alpine Ski went on sale more than a year before the patent filing date,” Lyons replied smugly. “Sixteen months before, to be exact. So the damned patent’s not valid. On-sale statutory bar.”

This was a new approach on his part, and it was unsettling. Up to now, all we’d been hashing out, in letter after letter, was whether Scandinavian Skier materially resembled Alpine Ski: whether it infringed the claims of the patent, to put it in legalese. Now he was citing something called the “on sale” doctrine, under which an invention can’t be patented if it was “in public use or on sale” more than a year before the date that the patent was applied for.

But I did not let on my surprise. A good attorney must be a skilled bullshit artist. “Nice try,” I said. “That’s not really use, Steve, and you know it.” It sounded good, whatever it meant.

“Ben-” Herb interrupted.

Lyons handed me a legal file folder. “Take a look,” he said. “Here’s a copy of a newsletter put out by the Big Apple Health Club in Manhattan that shows their latest piece of equipment-the Alpine Ski-almost a year and a half before Mr. Schell applied for his patent. And an invoice.”

I took the folder, glanced at it without interest, and handed it back.

“Ben-” Herb said again. “Can we talk for a minute?”

I left Lyons and Sommer in my office while Herb and I talked in a nearby vacant conference room.

“What the hell is this all about?” I asked.

“It’s true. They’re right.”

“You sold this thing more than a year before you applied for a patent?”

“Two years before, actually. To twelve personal trainers at health clubs around the country.”

I stared at him evenly. “Why?”

“Christ, Ben, I didn’t know the law. How the hell are you supposed to test these things out unless you get it out there? You have no idea the kind of abuse machines like this take in gyms and health clubs.”

“So you were able to make improvements along the way?”

“Well, sure.”

“Ah. How fast can you get me a document from your corporate headquarters in Chicago?”

Steve Lyons was beaming with triumph as we came in. “I assume,” he said with what he probably took to be sympathy, “that Mr. Schell has filled you in.”

“Yes, indeed,” I said.

“Preparation, Ben,” he said. “You ought to look into it.”

The timing was exquisite. At that moment my personal fax machine rang and squealed and began to print out a document. I walked over to the fax, watched it print out, and as it did so, I said: “Steve, I only wish you’d saved us all the time and expense by doing a little reading in your case law.”

He looked at me, puzzled, his smile dimming somewhat.

“Ah, let’s see,” I said. “It would be 917 Fed Second 544, Federal Circuit 1990.”

“What’s he talking about?” Sommer audibly whispered to Lyons. Lyons, unwilling to shrug in my presence, merely stared at me, uncomprehending.

“Is that true?” Sommer insisted.

Lyon’s facial expression did not change. “I’d have to look it up.”

The fax machine cut the paper, a staccato punctuation mark. I handed it to Lyons. “Here’s a letter from the manager of the Big Apple Health Club to Herb Schell, containing his thoughts about the Alpine Ski, his notes on how it was holding up and what about it might be reconfigured. And suggestions for modifications.”

At that point Darlene walked in, silently gave me a book-Federal Reporter 917, 2d Series-and left. Without even looking at it, I handed it to Lyons.

“This some sort of game you’re playing?” Lyons managed to stammer.

“Oh, not at all,” I replied. “My client sold prototypes during a period of testing, and gathered performance data from the sold version. Therefore the ‘on-sale’ doctrine doesn’t apply, Steve.”

“I don’t even know where you’re getting this-”

“Manville Sales Corp. v. Paramount Systems, Inc. Fed Second 544.”

“Oh, come off it,” Lyons retorted. “I never even heard of-”

“Page 1314,” I said as I returned to my chair, leaned back, and folded my legs. “Let’s see.” In a monotone, I recited: “The policies that define the on sale and public use bars do not support invalidation of the patent even though, more than one year prior to filing a patent application, the patentee installed a fixture at a state highway rest station under construction. A period of outdoor testing of the invention was necessary to determine whether it would…”

Lyons, in the meantime, sat with the book open on his lap, following along, mouthing the words. He finished the sentence for me: “it would serve its purpose.”

He looked up at me, slack-jawed.

“See you in court,” I said.

Herb Schell left that morning much happier and almost ten million dollars richer. And I had the pleasure of a parting colloquy with Steve Lyons.

“You knew that fucking case word for word,” he said. “Word for word. How the hell did you do that?”

“Preparation,” I said, and shook his hand firmly. “Look into it.”

TWO

Very early the next morning I had breakfast at the Harvard Club in Boston with my boss, Bill Stearns. Which was when I learned I was suddenly in some serious trouble.

Stearns had breakfast there every morning: Mrs. Stearns, a wan Wellesley housewife, apparently did little else beside serve as a volunteer for the Museum of Fine Arts. I imagined that she slept late, with an eyeshade on, and that since the time their two kids had left the nest for their foreordained lives as junior Boston Brahmins (Deerfield, Harvard, investment banking, alcoholism), he hadn’t had a single breakfast at home.

His table at the Harvard Club was always the same, against the plate-glass window overlooking the city. Invariably he’d have the Harvard Club’s special shirred eggs (Stearns considered the late twentieth-century aversion to cholesterol an evanescent fad, like the sixties). Sometimes he’d eat by himself, with The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe, sometimes with one or more of the senior partners, to discuss business and golf.

Every once in a long while I’d join him. In case you suspect we engaged in conspiratorial, old-boy-network chitchat about the Central Intelligence Agency, I should make it plain that Bill Stearns and I normally talked about sports (which I know just enough about to banter) or real estate. Occasionally-this morning, for instance-there was something of gravity Bill wanted to discuss.

Stearns is the sort of person who’s considered avuncular by those who don’t know him. He’s in his late fifties, gray-haired, ruddy-faced, bow-tied, somewhat potbellied. His two-thousand-dollar suits from Louis of Boston look, on him, as if they came off the wrong rack at Filene’s Basement.

The truth is that after those two nightmarish, violent years of clandestine CIA work, I found the very safeness of my legal career at Putnam & Stearns deeply reassuring. But it was my service at CIA that got me recruited to Putnam & Stearns. Bill Stearns was formerly Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency under the legendary Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence from 1953 to 1961.

When I was hired at Putnam & Stearns nine years ago I made it very clear that my intelligence background notwithstanding, I would refuse to have anything to do with the CIA. My brief CIA career was the past, I told Bill Stearns, and that was that. Stearns, to his credit, had shrugged theatrically and said, “Who said anything about CIA?” There was, I’m convinced, a twinkle in his eye. I think he figured that in time I’d relent, that it would be easy business for me. He knew that the Agency feels much more comfortable in dealing with its own, that there’d be all kinds of pressure on me to do whatever legal work the Agency wanted, and that I’d give in. Why else would an ex-field officer like me come to work for an old-boy firm like Putnam & Stearns? The answer, of course, was the money, which was substantially more than any other firm was offering me.

I didn’t know why Bill Stearns had invited me to breakfast that morning, but I strongly suspected something was up. I busied myself with my blueberry muffin. I’d had way too much coffee already, and I figured a little solid matter in my stomach would anchor me. I’ve always hated business breakfasts; I believe Oscar Wilde had a point when he said that only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.

As our food arrived. Stearns pulled a copy of The Boston Globe from his briefcase.

“You read about First Commonwealth, I assume,” he said.

His tone immediately alarmed me. “I didn’t see the Globe this morning,” I said.

He slid it across the table.

I scanned the front page. There, just below the fold, was a headline that made me feel immediately queasy.

INVESTMENT FIRM CLOSED BY FEDERAL GOVERNMENT it read. And in smaller letters: FIRST COMMONWEALTH ASSETS FROZEN BY SEC.

First Commonwealth was a small money-management firm based in Boston which managed all my money. Despite the grandiose name, it is a tiny place, a boutique firm run by an acquaintance of mine, with fewer than half a dozen clients. It was the firm that paid my mortgage each month, the place where virtually all my money was stashed.

Until this morning.

Unlike Stearns, I am not rich. Molly’s father left an insignificant amount of cash, some stock certificates and bearer bonds, and the title to his house in Alexandria, which was mortgaged to the hilt. He also left her, curiously, a document he’d signed and notarized, giving her full and absolute right of beneficiary to all accounts in his name foreign and domestic under the laws of blah blah blah… The details would numb your brain, as would most details pertaining to the law of estates and trusts. I say “curiously” because, as Harrison Sinclair’s only surviving heir, she was automatically entitled to beneficiary rights. No piece of paper was necessary. All right, so maybe Sinclair was the overly cautious type.

Me, he left exactly one item: an autographed copy of the memoirs of CIA director Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence. It was a first edition, and it was inscribed “For Hal, With deepest admiration, Allen.” A nice bequest on Sinclair’s part, but hardly a fortune.

When my father died some years back, I inherited a little over a million dollars, which after estate taxes immediately became half a million. I transferred all of it to First Commonwealth because of its good reputation. The head of the firm, Frederick “Doc” Osborne, I knew from various legal dealings, and he always struck me as shrewd. Was it Nelson Algren who said, Never eat at a place called Mom’s and never play cards with a guy named Doc? And that was before the days of money managers.

You may wonder, of course, why someone as shrewd as I’m supposed to be would put all his money in one place. I have often wondered the same thing myself, to be frank, and still do. The answer, I suppose, is twofold. Doc Osborne was a friend, and he had a terrific reputation, and therefore it seemed unnecessary to diversify. And I had always treated my inheritance as a nest egg, a chunk of money I preferred not to touch, since I was making a decent salary. And I suppose, too, it’s like that old saw about the shoemaker’s children never having any shoes: the guys who work with money are often pretty mindless about their own.

I dropped my fork, felt sick to my stomach. Rapidly calculating, I realized at once that unless I could somehow wrest my money back from First Commonwealth, I would immediately go bankrupt-my salary, generous though it was, wouldn’t even cover my mortgage. In the present soft real estate market in Boston, I’d be unable to sell my house except at a tremendous loss.

The veins at my temples throbbed. I looked up at Stearns.

“Help me out here,” I said weakly.

“Ben, I’m sorry-” Stearns said through a mouthful of shirred egg.

“What does this mean? This stuff isn’t my expertise, you know that.”

He took a swallow of coffee and set down the cup noisily in the saucer. “Here’s what it means,” he said with a sigh. “Your money’s frozen, along with that of all other First Commonwealth clients.”

“By whom? Who has the authority to do that? And for what?” I ran my eyes wildly up and down the Globe article, trying to glean some sense from it.

“The Securities and Exchange Commission. Plus the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston.”

“Frozen,” I said dully, disbelieving.

“The U.S. Attorney’s office isn’t saying much-they said it’s a pending investigation.”

“Investigating what?”

“All they said was something about securities law violations and RICO statutes. They said it might take at least a year to release the assets, pending the outcome of the SEC’s investigation.”

“Frozen,” I said again. “My God.” I ran a hand across my face. “All right. What can I do about this?”

“Nothing,” Stearns said. “Nothing except wait this out. I can have Todd Richlin talk to a friend of his at the SEC”-Richlin was Putnam & Stearns’s resident financial genius-“but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

I looked out the window at the miniature streets of Boston thirty-some floors below us-the green of the Public Garden and the Common resembling the green-sprayed lichen of a toy train set; the magnificent tree-lined Commonwealth Avenue; and running parallel to it, Marlborough Street, where I lived. If I were the suicidal type, it would have made a good spot from which to jump. “Go ahead,” I said.

“Both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department, acting through the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston, have shut down First Commonwealth, apparently for alleged drug ties.”

“Drug-?”

“Well, the word is that Doc Osborne’s involved in some kind of money-laundering scheme for drug types.”

“But I have nothing whatsoever to do with whatever shit Doc Osborne is into!”

“It doesn’t work that way,” he replied. “Remember when the Fed shut down that big discount brokerage in New York, Drexel Burnham? They literally went in and put handcuffs on people and put a sticker on the door. I mean, you could take a tour of the place a year later and you’d see cigarettes still in ashtrays, half-full cups of coffee, all that.”

“But Drexel’s clients didn’t lose their cash!”

“Well, look at Marcos of the Philippines, or the Shah of Iran-sometimes they just seize all the money and let it earn interest-for good old Uncle Sam.”

“Seize all the money,” I echoed.

“First Commonwealth literally has a padlock on the door,” Stearns went on. “Federal marshals have seized all the computer equipment, all the records and documentation, sequestered-”

“So when can I get my money?”

“Maybe in a year and a half you’ll be able to pry the money loose. Probably longer.”

“What the hell am I going to do?”

Stearns exhaled noisily. “I had a drink last night with Alex Truslow,” he said. Then, daubing his mouth with a linen napkin, he added casually: “Ben, I want you to free up time for Truslow Associates.”

“My schedule’s a little cramped, Bill,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Alex could mean upward of two hundred thousand dollars in billable hours this year alone, Ben.”

“We’ve got half a dozen attorneys as qualified as I am. More qualified.”

Stearns cleared his throat. “Not in all ways.”

His meaning was clear. “As if that’s a qualification,” I said.

“He seems to think it is.”

“What does he want done anyway?”

The waitress, a large-bosomed woman in her late fifties, refilled our coffee cups and gave Stearns a sisterly wink. “Pretty routine stuff, I’m sure,” Stearns said, brushing crumbs off his lapel.

“So why me? What about Donovan, Leisure?” That was another white-shoe law firm, based in New York, founded by “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS and a major figure in the history of American intelligence. Donovan, Leisure was also known to have links to the CIA. For something as secretive as intelligence, it’s amazing how much is “known” or “rumored.”

“No doubt Truslow does some work with Donovan, Leisure. But he wants local counsel, and of the Boston firms, there aren’t many he feels as comfortable about as he does us.”

I was unable to suppress a smile. “’Comfortable,’” I repeated, savoring Stearns’s delicacy. “Meaning he needs some sort of extracurricular espionage work, and he wants to keep it all in the family.”

“Ben, listen to me. This is a wonderful opportunity. I think this could be your salvation. Whatever Alex wants, I’m sure he’s not going to ask you to get back into clandestine work.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“I think something could be arranged. An emergency loan, say. An advance as a lien against your equity stake in the firm. Taken out of your end-of-the-year share of the firm.”

“A bribe.”

Stearns shrugged, took a deep breath. “Do you believe your father-in-law died in a genuine accident?”

I was uncomfortable at hearing him articulate my private suspicions. “I have no reason to disbelieve the version I was told. What does this have to do with-”

“Your language betrays you,” he said angrily. “You sound like a fucking bureaucrat. Like some Agency public affairs officer. Alex Truslow believes Hal Sinclair was murdered. Whatever your feelings about CIA, Ben, you owe it to Hal, to Molly, and to yourself to help Alex out in any way you can.”

After an uncomfortable silence I said, “What does my legal ability have to do with Truslow’s theories about Hal Sinclair’s death?”

“Just have lunch with the guy. You’ll like him.”

“I’ve met him,” I said. “I have no doubt he’s a prince. I made a promise to Molly-”

“We could all use the business,” Stearns said, examining the tablecloth, a sign that he’d just about reached the end of his patience. If he were a dog, he’d emit a low growl at this point. “And you could use the money.”

“I’m sorry, Bill,” I said. “I’d rather not. You understand.”

“I understand,” Stearns said softly, and began waving for the check. He was not smiling.

“No, Ben,” Molly said when I returned that evening.

Normally she is effervescent, even playful, but since her father’s death she was, understandably, a very different person. Not just subdued, angry, despondent, mournful-the range of emotions anyone goes through with the death of a parent-but uncertain, hesitant, introspective. It was a very different Molly these last few weeks, and it pained me to see her like this. “How can this be?”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I just shook my head.

“But you’re innocent,” she said, on the edge of hysteria. “You’re a lawyer. Can’t you do something?”

“If I had been smart enough to spread my money around, this wouldn’t have happened. Twenty-twenty hindsight.”

She was making dinner, something she does only when she needs the therapeutic benefits that cooking provides. She was wearing one of my rattier college sweatshirts and oversize jeans and stirring something in a saucepan that smelled like tomatoes and olives and lots of garlic.

I don’t think you would call Molly Sinclair beautiful the first time you saw her. But her looks grow on you so that after you’ve known her for a while, you’re amazed to hear anyone express the opinion that she’s anything less than stunning.

She’s a little taller than I, five foot ten or so, with an unruly mop of kinked black hair; blue-gray eyes and black lashes; and a healthy, ruddy complexion, which I think is her finest feature. I’ve always considered her somewhat mysterious, slightly distant, no less so now than when we met in college, and she’s graced with a serene temperament.

Molly was a first-year resident in pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital, and at thirty-six she was older than anyone else in her year, since she started late. Which is very Molly: she’s a serious procrastinator, especially when she has better things to do. In her case, this meant trekking through Nepal for more than a year after college. At Harvard, even though she knew she’d eventually end up in medicine, she majored in Italian, writing her thesis on Dante-which meant she was fluent in Italian but not so fluent in organic chemistry.

Molly was forever quoting that line from Chekhov, to the effect that doctors are the same as lawyers, but while lawyers merely rob you, doctors rob you and kill you too. She loved medicine, though, far more than she cared about material possessions. She and I had often talked-half seriously-about quitting our jobs, selling this albatross of a house, and moving somewhere rural, where we’d open a clinic to treat poor kids. The Ellison-Sinclair Clinic we’d call it, which sounded like a psychiatric hospital.

She turned down the heat on the sauce, and together we walked to the sitting room off the kitchen, which, like every room in the house, was a mess of lumber, spackling compound buckets, copper pipes, and such, and everything covered with a fine layer of plaster dust. We sat down in the overstuffed armchairs that were protected temporarily with plastic drop cloths.

Molly and I had bought a beautiful old town house in Boston’s Back Bay, on Marlborough Street, five years ago. Beautiful, that is, on the exterior. The interior was potentially beautiful. It was the height of the market, a few months before the bottom fell out-you’d think I’d have been smarter, but like everyone else I figured real estate prices had to keep skyrocketing-and the house was what real estate ads sometimes call a “handyman’s dream.” “Roll up your sleeves,” the ads say, “and use your imagination!” The realtor didn’t call it a handyman’s dream, but then, the realtor also didn’t tell us about the arthritic plumbing, the carpenter ants, or the rotten plasterboard. People used to say in the 1980s that cocaine was God’s way of telling you you have too much money. In the 1990s, it’s a mortgage.

I got what I deserved. The renovation was an ongoing project not unlike the construction of the pyramids at Giza. One thing led to another. If you want to repair the crumbling staircase you must put in a new load-bearing wall, which necessitates… well, you get it.

At least there were no rats. I have always had a rat phobia, an irrational, uncontrollable terror of the little beasts beyond the revulsion everyone else experiences. I had ruled out several houses before this, houses Molly adored, because I was convinced I’d glimpsed the silhouette of a rat. Exterminators were out of the question; I believe that rats, like cockroaches, are fundamentally nonexterminable. They will survive us all. Every once in a while, while we were browsing in a video store, Molly would have a little fun at my expense by pulling out a cassette of the rat horror movie Willard and suggesting we rent it for the evening. Not funny.

And as if we needed more stress, we had been arguing for months about whether to have a child. Unlike the normal pattern-the woman wants one while the husband doesn’t-I wanted a kid, or several kids, and Molly vehemently didn’t. I thought it odd for a pediatrician such as she to insist that the secret of raising a kid right is not to be its parent. As she saw it, her career was just getting started, and the timing was all wrong. This always touched off the fiercest quarrels. I’d say I was willing to split the responsibilities with her equally; she’d counter that no male in the history of civilization has ever shared the child-raising duties equally. The plain fact was, I was ready to have a family-when my first wife, Laura, died, she was pregnant-and Molly wasn’t. So the arguments continued.

“We could sell Dad’s house in Alexandria,” she began.

“In this market we’d make next to nothing. And your father didn’t leave you anything. He never cared much about money.”

“Can we take out a loan?”

“Using what as collateral?”

“I can moonlight.”

“That’s not going to do it,” I said, “and you’ll just wear yourself out.”

“But what does Alexander Truslow want with you?”

What, indeed, when the world swarms with lawyers far more qualified? I didn’t want to repeat Stearns’s suspicion that Molly’s father had been murdered: in any case, that didn’t explain why Truslow wanted to sign me on. No reason to upset her further.

“I don’t like to think about why he wants me,” I said lamely. Both of us knew it had to do with my CIA background, probably with my fearsome reputation, but that still didn’t answer why, precisely.

“How was the NICU?” I asked, meaning the neonatal intensive-care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, where, since her father’s funeral, she had been doing her rotation.

She shook her head, refusing to let me off the hook. “I want to talk about this Truslow thing,” she said. She fingered one of her curls anxiously and said, “My father and Truslow were friends. Trusted colleagues, I mean, not necessarily close personal friends. But he always liked Alex.”

“Fine,” I said. “He’s a good person. But once a spy, always a spy.”

“The same could be said for you.”

“I made a promise to you, Mol.”

“So you think Truslow wants you to do clandestine work for him?”

“I doubt it. Not at my billing rate.”

“But it involves CIA.”

“No question about that. CIA is the Corporation’s single biggest client.”

“I don’t want you doing it,” Molly said. “We talked about it already-that’s your past. You made a clean break-stay away.”

She knew how important it was to me to separate myself from the clandestine operative work that brought out the icy ruthlessness in me. “That’s my instinct, too,” I said. “But Stearns is going to make it as hard for me to say no as he possibly can.”

Now she got up and knelt on the floor facing me, her hands on my knees. “I don’t want you working for them again. You promised me that.” She was rubbing her hands back and forth on my thighs as she spoke, seducing me away, and fixed me with a beseeching stare, more inscrutable than usual “Is there anyone you can talk to about this?” she asked.

I thought for a moment, and at last said, “Ed Moore.”

Edmund Moore, who was retired from the Agency after thirty-some years, knew more about the inner workings of the CIA than just about anyone else in the world. He had been my mentor in my brief intelligence career-my “rabbi,” in intelligence argot-and he was and remained a man of rare instincts. He lived in Georgetown, in a wonderful old house, and he seemed to be busier now, since his retirement, than in his active days in the Agency: reading seemingly every biography ever published, attending meetings of CIA retirees, luncheons with old CIA cronies, testifying before Senate subcommittees, and doing a million other things I couldn’t keep track of.

“Call him,” she said.

“I’ll do better than that. If I can clear my calendar tomorrow afternoon, or the day after, I’ll fly to Washington to see him.”

“If he can spare the time to see you,” Molly said. She had begun to arouse me, no doubt her very intention, and as I leaned forward to kiss her neck, she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, great. Now the damn puttanesca sauce is burning.”

I followed her into the kitchen, and as soon as she had turned off the burner-the sauce was now a hopeless cause-I encircled her from behind. Things were so charged between us that with a little nudge in either direction, we could be embroiled in an endless argument, or…

I kissed her right ear and made my way slowly downward, and we began to make love on the floor of the sitting room, plaster dust or no plaster dust, pausing only long enough for Molly to go find her diaphragm and put it in.

That evening I called Edmund Moore, who delightedly invited me to join him and his wife for a simple dinner at their home the next evening.

The next afternoon, having postponed three eminently postponable meetings, I caught the Delta shuttle to Washington National Airport, and as dusk began to settle over Georgetown, my taxi crossed the Key Bridge, rattled over the cobblestones of N Street, and pulled up to the wrought-iron fence in front of Edmund Moore’s town house.

THREE

Edmund Moore’s library, in which we sat after dinner, was a magnificent two-story affair lined with shelves of oak inset with cherry. The second tier was ringed with a catwalk; several library ladders rested against the first-tier cases. In the dim lighting the room seemed to glow amber. Moore had one of the finest personal libraries I had ever seen, which included an impressive collection of books about espionage and intelligence. Some of them were accounts by Soviet and East Bloc defectors, which Ed Moore had placed with American and British publishers, in the years when the CIA did such things. (Openly, anyway.) Entire bookcases were devoted to the works of Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin. They had the look of those books you could purchase by the yard from an interior decorator to simulate the look of an old baronial library, but I knew that Ed Moore had painstakingly collected them all at auctions and in bookshops in Paris and London, and in secondhand stores and barns throughout the U.S., and no doubt had read them all, at one time or another.

A fire crackled in the fireplace, illuminating the room with a cozy ocher light. We sat in worn leather armchairs before the flames. He sipped a 1963 vintage port of which he was especially proud; I had a single malt.

I appreciated the atmosphere Moore had so carefully arranged for himself. In his town house we were no longer in Georgetown in the 1990s, crammed with video rental places, Tan-O-Ramas, and Benettons, but in Edwardian England. Edmund Moore was a midwesterner, really an Oklahoman, but over his years with CIA he’d become as tweedy and Ivy League as any Yalie or Princetonian in his generation. It wasn’t an affectation; that was simply what happened after enough time in an organization like the CIA. In fact, the Agency had changed around him. During the sixties, when Ivy League campuses were torn by strikes and drugs, the Agency began to recruit from safer, midwestern schools of more fundamental values. Thus, as one Company friend put it, the “polyesterization” of the CIA. And here was this quaint Oklahoman who could have walked into a lecture room at Linsley-Chittenden Hall at Yale in the forties and no one would have batted an eye. “Gentility,” Moore once told me, “is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.” In fact, though, Moore had married into a lot of money-Elena’s grandfather had invented something essential having to do with the telephone.

“You don’t miss it at all, do you?” he asked with a mischievous smile. He was a small, almost pixielike man in his late seventies, with a small dome-shaped bald head and heavy black-framed glasses that magnified his eyes enormously. His brown tweed suit hung on him, making him seem even more diminutive. “The glamour, the travel, the first-class hotels…?”

“… The beautiful women,” I added helpfully, “and the Michelin three-star restaurants.”

“Ah, yes.”

Moore, who had been chief of the Europe Division of the Operations Directorate while I was stationed in Paris-my boss, to put it simply-knew full well that the life of a clandestine operative actually meant unending tedious “fitness reports,” cables, lousy restaurants, and cold, rainy parking lots. After Laura’s murder, Moore had all but shoved me out the door of Langley headquarters, arranging my interview with Bill Stearns in Boston. He felt strongly that it would be a serious mistake for me to remain in the Agency after what had happened. For a while I resented him for it, but I soon came to realize that he had my best interests at heart.

Moore was a shy, bookish man-an unlikely operations type, where the prevailing personality is boisterous, aggressive, canny. You would have pegged him for an analyst, an intelligence type, according to Agency nomenclature. Not at all a spymaster. He taught history at the University of Oklahoma at Norman before he was recruited to Army intelligence in the Second World War, and he was still an academic at heart.

Outside, the wind howled, driving torrents of rain against the tall French doors at one end of the library, rattling the glass. The doors gave onto a beautifully landscaped garden, at the center of which was a small duck pond.

The rainstorm had begun during dinner, which was a somewhat overdone pot roast served by Moore’s diminutive wife, Elena. We chatted about innocuous subjects-presidential politics, the Middle East, the upcoming German general elections, gossip about mutual acquaintances-and the painful one, the death of Hal Sinclair. Both Ed and Elena expressed their sincere condolences. After dinner Elena excused herself to go upstairs, leaving us to talk.

Her entire married life, I imagined, had been spent excusing herself to go upstairs, or out of the room, or out for a walk, leaving her husband to talk shop with whatever spook happened to have dropped by. But she was far from colorless and retiring; she wielded her strong opinions, laughed often, and, at once playful and feisty, she reminded me of the actress Ruth Gordon.

“I take it, then, that the sedentary life suits you well?”

“I like the sedateness of my life with Molly. I look forward to having a family. But being an attorney in Boston isn’t the most exciting way to earn a living.”

He smiled, took a sip of port, and said, “You’ve had enough excitement for several lifetimes.” Moore knew about my past, about what the Agency disciplinary board termed my “recklessness” in the field.

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you were something of a hothead. But you were young. And you were a good agent, which is the main thing. God, you were fearless. We were afraid we’d have to rein you in. Is it true you put a Camp instructor out of commission?”

I shrugged. It was true: during my training at the CIA’s Camp Peary, a martial arts instructor had scissored me in a choke hold in front of my fellow students and proceeded to taunt me, goad me. And suddenly I was overcome by a slow, cold wave of anger. It was as if some corrosive fluid had seeped into my abdomen, then flooded the rest of my body, giving me a glacial composure. Some ancient portion of my hindbrain seemed to take over; I was a primitive, ferocious animal. I reached out with the heel of my right hand and slammed his face, breaking his jaw. The incident immediately passed into Camp lore, told and retold, embellished and embroidered over drinks late at night. From then on I was regarded warily, like a hand grenade with the pin out. It was a reputation that served me well in the field, and it caused me to be selected for assignments that were deemed too risky for the others. But it was at the same time a trait that sickened me; it warred with my sober, analytical side; it simply wasn’t who I was.

Moore crossed his legs and sat back. “So tell me why you’re here. I assume it’s nothing we could have discussed over the telephone.”

Not, certainly, without a secure phone, I thought; the Agency takes those privileges away from you upon retirement, even from such an institution as Edmund Moore.

“Tell me about Alexander Truslow,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, and arched his brows. “You’re doing some work for him, I take it.”

“Considering it. The truth is, Ed, I’m in a bit of financial trouble.”

“Ah.”

“You might have heard about a small firm in Boston called First Commonwealth.”

“I think so. Drug money or something?”

“It’s been shut down. Along with all my liquid assets.”

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“So suddenly Truslow Associates is looking quite a bit more appealing to me. Molly and I could use the money.”

“But isn’t your specialty intellectual property, or patents, or whatever it’s called?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d have thought Alex would require the services of someone-”

He paused for a moment to sip his port, and I put in, “Someone more adept at hiding money in international bolt-holes?”

Moore gave a faint smile, and nodded. “Yet perhaps you’re just what he needs. You did have a reputation as one of the finest, most highly skilled operatives in the field-”

“A loose cannon, Ed, and you know it.”

A “loose cannon” was, I imagine, just one of many labels given me by my colleagues and superiors in the Agency. I was regarded with fear, wonder, and a good deal of puzzlement. It was the fieldwork, the exposure to danger and the threat of violence, that would bring out my dark side. Some considered me fearless, which wasn’t true. Others considered me reckless, which was closer to the truth.

The fact was that at certain times, a ruthless and frightening Ben Ellison would take over. It was something that, once I was aware of it, deeply unsettled me, and eventually led to my leaving the Agency.

Before Paris I was detailed to Leipzig to get my feet wet. My cover was as a trade official. One of my first assignments was to debrief and protect a rather nervous informant, a Red Army soldier stationed nearby. They’d chosen me because I had studied Russian at Harvard, and was almost fluent. And I carried out the mission flawlessly, and so I was rewarded-promoted, in a sense-with a far more dangerous task.

I was ordered to escort an East German defector, a physicist, from Leipzig to a border crossing a good distance away, at Herleshausen. The Mercedes I was driving had been fitted with a specially constructed compartment behind the seat, in which the physicist was concealed. At the checkpoint we went through the routine, the wheeled mirror apparatus shoved under the car to check for Germans trying to escape that miserable country, all that. A BND man had been sent up from headquarters in Pullach to meet us on the other side. As I went through the passport and immigration block, congratulating myself on a job well done, the BND man made the mistake of showing himself. Someone on the East German side recognized him, and suspicion instantly fell upon me.

Suddenly three, then seven Volkspolizei emerged from the booth and surrounded the car. One stood before me and indicated with an outstretched hand that I should halt.

According to Agency procedures, I should have acted innocent and perplexed, and stopped. Under no circumstances was a human life to be taken. That wasn’t how the game worked.

And as I sat there, I thought of the small, sweaty physicist curled up in the tiny airless compartment between the backseat and the trunk. My precious cargo. The man was brave. He was risking his life, when it would have been so much easier to do nothing.

I smiled, looked to my left and my right, and then straight ahead. The Vopo blocking my way-a Stasi Kommandant, I later learned-gave me a smug smile.

I was boxed in. It was a classic box technique; we had learned it at Camp Peary. The only thing to do was to surrender. You did not take a life; the consequences would be grave.

And then something came over me, that same glacial fury that had come over me when I broke the martial arts trainer’s jaw. It was as if I were in another world. My heartbeat did not accelerate; my face did not flush. I was calm-but overtaken by a desire to kill.

Break the box, I told myself. Break the box.

I floored the gas pedal.

Never will I be able to expunge from my memory the sight of the Kommandant’s face as it rose up to meet the windshield. A rictus of terror; disbelief in the eyes.

Tranquil, floating in a reptilian calm, I stared straight ahead. Everything was in slow motion. The Kommandant’s eyes locked on mine, pools of abject fear. He saw in my eyes the supreme indifference. Not fury, not desperation-but that icy calm.

With an awful thud the Kommandant’s body was thrown into the air. There was a shower of gunfire, and I was across the line, my cargo safe.

Later, of course, I was reprimanded by Langley for taking “unnecessary” and “reckless” measures. But off the record my superiors let me know in subtle ways that they were secretly pleased. After all, I had gotten the physicist out, hadn’t I?

But what remained with me was not pleasure in an assignment accomplished, not pride in an act of bravery or heroism, but a queasiness. For a minute or so at the border crossing I had become almost an automaton. I could have driven right into a brick wall. Nothing scared me.

And that scared me.

“No, Ben,” Moore continued. “You were hardly a loose cannon. You were possessed of a rare combination of prodigious intellect and… brass balls. What happened to Laura wasn’t your fault. You were one of the best. Moreover, with your photographic memory, or whatever that’s called, you’re quite an asset.”

“My… eidetic memory, as the neurologists call it, may have been a big deal in college and law school, but these days, with electronic databases all over the place, it’s nothing special.”

“You’ve met with Truslow?”

“I met him at Hal’s funeral. We talked for about five minutes. That’s it. I don’t even know what he wants me to do yet.”

Moore got to his feet and walked across the room to the French doors. One of them was rattling more than the others; he adjusted and locked it, quieting the noise. As he returned, he said: “Do you remember that famous civil rights case that was filed against CIA in the early 1970s? A black man applied for an analyst position there and was turned down for no good reason?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it was Alex Truslow who, in the end, resolved the case. And saw to it that the Agency’s personnel office never again discriminated on the basis of race or sex. It was extraordinary-he had a vision of a CIA that was a true meritocracy, that wouldn’t permit its old guard to trample the rights of minorities to enter its ranks. A lot of old-timers still bear a grudge against him for that-he let all those minorities into the lily-white old-boys’ club. And, as you might have heard, he’s probably going to be named to replace your father-in-law.”

I nodded.

“How much do you know of what he’s doing?” Moore asked.

“Virtually nothing. ‘Security work’ for the Agency, I understand. Procedures Langley can’t or won’t do.”

“Let me show you something,” Moore said, once again rising, this time beckoning me to follow. With a grunt he mounted the wooden spiral staircase to the library’s second level. “Someday soon I won’t be able to climb these stairs,” Moore said, short of breath. “At which point I’ll move all my Ruskins up here, where I need never see it again. Vile stuff-never liked the nasty old son of a bitch. That’s what happens when cousins marry. Here we go. My booty.”

We had advanced about ten feet along the catwalk, past drab-looking morocco-bound volumes, until Moore came to a stop at a wainscoted stretch of wall between shelves. He nudged a panel until it popped open, revealing a metal file drawer painted institutional gray.

“Nice,” I said. “Did you have the boys from Technical Services build that for you?” In truth, it was rather a poor hiding place to anyone who knew the first thing about breaking and entering, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.

He pulled the drawer open. It gave a low, rusty moan. “No, actually it was here when I bought the house in 1952. The rich old manufacturer who built this place-some coot out of an Edith Wharton novel, I’ll bet-liked secret compartments. There’s a sliding panel in the fireplace mantel I never use. Little did he know his town house would eventually end up in the hands of a bona fide spook.”

The drawer seemed to contain intelligence files, at least from what I could tell by scanning the index tabs. “I didn’t know they let you take files with you when you retired,” I said.

He turned to me and adjusted his eyeglass frames. “Oh, they don’t.” He smiled. “I’m trusting your discretion.”

“Always.”

“Good. I haven’t violated any national security acts, really.”

“Did someone give these to you?”

“You remember Kent Atkins, from Paris station?”

“Certainly. He was a friend.”

“Well, he’s in Munich now. Deputy station chief. He stuck his neck out to get these for me. The very least I could do is take the precaution of hiding them at home from prying burglars or what have you.”

“So I take it the Company doesn’t know.”

“I doubt they’ve even noticed,” he said, and pulled out a manila folder. “This is what Alex Truslow is up to. Do you know much about what your father-in-law was doing before his death?”

The rain was beginning to let up. Moore had spread out an array of files on a well-burnished oak library table near the French doors. They concerned the abolition of the KGB and the East Bloc intelligence services: the steady flow of secrets, and personnel, from Moscow and Berlin and everywhere else behind what was once called the Iron Curtain. There were extracts from debriefings of KGB officials who were attempting to sell their secrets for protection in the West, or who were offering bundles of files for sale to the CIA or to Western corporations. There were decoded cables reporting morsels of information seeping out of KGB stations around the world, which (I could tell at the briefest glance) had the potential for being explosive.

“You see,” Moore said gently, “there’s quite a bit of information that we’d all just as soon had remained buried in the Lubyanka.”

“What do you mean?”

He sighed. “You know about the Wednesday Club, I’m sure.”

I nodded. The Wednesday Club was a regular social gathering of former CIA muckamucks-former directors and deputy directors and so on who enjoyed each other’s company enough to eat lunch together at a French restaurant in Washington every Wednesday. The younger folks in the Agency called it the Fossils Club.

“Well, there’s been quite a bit of talk in the last few months about just what we’re seeing coming out of what used to be the Soviet Union.”

“Anything useful?”

“Useful?” He looked at me intently, owlishly, over his glasses. “Would you consider it useful to receive irrefutable documentary proof that the Soviet Union engineered the assassination of John F. Kennedy?”

I started for a second, then shook my head. “I don’t think it would make Oliver Stone very happy,” I said.

He burst out laughing. “But for a second you believed me, didn’t you?”

“I know your sense of humor quite well.”

He laughed a few moments longer, then pushed his glasses up his nose. “We’ve had KGB and Stasi generals coming over and trying to sell us information on KGB assets around the world. Names of people who worked for them.”

“I’d think that would be a great boon.”

“Maybe, in some historical sense,” Moore said, and removed his glasses. He massaged the bridge of his nose. “But who really cares much now about some washed-up old Red who cooperated thirty years ago with a government that no longer exists?”

“I’m sure some people do.”

“No doubt. But that’s not what interests me. A few months ago at one of our Wednesday lunches I heard a story about Vladimir Orlov.”

“The former chairman of the KGB?”

“More precisely, the last chairman of the KGB, before Yeltsin’s people did away with it. Where do you imagine a fellow like that goes when his job is pulled out from under him?”

“Paraguay or Brazil?”

Moore chuckled. “Mr. Orlov knew better than to hang around in his dacha outside Moscow, waiting for the Russian government to decide to prosecute him for doing his job to the best of his ability. He went into exile.”

“Where?”

“That’s the problem.” He selected a stapled set of papers from the table and handed it to me. It was a photocopy of a cable from a CIA officer in Zurich station reporting the appearance of one Vladimir I. Orlov, former chairman of the Soviet KGB, in a café on Sihlstrasse.

He was accompanied by Sheila McAdams, executive assistant to Director of Central Intelligence Harrison Sinclair. The cable was dated less than one month earlier.

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“Three days before Hal Sinclair died, his executive assistant and-I trust I’m not revealing anything you don’t already know-mistress, Sheila McAdams, met in Zurich with the ex-chief of the KGB.”

“So?”

“The rendezvous was apparently cleared by Sinclair himself.”

“Presumably they were transacting some sort of business.”

“Of course,” Moore said impatiently. “The following day, the name of Vladimir Orlov disappeared from most CIA data banks, at least those accessible to all but the top five or six officials. Then Orlov himself disappeared from Zurich. We don’t know where he went. It was as if Orlov had given Hal’s assistant some quid pro quo in exchange for removing him from our sonars, our sights. But we’ll never know. Two days later Sheila was killed in that alley in Georgetown. Next day Hal perished in that awful ‘accident.’”

“So who would have murdered them?”

“That, my dear Ben, is exactly what Alexander Truslow would like to know.” The fire was dying, and Moore poked at it idly. “There’s turmoil in the Agency. Terrible turmoil. A dreadful power struggle.”

“Between-?”

“Listen to me. Europe is in a frightful mess. Britain and France are in bad shape, and Germany’s virtually in a depression. The specter of feuding nationalist elements-”

“Yes, but what does that have to do-”

“The talk-it is only talk, I grant you, but it is from supremely well-connected Agency retirees-is that certain elements within the Agency have found a way to insinuate themselves into the chaos in Europe.”

“Ed, that’s awfully vague-”

“Yes,” he said, so sharply that it startled me. “Certain elements… and insinuate… and all the other muzzy little phrases we employ when all we know are wisps. But the point is, old men who should be playing golf and enjoying bone-dry martinis are frightened. Friends of mine who used to run the organization speak of enormous sums of money changing hands in Zurich-”

“Meaning that we paid off Vladimir Orlov?” I interrupted. “Or that he paid us off for protection?”

“Money isn’t the point!” His too-even teeth were an unnatural yellow.

“Then what is?” I asked gently.

“Let me just say that the skeletons haven’t yet begun to emerge from the closet. And when they do, the CIA may well join the KGB on the ash heap of history.”

We sat for a long time in silence. I was about to remark And would that be so bad? when I glimpsed Moore’s expression. His face was now chalk-white.

“What does Kent Atkins think?”

He was silent for half a minute. “I don’t really know, Ben. Kent is scared to death. He was asking me what I thought was going on.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That whatever these Agency renegades are trying to accomplish in Europe will not simply involve the Europeans. It will directly involve us as well. It will involve the world. And I shudder to think what sort of conflagration is in store for us all.”

“Meaning what, specifically?”

He ignored my question, gave a small, rueful smile, and shook his head. “My father died at the age of ninety-one, my mother at eighty-nine. Longevity runs in my family. But none of them fought in the Cold War.”

“I don’t understand. What sort of conflagration, Ed?”

“You know, in his last few months in office, your father-in-law was quite obsessed with saving Russia. He was convinced that unless CIA took serious action, forces of reaction would take over in Moscow. And then the Cold War would be a sweet memory. Maybe Hal was onto something.”

He clenched his small liver-spotted fist, and pressed it against his pursed lips. “We take risks, all of us who work for Central Intelligence. The rate of suicide is quite high, you know.”

I nodded.

“And although it’s actually quite rare for any of us to be killed in the line of duty, it happens.” His voice softened somewhat. “You know that.”

“You’re afraid you’re going to be killed?”

Another smile, a shake of the head. “I’m approaching eighty. I don’t plan to live my remaining years with an armed guard beside my bed. Assuming they’d provide one. I see no reason to live in a cage.”

“But have you received any threats?”

“None at all. It’s just the patterns that have me worried.”

“Patterns-?”

“Tell me this. Who knew you were coming to see me?”

“Just Molly.”

“No one else?”

“No.”

“There’s always the telephone.”

I peered at him closely, wondering whether the paranoia had closed in on him, as it had done on James Angleton in his last years. And as if he could read my thoughts, Moore said, “Don’t worry about me, Ben. I have all my marbles. And certainly my suspicions could be wrong. If and when anything happens to me, it will happen. It’s just that I’m allowed to be scared, aren’t I?”

I had never known him to be hysterical, so his quiet fear unnerved me. All I could say was, “I think you’re probably overreacting.”

He smiled, a slow, sad smile. “Maybe so. Maybe not.” He reached for a large manila envelope and slid it across the table toward me. “A friend… or, rather, a friend of a friend… sent this to me.”

I opened the envelope and removed an eight-by-ten glossy color photograph.

It took me a few seconds to recognize the face, but the instant I did, I felt sick to my stomach.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. I was transfixed with horror.

“I’m sorry, Ben. But you had to know. It rather settles any doubts as to whether Hal Sinclair was murdered.”

I stared, my head reeling.

“Alex Truslow,” he went on, “may be the last, best chance the Company has. He’s been valiantly trying to rid CIA of this-for want of a better word, cancer-that afflicts it.”

“Are things really that bad?”

Moore gazed at the reflection of the room in the dark panes of the French doors. His eyes got a far-off look. “You know, years ago, when Alex and I were junior analysts at Langley, we had a supervisor who we knew was fudging an assessment-grossly exaggerating the threat posed by an Italian extreme-left splinter group, just so that he could double the size of his operating budget. And Alex faced him down. Called him on it. Even then the guy had brass balls. He had a kind of integrity that seemed out of place, almost bizarre, in such a cynical outfit like the Agency. As I recall, his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in Connecticut, from whom Alex probably inherited that kind of ethical stubbornness. And you know something? People came to respect him for it.”

Moore took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and massaged them. “Only problem is, I’m not sure there are any others left like him. And if they get to him the way they got to Hal Sinclair… well, who knows what might happen?”

FOUR

I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight. It was too late to catch the last shuttle back to Logan, and Moore wouldn’t hear of my staying in a hotel, what with the various empty rooms in his house now that his children had all left. So I spent the night in his comfortable guest bedroom on the third floor and set the digital alarm clock for six A.M. so I could get to the office at a decent hour.

About an hour later I suddenly sat up in bed, my heart pounding, and switched on the bedside lamp. The photograph was still there. Molly must never see this, I told myself. I got up from the bed, and, in the bright yellow lamplight, slipped the photograph into the manila envelope and zipped it into a side compartment in my briefcase.

I switched off the light, tossed and turned for a few moments, until I surrendered and put the light back on. I could not sleep. As a rule I avoid sedatives, in part because of my Agency training (one must always be ready to bound out of bed on an instant’s notice), and in part because, as an intellectual-property attorney, the last thing I need during the day is the hangover from anything sleep-inducing.

So I put on the television and looked for something suitably soporific. C-SPAN usually does it for me. On CNN, as it turned out, was a news-talk program, Germany in Crisis. Three journalists were discussing the German situation, the German stock market crash, and the resulting neo-Nazi demonstrations. They appeared to be in rather heated agreement that Germany was in imminent peril of succumbing to another dictatorship, which would present the world with a terrifying prospect. And, being journalists, they seemed quite certain about it.

One of them I recognized immediately.

He was Miles Preston, a British newspaper correspondent. Ruddy-cheeked, a sparkling wit, and (unlike most Brits I know) a fitness fanatic, I had known him since my early Agency days. He was a bright, extremely well-informed, impressively well-connected fellow, and I listened closely to what he had to say.

“Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we,” he was saying from CNN’s Washington studio. “The so-called neo-Nazis who are behind all this violence are just plain old Nazis. I think they’ve been waiting for this historical moment. Look, the Germans finally, after all these years, establish one unified stock market, the Deutsche Börse, and look what happens-it teeters and then collapses, right?”

I had met him during my assignment in Leipzig, having just graduated my training at the Farm. I was lonely: Laura was back home in Reston, Virginia, trying to sell our house so she could join me. I was sitting alone in the Thüringer Hof on Burgstrasse, a pleasant, bustling little beer cellar in the Altstadt, and I was probably looking bent out of shape, nursing a large mug of beer.

I noticed someone standing over me, clearly a Westerner. “You look bored,” the man said in a British accent.

“Not at all,” I said. “Drink enough of this stuff, and everybody seems interesting.”

“In that case,” Miles Preston said, “may I join you?”

I shrugged. He sat at my table and asked, “American? A diplomat, or something?”

“State Department,” I answered. My cover was as a commercial attaché.

“I’m with the Economist. Been here long?”

“About a month,” I said.

“And you can’t wait to leave.”

“I’m getting a little tired of Germans.”

“No matter how much beer you drink,” he added. “How much longer are you here?”

“A couple of weeks. Then Paris. Which I much look forward to. I’ve always liked the French.”

“Oh,” he said, “The French are just Germans with good food.”

We hit it off, and saw each other, for drinks or dinner, a number of times before I was transferred to Paris. He seemed to believe my State Department cover, or at least didn’t question it. He may have suspected I was with the Agency, I don’t know. On one or two occasions when I was dining with Agency friends at the Auerbachs Keller, one of the city’s few decent restaurants and popular with foreigners, he walked in, saw me, but didn’t approach, perhaps sensing that I didn’t want to introduce him. This was something I liked about him: journalist or not, he never tried to pry for information or ask intrusive questions about what I was really doing in Leipzig. He could be blunt-spoken to the point of crassness-a source of much humor between the two of us-but at the same time he was capable of extraordinary tact. We were both in the same line of work, which may have been what drew me toward him. Each of us was hunting and gathering information; the only difference was that I was doing it on the shady side of the street.

Now I picked up the bedside phone. It was after one-thirty in the morning, but someone answered at CNN’s Washington office, no doubt a young intern, who gave me the information I needed.

We met for a very early breakfast at the Mayflower. Miles Preston was as hearty and charming as I remembered him.

“Did you ever remarry?” he asked over his second cup of coffee. “What happened to Laura in Paris, my God, I don’t know how you ever survived it-”

“Yes,” I interrupted. “I’m married to a woman named Martha Sinclair. A pediatrician.”

“A doctor, eh? Could be trouble, Ben. A wife must be just clever enough to understand her husband’s cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.”

“She may be a little too bright for my own good. How about you, Miles? As I recall, you had a rather steady stream of women.”

“Never did the dirty deed. Ah, well, if only you could fall into the arms of a woman without falling into her clutches, hmm?” He chortled quietly and signaled the waiter for a third cup of coffee. “Sinclair,” he murmured. “Sinclair… You didn’t marry the scion of the proprietor of the Company Store, did you? Not Harrison Sinclair’s daughter?”

“That’s the one.”

“Then please accept my condolences. Was he… murdered, Ben?”

“Subtle as always, Miles. Why do you ask?”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me. But in my business, I can’t ignore rumors.”

“Well, I was hoping you might be able to enlighten me on that,” I said. “Whether he was or not, I have no idea. But you’re not the first to suggest as much to me. And it doesn’t make any sense to me-my father-in-law just didn’t have personal enemies, so far as I know.”

“But you mustn’t think in terms of personalities. Think instead in terms of politics.”

“How so?”

“Harrison Sinclair was known to be a vociferous supporter of helping out Russia.”

“So?”

“A lot of people don’t want that.”

“Sure,” I said. “Plenty of Americans oppose throwing money at the Russians-good money after bad, and all that. Especially in a time of global financial difficulty.”

“That’s not what I mean. There are people-no, let’s call them forces, Ben-who want Russia to collapse altogether.”

“What sort of forces?”

“Consider this: Eastern Europe is a total disaster. It’s full of valuable natural resources, and it’s roiling with dissent. Many Eastern Europeans have forgotten Stalinism already, and they long for dictatorship again. So it’s ripe for the picking. Wasn’t it Voltaire who said, ‘The world is a vast temple dedicated to Discord’?”

“I don’t entirely follow your logic.”

“Germany, man. Germany. The wave of the future. We’re about to see a new German dictatorship. And it won’t happen accidentally, Ben. It’s been in the planning for a good long time. And those planners don’t want to see a revived, strengthened Russia. Bear in mind how the German-Russian national rivalry so dominated this century’s two world wars. A weak Russia ensures a strong Germany. Maybe-just maybe-your father-in-law, a strong advocate of a strong, democratic Russia, got in the way. By the way, who’s slated to take his place?”

“Truslow.”

“Hmm. Bit of a stickler, isn’t he, our Alex? Not exactly a favorite of the old boys. Shouldn’t be surprised if he took a little spill himself. Well, I’ve got a squash game. Being a bachelor, you understand, I have to keep in shape. Your American ladies have become so demanding these days.”

An hour later at National Airport, just before I boarded the shuttle to Boston, I left a message with Alexander Truslow’s office, agreeing to meet with him.

FIVE

The taxicab, a battered Town Taxi missing a door handle on the right rear side and driven by a borderline psychotic, pulled up to my house at quarter after nine. I quickly changed clothes-Molly was still at work-and drove the Acura to work. And only fifteen minutes late.

Darlene fixed me with a level stare and said, “You had a nine o’clock conference call, or did you forget?”

“I was detained in Washington,” I said. “On business. Could you call with my apologies, and reschedule?”

“What about Sachs? He waited about half an hour.”

“Shit. Could you get me his number? I’ll call him myself.”

“Also”-she handed me a pink message slip-“Molly called. Said it’s urgent.”

I wondered what could possibly be so urgent that Molly would call at this time of the day, when she’s normally on rounds at the hospital. “Thanks,” I said, and entered my office, brushed past the row of twenty-four three-foot Big Baby Dolls, and sank into my leather desk chair. I sat there thinking for a moment, considered asking Darlene to put through the conference call, and instead dialed Molly’s page number. No response; I left a message with the page operator.

I had work to do, a good bit of it, made all the worse by my lateness, but I was in no condition to concentrate on patent law. I picked up the phone to buzz Bill Stearns’s office, then changed my mind and replaced the handset. My meeting with Truslow was set for tomorrow morning, but then, Stearns probably already knew that.

I have one of those pin sculptures that are impossible to describe unless you’ve seen them. It’s called an “executive toy.” I made an impression of my fist out of hundreds of round-headed pins, then admired the 3-D sculpture for a while. My other executive toy is an electronic basketball hoop on a slick-looking acrylic backboard, mounted on the wall across from my desk. I tossed the black and white leatherette ball, swished it in, and it shouted in a fevered electronic voice, “Great shot!” then emitted a great prerecorded frenzied crowd-cheer. Very out of place in this stuffy firm.

“De nada,” I said.

Ten minutes later, and still no call from Molly.

There was a soft knock on the doorjamb, and Bill Stearns entered, wearing his Ben Franklin reading glasses.

“I’ll meet with Truslow,” I said.

I paused, looked at him sharply, felt my breath catch.

“Alex will be very pleased.”

I exhaled slowly. “That’s nice. But I haven’t decided, yet. I’m agreeing only to talk with him.”

He arched his eyebrows slightly, quizzically.

“How much would his business mean to the firm?” I asked.

Stearns told me.

“I wouldn’t see my share of that until the end of the year,” I said, “after the profits are calculated, right?”

Now his brows furrowed slightly. “What are you getting at, Ben?”

“Simply this. Truslow wants me to represent him, and so do you. I happen to have a rather sudden need for a little cash.”

“And?”

“I want him to pay me. Directly. Up front.”

Stearns removed his glasses, folded them with a flick of the wrist, and put them in his breast pocket. “Ben, that’s highly-”

“It can be done. I’ll see Truslow, sign on with him, and he transfers a six-figure retainer directly to my account. Then we’ve got a deal.”

Stearns hesitated a moment before shaking my hand. “Tough son of a bitch. Sometimes I forget that. All right, Ben. We’ve got a deal.” He turned as if to leave, then turned back. “What changed your mind?” He came into my office, eased himself into one of the leather “client chairs,” and crossed his legs.

“I could get brownie points and say it was your powers of persuasion,” I said.

He smiled. “Or?”

“I’ll go for the brownie points,” I replied, giving a half-smile. I pressed my open palm against the pin sculpture, creating a 3-D cyborg replica of my hand. “Listen,” I said after a moment’s silence, just as Stearns was turning once again to go. “I had a talk with an old Agency friend last night.”

Stearns nodded, staring blankly into the middle distance.

“He’s been looking into Harrison Sinclair’s death.”

He blinked a few times and said, “So?”

“He believes it had something to do with the KGB.”

He rubbed his eyes with both hands and moaned. “Old Cold Warriors don’t let go of their illusions very easily, do they? The KGB, and the Evil Empire, were truly great villains in their time. Really first-rate. But the KGB hasn’t existed for a few years now. And even when it did, they didn’t do things like assassinate directors of Central Intelligence.”

I considered showing him the photograph Ed Moore had given me, but just then the telephone buzzed.

“It’s Molly,” came Darlene’s voice, metallic and flat.

I punched the button, picked up immediately.

“Molly-” I began.

She was crying, her words slurred, almost indecipherable. “Ben… something awful…”

I rushed into the corridor, toward the elevator, easing my coat on as I ran. Past Bill Stearns, hunched in conversation with Jacobsen, a bright new associate. Stearns looked up, gave me a quick, piercing, knowing glance as I ran.

As if… almost as if he knew.

SIX

A thousand years ago, it seems, I went through six months of CIA basic training at the “Farm”-Camp Peary, Virginia-where I learned everything from how to make a brush pass to how to pilot a small plane to how to aim a pistol from a moving car. One of my trade-craft instructors casually remarked that we would be learning the spy’s black arts so thoroughly that they would in time be automatic, almost instinctual. No matter what might take us by surprise, even years later, our bodies would know how to react a split second before our brains. I didn’t believe it; after my years as an attorney, I felt sure, my instincts must surely have faded.

I parked the Acura, not in our space behind the building, but a block and a half away, on Commonwealth Avenue.

Why? Instinct, I suppose; the ingrained habits of my time in the field.

Molly had discovered something terribly upsetting, something she couldn’t talk about over the phone. That was all, but still…

I raced down the alley that ran behind our block of attached town houses, approaching our building’s back entrance, pausing at the door before taking out my key. Then, momentarily reassured, I entered and stole quietly up the dark, wooden back stairs.

Just the normal house noises. The ticking of heat coursing through pipes; the refrigerator cycling on; the whirring of countless mechanical objects that run our home.

Anxiously, my entire body tensed, I entered the long, narrow room that would someday be our library, but for the time being was barren. The floor-to-ceiling bookcases lay empty, the oil paint still not quite dry a day after it had been applied by Frank, the painter we’d hired.

I was about to cross over to the staircase and up to the bedroom when, in my peripheral vision, I noticed something.

Molly and I had stacked our books in this room, by subject, ready to put up on the shelves the moment they were dry. They stood in neat piles against one wall, covered with a clear plastic drop cloth. Next to them, also covered with a drop cloth, were the oak file drawers I had refinished a few years ago, filled with our personal files.

Someone had been through them.

They had been searched, expertly but noticeably. The drop cloths had been lifted and replaced incorrectly, so that now they were draped with the paint-bespattered surface inside, not outside.

I drew closer.

The books, still in orderly piles, were arranged differently. But nothing seemed to have been taken; the signed copy of Allen Dulles’s The Craft of Intelligence was still there. Upon yet closer inspection, I could see that our files were in an entirely different order, some index tabs facing the wrong way, Molly’s medical school files where my law school files had been, everything slightly askew.

Nothing seemed, at first glance at least, to be missing. Merely rifled.

I had been meant to see this.

Someone had been in the house, had looked through our belongings. Had deliberately replaced them wrongly. So that I would notice. As… what? a warning?

My heartbeat accelerating, I hastened up the stairs and found Molly in the bedroom, curled up fetuslike in the very center of our king-size bed. She was still wearing her work clothes, the sort of outfit she always wore to the hospital-a pleated gray skirt, a salmon cashmere sweater-but her hair, normally pulled back, was in disarray. I noticed she was wearing the gold cameo locket her father had given her. It had belonged to his mother, and had been passed down through generations of Sinclairs and Evanses. I think she believed it was lucky.

“Honey?”

I came closer. Her eye makeup was badly smudged; she had been crying for a long time.

I touched my hand to the back of her neck, which was damp and hot.

“What happened?” I asked. “What is it?”

Clutched to her breast was the manila envelope.

“Where did you get that?”

Shaking, her voice trembling, she could barely speak. “Your briefcase,” she said. “Where you keep the bills. I was looking for the phone bill this morning…”

With an awful sense of dread I remembered that I had switched briefcases at home earlier that morning. She opened her eyes, red-rimmed. “I got out of work a couple of hours early, thanks to Burton, and decided to just crash,” she said slowly, thickly. “I couldn’t sleep. Too wired. I… decided to pay some bills, and I couldn’t find the phone bill. I looked in your briefcase…”

The photograph that I was now holding was of Molly’s father, after his death.

I had tried to protect her as much as possible from the horrible details of her father’s death. So badly burned was Harrison Sinclair’s body that an open coffin was out of the question. In addition to the terrible mutilation caused by the explosion of the gas tank, his neck had been nearly severed (during the crash, the forensic pathologist explained to me). I saw no reason for Molly to see her father this way; both she and I preferred that she remember him the way he was when they were last together, hale and ebullient and strong. I remember weeping in the morgue in Washington, seeing what was left of my father-in-law. Molly certainly didn’t need to go through it.

But she insisted. She was a physician, she insisted; she had seen mutilation. Still, it’s different if it’s your own father; the sight had been, naturally, deeply traumatic. Mangled though her father’s body was, she had been able to identify it, pointing out the faded blue tattoo of a heart on his upper shoulder (which he’d gotten one drunken night in Honolulu during his service in World War II), his college class ring, the mole on his chin. And then she entirely fell apart.

The photograph Ed Moore had given me had been taken after Hal’s death but before the car crash. It was proof of his murder.

It was a neck-and-shoulders shot of Hal Sinclair, eyes wide and staring, as if fiery with indignation. His lips, abnormally pale, were slightly parted, as if he were about to speak.

But he was unquestionably dead.

Immediately beneath his jawline, reaching from ear to ear, was a large horrid gaping grin, from which protruded tissue of red and yellow.

Sinclair’s neck had been deftly sliced from left carotid to right carotid. I knew the procedure well; we had been taught to recognize it at a glance. The flesh wound was accomplished with one quick stroke, prompting a sudden loss of arterial blood pressure in the brain.

To the victim it was as if someone had suddenly shut off the water. You collapsed almost instantly.

They had done this; they had murdered Hal Sinclair, they had for some unfathomable reason snapped a photo, and then they had put him in a car, and…

They.

I knew right away, of course, who they were.

In the trade, this was what is known as a “signature,” or “fingerprint,” killing, a type of murder preferred by a particular group or organization.

The carotid-to-carotid slice was a specialty of the former East German intelligence service, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, also known as the Staatssicherheitsdienst.

The Stasi.

That manner of execution was their signature, and this photograph was their calling card.

But it was the calling card of an intelligence service that no longer existed.

SEVEN

She wept silently, her shoulders shaking, and I held her. I kissed the nape of her neck, speaking softly.

“Molly, I’m sorry you had to see this.”

She grabbed a pillow with both fists, scrunched it up into her face, muffling her words. “It’s a nightmare. What they did to him.”

“Whoever did it, Mol, they’ll catch them. They almost always do. I know that’s no consolation.” I didn’t believe it either, but Molly needed to hear the words. I didn’t tell her my suspicions about how the house had been searched.

Now she turned over, her eyes searching my face. My heart squeezed. “Who would do this, Ben? Who?”

“Everyone in public office is vulnerable to crazy people. Especially in a position as sensitive as Director of CIA.”

“But… it means Dad was killed first, doesn’t it?”

“Molly, you talked to him the morning he was killed.”

She sniffled, reached for a tissue, squeezed her nose with it. “That morning,” she said.

“You said there was nothing unusual in your conversation.”

She shook her head. “I remember,” she said remotely, “he was complaining about some intra-Agency power struggle he couldn’t explain much about. But that’s normal for him. He always felt CIA was an impossible agency to get under control. I think he just wanted to vent, but as usual, he couldn’t say anything specific.”

“Go on.”

“Well, that’s pretty much it. He sighed, said-no, that’s right, he sang, ‘Fools rush in where wise men never go.’ In his lousy voice.”

“That’s a Sinatra song, right?”

She nodded once, compressed her lips. “His favorite. Hated the man, loved the music. Not exactly a profound sentiment. Anyway, he always sang that to me at bedtime when I was little.”

I got up from the bed, went to the mirror, and straightened my tie.

“Back to the office, Ben?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry.”

“I’m scared.”

“I know. So am I, a little bit. Call me again. Whenever you want.”

“You’re going to sign on with Alex Truslow, aren’t you?”

I tugged at my lapels, ran a comb through my hair, didn’t answer. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said.

She looked at me oddly, as if trying to decide something, and at last said: “How come you never talk about Laura?”

“I’m not-” I began.

“No. Listen to me. I know it’s so painful to you it’s unbearable. I know that. I don’t want to dredge up anything like that, believe me. But given what happened to Dad… Well, Ben, I just want to know if your decision to work with Truslow has something to do with how Laura was killed, with some kind of attempt to rectify things or something-”

“Molly,” I said very quietly, warningly. “Don’t.”

“All right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

She was on to something, of course, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time.

I found myself thinking quite a bit about Harrison Sinclair that day. One of my earliest memories of him was of his telling a dirty joke.

He was a tall, spare, elegant man with a full head of white hair, obviously a former athlete. (He had rowed crew at Amherst.) Hal Sinclair was an easy, charming man, at once dignified and playful.

At the time I was in college, one of only three Harvard students (and the only undergraduate) in an MIT seminar on nuclear weapons. One Monday morning I entered the seminar room and saw that we had a visitor, a tall, well-dressed older man. He sat there at the coffin-shaped conference table, listening and saying nothing. I figured (accurately) that he was a friend of the professor’s. Only much later did I learn that Hal, who was then the number-three man in CIA, the Director of Operations, was in Boston coordinating an espionage operation behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain involving MIT faculty members.

I happened that afternoon to be presenting a research paper I’d done on the fallacy of America’s nuclear weapons policy of mutual assured destruction, or MAD. It was a pretty sophomoric effort, I recall. The last line of the paper said something dumb about MAD being “MADness indeed.” Actually, I’m being unfair to myself; the paper was a pretty decent job of culling public sources on Soviet and American nuclear strategy.

Afterward, the distinguished-looking visitor introduced himself, shook my hand, told me how impressed he was. We stood around talking, and the man told an off-color but very funny joke about nuclear weapons, of all things. Then I noticed my friend Molly Sinclair come in the classroom door. We said hello, surprised to see each other outside of Harvard Yard.

Hal took the two of us out to lunch at Maison Robert, on School Street, in Old City Hall. (Molly and I have dined there exactly once since then, when I proposed to her; her reply was that she’d “think about it.”) There was a lot of booze, a lot of laughing. Hal told another off-color joke, and Molly blushed.

“You two should get together,” he said sotto voce to Molly, but not sotto enough that I didn’t overhear. “He’s great.”

She blushed redder still, almost scarlet.

We were both obviously attracted to each other, but it wasn’t to be for several years.

“It’s good to see you again,” Alexander Truslow said. He, Bill Stearns, and I sat at a banquette at the Ritz-Carlton the next day. “But I must confess: I’m a bit surprised. When we met at Hal’s funeral, I distinctly sensed a lack of interest on your part.”

Truslow was wearing another elegant bespoke suit, rumpled as usual. The only rakish element was his bow tie, which was small, neat, navy blue, and awkwardly tied. I was wearing my best suit, a muted olive-gray glen check from the Andover Shop in Harvard Square; I suppose I wanted to impress the old fellow.

He fixed me with a mournful look as he buttered his fresh-baked roll.

“I assume you know about my brief intelligence career,” I said.

He nodded. “Bill has briefed me. I understand there was a tragedy. And that you were completely exonerated.”

“So I’m told, yes,” I murmured.

“But it was a scarring, terrible time.”

“It was a time I don’t much talk about,” I said.

“I’m sorry. It’s the reason you quit the Company, isn’t that right?”

“It’s the reason,” I corrected him, “I quit that entire line of work. For good. I made a solemn vow to my wife.”

He put down his buttered roll without taking a bite. “And to yourself.”

“That’s right.”

“Then we must speak frankly. Are you at all familiar with what my firm does?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“Well, we’re an international consulting firm. I guess that’s the best way to put it. One of our clients, as I’m sure you know, is-your former employer.”

“Which badly needs consulting,” I said.

Truslow shrugged, smiled. “No doubt. You understand I’m speaking now within the bounds of attorney-client privilege.”

I nodded, and he continued. “For various reasons, they at times desire the help of an outside firm located well outside the Beltway. For whatever reason-maybe because I was with the Agency so long, I was almost part of the furniture-the powers that be at Langley trust me to do the odd job for them.”

I took a roll, which was by now cold, and bit into it. I noticed he was carefully avoiding saying “CIA.”

“Oh, really,” Stearns said, putting a hand on Truslow’s shoulder. “Such ridiculous modesty.” To me, he added: “You know Alex is on the short list to be named director.”

“I do,” I said.

“There must be a serious scarcity of qualified candidates,” Truslow said. “We’ll see what happens. As I was saying, Truslow Associates is engaged in a number of projects that Langley prefers, for one reason or another, not to be directly involved in,” he said.

Stearns put in: “You know how congressional oversight and such can gum up the work of intelligence. Especially nowadays, with the Russian thing out of the picture.”

I smiled politely. This was a particularly common strain of conversation within the Agency, usually among those who wanted CIA to be liberated to do whatever the hell it wanted, like use exploding cigars on Fidel and assassinate third-world dictators.

“All right,” Truslow said, lowering his voice. “The ‘Russian thing,’ as Bill puts it-the collapse of the Soviet Union-created a number of unique problems for us.”

“Sure,” I said. “Without an enemy, what’s CIA for? And then, who needs the Corporation?”

“Not quite,” he said. “There are plenty of enemies, and unfortunately we’ll always need a CIA. A reformed CIA, a better CIA. Congress may not realize that now, but in time it will. And as you know, CIA is retooling, concentrating far more on economic and corporate espionage. Defending American companies from those foreign countries that seek to steal their industrial secrets. Which is where the real battles of the future lie. Are you aware that shortly before his death, Harrison Sinclair established contact with the last chairman of the former KGB?”

“Through Sheila McAdams,” I said.

He paused, his chin up, surprised. “That’s right. But apparently Hal was in Switzerland too. Both he and Sheila met with Orlov. Think back to the death throes of the Soviet empire-the failed coup d’état attempt of August 1991. At that point the old guard knew the game was up. The Communist Party bureaucracy was already in a shambles, the Red Army had turned tail and was now supporting Yeltsin-then seen as the only hope for preserving Russia, at least. And the KGB-”

“Which,” I interrupted, “engineered the coup.”

“Yes. Engineered, masterminded the coup-though it’s nothing to be proud of, the way it was bungled. The KGB knew that in weeks, perhaps months, it was going to be shut down.

“It was at that point that the Agency began to watch the Lubyanka especially closely. Watching to see whether it would accept its inevitable death sentence-”

“Or rage against the dying of the light,” I said.

“Well put,” Truslow said. “In any case, it was at that point that the Agency began to detect an unusually heavy shipment of diplomatic ‘bags’-truckloads of mail sacks and cartons, to be exact-moving from Moscow to the Soviet embassy in Geneva. The recipient, and requisitioner, was the KGB’s station chief.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” Stearns said, and arose. “I’ve got to get back to the office.” He shook Truslow’s hand and departed. We were now, I realized, getting down to it.

“Do we know what was in the shipments?”

“Actually, no,” Truslow said. “Something quite valuable, I imagine.”

“Which is why you want my help.”

Truslow nodded. He finally took a bite of his roll.

“How, exactly?”

“Investigation.”

I paused, considered. “Why me?”

“Because-” He lowered his voice, and continued: “Because I can’t trust the boys at Langley. I need an outsider-someone who knows the ways of the Agency but is no longer connected.” He paused for a long time, as if wondering how frankly he could speak. Finally he shrugged. “I’m in a bind: I don’t know who in the Agency I can trust anymore.”

“Meaning what?”

He hesitated. “Corruption is rampant at Langley, Ben. You’ve heard stories, I’m sure-”

“Some, yes.”

“Well, it’s much worse than you can imagine. It’s at the point of criminality-of outright rogue action.”

I recalled Ed Moore’s warning: “There’s turmoil in the Agency… A dreadful power struggle… Enormous sums of money changing hands…” At the time, it seemed the overheated, irrational doomsayings of an old man who’d been in the business too long.

“I need specifics,” I said.

“And you’ll have specifics,” Truslow said. “More than you’ll care to know about. There’s an organization-a sub rosa group, a council of elders… But we mustn’t talk of these things here.”

Truslow’s face had flushed. He shook his head.

“And what,” I asked, “did Hal Sinclair have to do with these shipments?”

“Well, that’s the mystery. No one knows why he met with Orlov, why he was so secretive about it. Or what was transacted, exactly. And then came word-rumors-that Hal embezzled a good deal of money-”

“Embezzled? Hal? You believe these rumors?”

“I’m not saying I believe them, Ben. I certainly don’t want to believe them. Knowing Hal, I’m sure that-whatever the reason was that he met secretly with Orlov in Switzerland-it wasn’t out of criminal intent. But whatever he was up to, there’s good reason to believe that he was killed because of it.”

Had he seen the photograph Moore had given me? I wondered. But before I could ask, he resumed: “The point is this: In a matter of days the United States Senate is about to commence hearings into the widespread corruption within CIA.”

“Public?”

“Yes. Some sessions will no doubt be closed to the press. But the Senate Select Subcommittee on Intelligence has heard enough of these rumors to look into it.”

“And Hal is implicated, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not publicly. Not yet. I don’t even think the Senate has heard these tales. They have heard only that a good deal of money is missing. And so Langley internal affairs has hired me to look into this. To see what Hal Sinclair was up to in the last days of his life. To find out why he was killed. To find the missing money, to find out where it went, who was involved. The investigation must not be done in-house-the corruption is too rampant. Thus, Truslow Associates.”

“How much missing money are we talking about?”

He shrugged. “A fortune. Let me leave it at that for now.”

“And you need me…”

“I need you to find out what Hal was doing, meeting with Orlov.” He looked up at me, his brown eyes bloodshot, moist. “Ben, you still have the perfect right to say no. I’ll understand. Given, especially, what you’ve been through. But from everything I’m told, you were one of the best in the field.”

I shrugged, flattered and appreciative, but not sure how to reply. Surely he’d heard tales of my “recklessness.”

“You and I have a lot in common,” he said. “I could tell that about you from the start. You’re a straight shooter. You gave the Agency your all, but you always felt it could be better than it was. I’ll tell you something: in all the years I’ve been with the Agency, I’ve seen its fundamental purpose jeopardized by ideologues and zealots on the left and the right. Angleton once said something to me: he said, Alex, you’re one of the best we have-but the paradoxical thing is, what makes you so good at the work is the fact that on some level you disapprove of it.” Truslow laughed ruefully. “At the time I denied it till I was red in the face. But in the end I realized he was right. My gut tells me you’re a similar creature, Ben. We do what we think has to be done, but there’s a part of us that stands aloof in disapproval.” He took a deep sip from his water glass and smiled to himself, seemingly embarrassed that he’d gone on so.

He slid the wine list across the tablecloth toward me, as if inviting me to make a selection. “Could you glance at this, Ben? Pick out something nice.”

I opened the leather booklet and looked through it quickly. “I like the Grand-Puy-Ducasse Pauillac quite a bit,” I said.

Truslow smiled and took the wine list back. “What was on the top of page three?”

I thought for a second, brought the picture to memory. “A Stag’s Leap Merlot, ’82.”

Truslow nodded.

“But I’m not much into performing like a circus animal,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I apologize. That’s a very rare gift. How I envy you.”

“It allowed me to coast through any class at Harvard in which memorization was crucial-which included English, history, the history of art…”

“Well, you see, Ben, your… eidetic memory is a real advantage in work like this, an assignment that might well involve sequences of codes and the like. If, that is, you’re still willing to accept. Incidentally, I’m completely amenable to the terms you and Bill worked out.”

The terms I extorted, he meant, but was too polite to say. “Uh, Alex, when Bill and I discussed those terms, I had no idea what you wanted me for.”

“That’s quite all right-”

“No, let me finish. If I understand you correctly-that what this comes down to is clearing Hal Sinclair’s name-then I certainly have no intention to be mercenary.”

Truslow frowned, his expression stern. “Mercenary? For God’s sake, Ben, I know about your financial plight. At the very least, this assignment will give me the excuse to help you out. If you’d like, I can even put you on our payroll as well.”

“Thanks, but not necessary.”

“Well, then,” he said. “I’m glad you’re on board.”

We shook hands, as if ritually consummating the deal. “Listen, Ben, my wife, Margaret, and I are going to our place in New Hampshire tonight. Opening it up for the spring. We’d love it if you and Molly could have supper with us-nothing fancy, barbecue or whatever. Meet the grandkids.”

“Sounds nice,” I said.

“Tomorrow possible?”

Tomorrow was hectic, but I could clear some time. “Yeah, sure,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

For the rest of the afternoon I could barely concentrate. Could Molly’s father seriously have been involved in some sort of conspiracy with the former head of the KGB? Was it possible that he had actually embezzled money-“a fortune,” as Truslow put it? It made no sense.

Yet as an explanation for his murder… it did make a certain sense, did it not?

A knot of tension had formed in my stomach and evidently had no plans to untie itself.

The phone buzzed; Darlene announced that Molly was on the phone.

“What time are we meeting Ike and Linda?” She was calling from some noisy corridor in the hospital.

“Eight, but I’ll cancel if you like. Under the circumstances.”

“No. I-I want to.”

“They’ll understand, Mol.”

“Don’t cancel. It’d be good to go out.”

There was, thankfully, no time to brood that afternoon. My four o’clock arrived punctually: Mel Kornstein was a rotund man in his early fifties, who wore too-stylish, expensive Italian clothes and his tinted aviator-style glasses always slightly askew. He had the distracted, unfocused look of a genius, which I believe he was. Kornstein had made a tidy fortune from inventing a computer game called SpaceTron, which you’ve no doubt heard of. If you haven’t, basically it’s a chase game, in which you, the pilot of a small spacecraft, are supposed to elude the evil spacecraft intent on destroying you and then planet Earth. This may sound silly, but the game is a marvel of computer technology. It’s all done in 3-D so lifelike you’re really convinced you’re there-you really feel as if the comets and meteors and enemy spaceships and all that are coming right at you. This is accomplished by means of an ingenious software driver device Kornstein patented, a real breakthrough. Add that to his patented voice simulator that barks commands at you-“Too far to the left!” or “You’re getting too close!”-and you have an explosion of color and sound, all on your home computer. And Kornstein’s company had revenues of something like a hundred million dollars a year.

But now another software company had released a product so similar to SpaceTron that Mel Kornstein’s revenues had plummeted. Needless to say, he wanted to do something about it.

He sank into the leather chair at the side of my desk, radiating darkest despair. We chatted for a few moments, but he was not in an expansive mood. He handed over to me a box containing the rival game, which was called SpaceTime. I popped it into my desktop computer, booted it up, and was astonished to see how close a copy it was.

“These guys didn’t even try to be original, did they?” I said.

Kornstein removed his eyeglasses and polished them on a shirttail. “I want to shut the fucking bastards down,” he said.

“Let’s slow down a minute here,” I said. “I’m going to have to make an independent determination as to how close the patent infringement is.”

“I want to screw the bastards,” he said.

“All in good time. Let’s go through each of the claims in the patent, one at a time.”

“It’s identical,” Kornstein said, putting his eyeglasses back on, still askew. “Am I going to have a case here, or what?”

“Well, computer games are patentable on the same principles that govern, let’s say, board games. You’re really patenting the relationship between the physical elements and the concepts behind them, the way they interact.”

“I just want to screw ’em.”

I nodded. “We’ll do our best,” I said.

Focaccia was one of those fabulously hip, vaguely offensive, yuppie northern Italian restaurants in the Back Bay that serve a lot of arugula and radicchio, where all the patrons are young and beautiful and wear black and work in advertising. Between the clamor of voices and the thundering white man’s rap music, the place is deafeningly loud, too, which seems to be another requirement of pretentious northern Italian restaurants located in urban American settings.

Molly was late, but my closest friend, Ike, and his wife, Linda, were already shouting at each other across the table in what looked like a vicious marital argument but was just an attempt to communicate. Isaac Cowan and I had gone to law school together, where he specialized in defeating me at tennis. He’s now got some corporate law job that’s so unspeakably dull, even he can’t bring himself to talk about it, but I know it has something to do with reinsurance. Linda, who was seven months pregnant at the time, is a shrink who mostly treats children. Both of them are tall, freckled, and redheaded-unnervingly similar in physical type-and I find them both easy to be with.

They were saying something about his mother coming for a visit. Then Ike turned to me and mentioned a Celtics game we had gone to last week. We talked a bit about work, about Linda’s pregnancy (she wanted to ask Molly something about a test her ob-gyn was forcing upon her), about my backhand (virtually nonexistent), and eventually about Molly’s father.

Ike and Linda had always seemed a little uncomfortable talking about Molly’s famous father, never sure when they were prying, not wanting to seem too curious about him. Ike knew a little about my work for CIA, though I had made it clear I preferred not to say much. He knew, too, that I had been married before, that my first wife had been killed in an accident, and not much else. Naturally, that limited our conversation at times. They expressed their condolences, asked how Molly was doing. I knew I couldn’t say anything about what had preoccupied me of late, certainly nothing about Hal Sinclair’s murder.

While we were finishing our appetizers (as a matter of principle, no one ordered focaccia), Molly arrived, profusely apologetic.

“How was your day?” she asked as she kissed me. She gave me a look that was a second or two too long, which meant she was asking about Truslow.

“Fine,” I said.

She kissed Ike and Linda, sat down, and said, “I don’t think I can take this much longer.”

“Medicine?” Linda asked.

“The preemies,” Molly replied, medical jargon for premature babies. “Today I admitted twins and another baby, and the three patients together weighed less than ten pounds. I spend all my time taking care of these critically ill little things, trying to put in umbilical artery catheters, dealing with stressed-out families.”

Ike and Linda shook their heads sympathetically.

“Kids with AIDS,” she continued, “or bacterial infections around the brain, and being on call every third night-”

I interrupted her. “Let’s leave all that behind for now, huh?”

She turned to me, her eyes widening. “Leave it behind?”

“All right, Mol,” I said quietly. Ike and Linda, looking uncomfortable, concentrated on their Caesar salads.

“I’m sorry,” she said. I took her hand under the table. Work sometimes strung her out in this way, but I knew she still hadn’t recovered from the shock of seeing that photograph.

Throughout dinner she was distant; she nodded and smiled politely, but her thoughts were obviously elsewhere. Ike and Linda no doubt attributed her behavior to her father’s recent death, which was largely accurate.

In the cab on the way home we had a quarrel, in fiercely whispered tones, about Truslow and the Corporation and the CIA, everything she had once made me promise I would give up forever. “Dammit,” she whispered, “once you start dealing with Truslow, you’re back in that awful game.”

“Molly-” I began, but she was not interruptable.

“Lie down with dogs and you get fleas. Dammit, you made a promise to me you’d never go back to that stuff.”

“I’m not going back to that stuff, Mol,” I said.

She was silent for a moment. “You talked to him about Father’s murder, didn’t you?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t.” A minor falsehood; but I didn’t want to tell her about the alleged embezzlement or the Senate hearings.

“But whatever he wants you for, it has something to do with that, doesn’t it?”

“In a sense, yes.”

The cabbie swerved to avoid a pothole, slammed on the horn, and cut into the left lane.

We were both silent for a moment. After a minute or so-as if she’d been deliberately trying for some kind of dramatic effect-she said, too casually, even airily: “You know, I called the Fairfax County medical examiner’s office.”

Momentarily I was confused. “Fairfax-?”

“Where Dad was killed. To get a copy of his autopsy report. The law states that immediate family members can get copies if they want.”

“And?”

“It’s sealed.”

“Meaning what?”

“It’s not a public record any longer. The only parties allowed to see his autopsy report are the district attorney and the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

“Why? Because he’s-was-CIA?”

“No. Because someone involved in the case decided something we already know. It was a homicide.”

We rode the rest of the way home in silence, and for some lunatic reason had another fight after we got back, and ended up going to bed furious at each other.

It’s funny, but now I look back on that evening with fondness, because it was one of the last normal nights we’d ever spend together, just two nights before it happened.

EIGHT

That night, the last normal night in my life, I had the dream.

I dreamed about Paris, a dream as lifelike as any waking nightmare, a dream I have suffered through perhaps thousands of times.

The dream always goes like this:

I am in a clothing store on the rue du Faubourg-St. Honoré, a men’s clothing store that is a rabbit’s warren of small, bright rooms, and I have lost my way, moving from room to room, looking for the rendezvous point I have laboriously arranged with the field agent, and at last I find a dressing room. It is the rendezvous spot, and there, hanging on a peg, is a sweater, a navy blue cardigan, which I take, as we have arranged, and in the pocket I find, as we have also arranged, a scrap of paper containing the coded message.

I spend too long poring over the message, and now I am late for the phone call I am supposed to make, and frantically, I go from room to room in this wretched store, looking for a telephone, asking for one, unable to locate one, until at last, in the basement of the building, I find a phone. It is a bulky, old-fashioned French phone, two-tone, tan and brown, and for some reason it will not work, try after try after try, and then-thank God!-it rings.

Someone answers the phone; it is Laura, my wife.

She is crying, pleading with me to come home, to our apartment on the rue Jacob, something horrible has happened. I am gripped with fear, and I begin to run, and in a few seconds (this is a dream, after all) I have arrived at the rue Jacob, at the entrance to my apartment building, knowing what I am about to see. This is the worst part of the dream: thinking that if I don’t go home, it won’t have happened; but some horrified fascination impels me onward. I swim through the air, feeling nauseated.

A man is coming out of my building, wearing a thick woolen plaid hunter’s shirt, Nike running shoes. An American, I am convinced, in his thirties. Although I can see him only from behind, I can see that he has a thick, unruly shock of black hair and-it is always the same detail-a long red ugly scar running along his jawline, from his ear to his chin. It is a terrible scar, and I can see it quite clearly. He is limping as if in great pain.

I don’t stop the man-why should I?-but instead, as he limps away, I enter the building, smelling the odor of blood, which grows stronger as I climb the stairs to our apartment, and now the stench is unbearable, and I find myself retching, and then I am at the landing, and I can see the three bodies, splayed grotesquely in pools of blood, and one of them-it can’t be, I tell myself-is Laura.

And at this point I usually awake.

But that is not quite the way it happened, of course. My dream, and it is always the same, has created a grotesque semiparable out of it.

As a case officer in Paris, I was charged with running several valuable deep-cover field agents, and a host of minor ones. I’d had one major success in Paris: I’d succeeded in rolling up a ring of Soviet military-intelligence spies operating out of a turbine plant outside the city. My cover was as an architect at an American firm. The apartment I had been given on the rue Jacob was small but sun-drenched, located in the sixth arrondissement, the best neighborhood in Paris, to my mind. I was fortunate; most of my fellow spooks were housed in the drab eighth. Laura and I had recently married, and she had no objection whatsoever to being moved to Paris: she was a painter, and there were few places she preferred to paint than Paris. She was small, irresistibly cute, with long blond hair that she wore up. We were pretty much intoxicated with love.

We had talked about having kids, and we both wanted them. But what I didn’t know was that she was pregnant, a fact that would have thrilled me. She never had a chance to tell me. I’ve always believed she wanted to tell me in her own way, at her own pace, after she’d had a chance to digest the news. All I knew was that she’d been feeling sick for several days-some sort of minor virus, I thought.

Around this time I was contacted by a low-level KGB officer, a filing clerk in the KGB’s Paris station, who wanted to strike a deal. He had some information to sell, he said, which he’d run across in the archives in Moscow. In exchange, he wanted to defect, wanted financial security, protection, the works.

I followed all the standard procedures, cleared the first meeting with the CIA station chief, James Tobias Thompson. Case officers are always wary of what’s called a “blind date,” which means a meeting with an unknown agent at a place of his designation. There is always the risk that the whole thing is a trap.

But this agent, who called himself Victor, agreed to meet on our terms, which was heartening. I arranged a rendezvous, risky but vital. Three quick rings of a telephone at a flat somewhere in the sixth arrondissement signaled the location and time. Then, a “chance” encounter in an expensive men’s clothing store on the rue du Faubourg-St. Honoré, but unlike in the dream, it went swimmingly. A navy blue sweater was hanging on a peg in the dressing room, as it was supposed to be, left behind by a careless customer who decided against making a purchase, and in the pocket I left the scrap of an envelope, the encoded message, designating time and place.

The next day we met at one of the Agency’s safe houses, really a grubby little apartment in the fourteenth. I knew that walk-ins generally didn’t pan out, but you could never ignore them either: many of the greatest defectors in the history of intelligence have been walk-ins.

“Victor” was wearing a blond wig, obviously a wig; his olive complexion was that of a dark-haired man. Below his jawline was a long, thin, beet-red scar.

He seemed to be the real article, at least as far as I could ascertain. He promised me, the next time we met-if a deal could be arranged-a major, earth-shaking revelation. A document, he said, which he’d come across in the KGB archives. He mentioned a cryptonym: MAGPIE.

When my boss and close friend Toby Thompson debriefed me later, this little detail intrigued him. Apparently there was some substance to the case.

So I arranged a second meeting.

I have been over this a thousand times since then. Victor had contacted me, which meant he already knew my cover. And all the safe houses conveniently located were in use for debriefings and such. So, with Toby Thompson’s approval and even encouragement, I arranged a second meeting, between Victor, Toby, and me, at my rue Jacob apartment.

Laura, despite her sporadic bouts of nausea, was out of town, or so I believed. The night before she had gone out to visit friends near Giverny, to explore Monet’s gardens. She wasn’t to return for two days, so the apartment was available.

I shouldn’t have risked it, but that’s easy to say now.

The meeting was to have been at noon, but I was detained at work on a transatlantic conference call to Langley on a secure trunk line, to the deputy director of Operations, Emory St. Clair. As a result, I arrived twenty minutes late, expecting Toby and Victor to be in the apartment already.

I remember seeing a dark-haired man striding purposively out of my building, wearing a plaid hunter’s shirt, and dismissing him as a neighbor or visitor. I climbed the stairs, and something in the stairwell smelled somehow off. The odor got stronger as I neared the third floor: blood. My heart began to race.

When I arrived at the third-floor landing, I beheld a scene of unforgettable gruesomeness. Tangled on the floor, in pools of fresh blood, were two bodies: Toby… and Laura.

I think I must have cried out, but I can’t be sure. Everything slowed down, became stroboscopic. Suddenly I was kneeling beside Laura, cradling her head, unbelieving. She wasn’t supposed to be home; it wasn’t her; this was some mistake.

Laura had been shot in the chest, in the heart, the bloodstain spread over a large area of her white silk nightgown. She was dead. I turned, saw that Toby had been shot in the stomach, saw him shift in the lake of blood, heard him groan.

I don’t remember anything after that. Someone showed up, I think. Probably I called someone. I can’t have made any sense. I had lost my mind. They had to separate me from my poor dead Laura, who I was convinced I could revive if I tried hard enough.

Toby Thompson had survived, if barely; his spinal cord had been severed, and he would be paralyzed for life.

Laura was dead.

Later, some things were explained.

Laura had returned home early that morning, feeling sick. She had called me at work to say so, although for some reason I never got her message. Later, the autopsy revealed that she was pregnant. Toby had shown up at my apartment at a few minutes before noon, armed, in case anything untoward happened. He found the door ajar, the KGB man inside, holding Laura hostage at gunpoint. “Victor” had then pointed his gun at Toby and fired, then turned and shot Laura. Toby had returned the fire, tried but failed to kill him before the pain overtook him.

What had happened, it seemed, was a Soviet retaliation targeted directly at me. But for what? For rolling up the turbine factory spy ring? Or for any of the several incidents in East Germany in which I wounded, and in a few cases killed, East German and Soviet agents? I had been set up by “Victor,” and was to be taken in a shootout. But instead, Laura was killed-Laura, who wasn’t supposed to be there-and I, detained by some freak twist of fate, was spared. I had fucked up, and I was alive, while Toby Thompson was condemned to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and Laura was dead.

As to the dark-haired man in plaid whom I’d seen leaving my building: who else could it have been but “Victor,” having shed his blond wig?

Much later it was decided that though I hadn’t been at fault, I had nevertheless performed badly-sloppiness of procedure, largely, which I could not contest, even though Toby had given me an okay-and in a sense I was ultimately culpable for my own wife’s murder and for Toby’s paralysis.

My career was not necessarily over; I could have appealed to yet another administrative board. In time, I could have surmounted this.

But I couldn’t bear it. I knew that I had as good as pulled the trigger myself.

The inquest went on for some time. Everyone who’d been even marginally involved, from secretaries to code clerks to Ed Moore, the chief of the Operations Directorate Europe Division, was questioned endlessly, administered polygraph tests. The inquest took over my life at a time when I had no inner resources left to draw from.

My wife and future child had been killed. My life seemed pointless.

Weeks went by. I was in purgatory. They’d put me up in a hotel a few miles from Langley. I would drive to “work” every morning: a windowless white conference room on the second floor, where the interrogator (every few days there was a new one) would smile cordially, give me a firm, bureaucratic handshake, offer me a cup of coffee and a brown jar of Coffee-mate nondairy creamer, and a flat wooden coffee stirrer.

Then he’d pull out the transcript of yesterday’s session. On the surface we were just two guys trying to figure out what went wrong over there in Paris.

In reality the interrogator was trying with all his might to trip me up on the slightest inconsistency, to find the tiniest hairline fracture in my composure, the most minuscule contradiction, wear me down, break me down.

After seven weeks of this-the manpower costs involved must have been extraordinary-the investigation was closed. No conclusion reached.

I was summoned to Harrison Sinclair’s office. He was still the number-three man in the Agency, the Deputy Director for Operations. Although we had spoken only a few times, he acted as if we were old friends. I’m not saying he was insincere; more likely, he was doing his damnedest to put me at ease. Hal was a genuinely affectionate man. He put an arm around me, guided me over to a leather seat, and sat on the small leather couch next to me. He hunched toward me confidentially, as if he were about to brief me on some top secret operation, and then told me a joke about an old man and an old lady in an elevator in a retirement community in Miami. I remember only that the punch line was “So, are you single?”

Although I felt as if my insides had turned to scar tissue in the last two hellish months, I found myself laughing, felt the tension ebbing, if only for the moment. We talked a bit about Molly. She was living in Boston after two years with the Peace Corps in Nigeria. She’d broken up with her college boyfriend-the lunk, as she referred to him.

She wanted me to give her a call when I felt I was ready to see people, Sinclair added. I said I would.

He told me that Ed Moore, the chief of the Europe Division, had decided I had to leave the CIA, that my career would always be clouded by questions. That although I was no doubt innocent, there would always be suspicions. The best thing for me to do was to leave. Moore, he said, was quite adamant.

I was hardly going to argue. I wanted nothing more than to curl up in a ball somewhere and sleep for days and then awake to find it was all a bad dream.

“Ed thinks you should go to law school,” Hal said.

I listened passively. What interest in law did I have? The answer, I later discovered, was not much, but what difference did that make? You can do something well that you don’t care much for.

I wanted to talk to Hal about what happened, but he wasn’t interested. He had a full schedule; he thought it best to maintain neutrality; he didn’t want to rake over the past.

You’ll be a great lawyer, he said.

He told a very funny, very dirty joke about lawyers.

We both laughed. That day I left CIA headquarters-for what I thought was the last time.

But I was to be haunted by the nightmare of Paris for the rest of my life.

NINE

Alex Truslow’s weekend house in southern New Hampshire was less than an hour’s drive from Boston. Molly, miraculously enough, was able to free up enough time to join me. I think she wanted to reassure herself that Truslow was all right, that I was not making a colossal error by agreeing to work for the Corporation.

The house, a rambling old beauty perched on a bluff above its own lake, was much larger than we had expected. White clapboard with black shutters, it was at once cozy and elegant. It looked as if it had begun as a humble two-room farmhouse a hundred years ago, and had gradually and steadily been added to until it sprawled, ungainly and serpentine, along the undulating crest. Here and there the paint was peeling.

Truslow was outside, tending the fire as we drove up. He was in casual attire: a plaid woolen shirt, bulky moss-green wide-wale corduroy pants, white socks, and boat shoes. He kissed Molly on the cheek, clapped me on the back, and pushed vodka martinis at us. I realized for the first time, consciously, what it was about Alexander Truslow that intrigued me. In certain striking ways-the mournful cast of the brow, the dogged honesty-he reminded me of my own father, who died of a stroke when I was seventeen, the summer before I went off to college.

His wife, Margaret, a slender, dark-haired woman of around sixty, came out of the house, wiping her hands on a bright red apron, the screen door clattering behind her.

“I’m sorry about your father,” she said to Molly. “We miss him so much. So many people miss him.”

Molly smiled and thanked her. “This is a wonderful place,” she said.

“Oh,” Margaret Truslow said, approaching her husband and touching his cheek fondly with the back of her hand, “I hate it out here. Ever since Alex retired from CIA he’s made me spend practically every weekend and every summer out here. I put up with it because I have no choice.” Her expression, doting and wearily amused, was the sort you might use on an errant but beloved child.

“Margaret much prefers Louisburg Square,” Truslow said. Louisburg Square was a small, exclusive enclave atop Beacon Hill, where Alexander Truslow owned a town house. “You two live in the city, don’t you?”

“Back Bay,” Molly said. “You might have seen the Men at Work signs and the trash heaps. That’s us.”

Truslow chuckled. “Renovation, I take it?”

Before we could reply, two small children came tearing out of the house, a little girl of about three, bawling, being chased by a somewhat older boy.

“Elias!” Mrs. Truslow called out.

“Now, cut it out,” Alex said, scooping the girl up into his arms. “Elias, don’t torment your sister. Zoë, I want you to meet Ben and Molly.”

The little girl looked at us warily with a tearstained face. She then buried her head against Truslow’s chest.

“She’s shy,” Truslow explained. “Elias, shake hands with Ben Ellison and Molly Sinclair.” The boy, towheaded and pudgy, thrust a small fat hand at each of us in turn, before he ran off.

“My daughter…” Margaret Truslow began to say.

“My deadbeat daughter,” Truslow put in dryly, “and her workaholic husband are at the symphony. Which means their poor kids have to have supper with their boring old grandparents. Right, Zoë?” He tickled the girl with one hand, holding her up with the other. She giggled, almost reluctantly, and then resumed crying.

“Our little Zoë seems to have an earache,” Margaret said. “She’s been crying since she got here.”

“Let me take a look,” Molly said. “You probably don’t have any amoxicillin around, do you?”

“Amoxi-what?” Margaret said.

“That’s all right. I think I’ve got a 150cc bottle in the car.”

“An honest-to-goodness house call!” Margaret Truslow exclaimed.

“And no charge either,” Molly said.

Dinner was prime Americana-barbecued chicken, baked potatoes, and a salad. The chicken was delicious; Truslow proudly gave us his recipe.

“You know what they say,” he said as we tucked into our dishes of ice cream. “By the time the youngest children have learned to keep the house tidy, the oldest grandchildren are on hand to tear it to pieces. Right, Elias?”

“Wrong,” Elias replied.

“Do you have children?” Margaret Truslow asked.

“Not yet,” I said.

“I believe that children should neither be seen nor heard from,” Molly said. “Ever again.”

Margaret looked momentarily scandalized, until she realized that Molly was kidding. “And that from a pediatrician!” she mock-scolded.

“Having kids was the greatest thing I ever did,” Truslow said.

“Isn’t there some book,” Margaret said, “called Grandchildren Are So Much Fun, I Should Have Had Them First?”

Both Truslows chuckled. “There’s some truth to that,” Alex said.

“You’ll have to give all this up if you go back to Washington,” Molly said.

“I know. Don’t think it hasn’t been weighing on me.”

“You haven’t even been asked yet, Alex,” his wife said.

“Quite right,” Truslow said. “And to be honest, replacing your father is a rather daunting prospect.”

Molly nodded.

“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example,” I put in.

“And now,” Truslow announced, “I hope you lovely women don’t mind if Ben and I wander off somewhere and talk shop.”

“Fine with us,” his wife said with asperity. “Molly can help me get the kids down. If she can bear to be around kids, I mean.”

“A few weeks ago,” Truslow said, “the Agency apprehended a would-be assassin. A Romanian. Securitate.” We sat in a stone-floored room that he seemed to use as his study, both of us at a large ashwood table. The furniture in the room was old and worn; the only discordant note was the modern black telephone-and-scrambler unit on the desk.

“He was interrogated. He was tough.”

I didn’t know what he was getting at, so I waited in silence, tensely.

“After several difficult interrogation sessions, he finally broke. But even then, he knew very little. A very professional job of compartmentalization. He said he had something to offer us. Something about Harrison Sinclair’s murder…” His voice trailed off.

“And?”

“And before he was able to spill, he died.”

“One of the Agency’s overzealous interrogators, I take it.”

“No. They were able to infiltrate the system, get to him, take him out. Their reach is impressive.”

“And who are they?”

“A person or persons,” he said slowly, ominously, “within CIA.”

“Do you have names?”

“That’s the thing. They’re very well insulated. Faceless. Ben, this group inside Langley-it’s a group long rumored about. Have you heard of the Wise Men?”

“Yesterday you mentioned some sort of council of elders,” I said. “But who are they? What are they after?”

“We don’t know. Too well cloaked, behind a series of fronts.”

“And you’re saying that these… ‘Wise Men’… were behind Hal’s murder?”

“Speculation,” he replied. “It’s possible that Hal was one of them.”

I felt a little vertiginous. Hal, it appeared, had been killed by someone trained by the East German secret service, Stasi. Now Truslow was talking about a Romanian. How did the pieces fit? What was he implying?

“But you must know something about their identities,” I prompted.

“We know only that they’ve managed to siphon off tens of millions of dollars from various Agency accounts. All done in a highly sophisticated manner. And it appears that Harrison Sinclair pocketed some 12.5 million of it.”

“But you don’t seriously believe that. You know how modestly Hal lived.”

“Listen, Ben. I don’t want to believe that Hal Sinclair embezzled a cent either.”

“You don’t want to believe it? What the hell are you saying?”

Instead of replying, Truslow handed me a manila file folder. Its label bore an Agency filing designation: Gamma One, which was a higher level of classification than I’d ever before been privy to.

Inside was an assortment of photocopies of checks, computer printouts, blurry photographs. In one photo, a man wearing a Panama hat was standing in some kind of lobby.

It was unquestionably Hal Sinclair.

“What’s all this?” I asked, although I already knew.

“Hal at a bank in Grand Cayman, evidently waiting for an appointment with the bank’s manager. The other shots are of Hal at a variety of banks in Liechtenstein, Belize, and Anguilla.”

“Proving nothing-”

“Ben, listen to me. I was one of Hal’s closest friends. This knocked me out, too. There were several days during which Hal was missing-sick, allegedly, or taking a brief vacation. And was unreachable, or he’d arrange it so that he called in to the office. Evidently that’s when he’d make the deposits. They’ve got records of trips he made using several false passports.”

“This is bullshit, Alex!”

He sighed; this obviously distressed him. “That’s his signature on the registration papers for an Anstalt, a nonshare, limited-liability ‘letter box’ corporation based in Liechtenstein. The true owner’s identity, as you’ll see there, is Harrison Sinclair. And we’ve got copies there of intercepted wire transfers of funds to Bermuda trust accounts. Liberian-owned, of course. Telephone records, telexes, wire transfer authorizations. A real maze, Ben. Layers upon layers, shells inside shells. It’s proof, pure and simple, and it breaks my heart. But there it is.”

I didn’t know what to make of it all; from everything I could tell, they had the goods. But it made no sense. My late father-in-law a con artist, an embezzler? You had to know him as I did to realize how hard that was to accept. Yet there’s always that tiny seed of doubt. We never really know another person.

“The key lies in Sinclair’s meeting in Zurich with Orlov,” he continued. “Think: What does Zurich say to you?”

“Gnomes.”

“Hmm?”

“The gnomes of Zurich.” The phrase, I believe, was coined by a British journalist in the early sixties, referring to Swiss bankers, who are so helpful and discreet with mafiosi and drug “kingpins,” as they’re called.

“Ah, yes. Precisely. It’s a safe guess that when he and Orlov met in Zurich, they were transacting something. It was no social call.” He added musingly: “The head of the CIA and the last-ever head of the KGB.”

“Circumstantial,” I said.

“Perhaps. I hope to God there’s an explanation for all this. I believe there may well be. So you understand, I hope, why I want you to clear his name. The Agency has hired me to locate an enormous sum of missing money-a fortune that will make the 12.5 million that Hal allegedly embezzled seem paltry. I need your help. We can kill two birds with one stone: we can at once find the money and establish Hal’s innocence. Can I count on you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, you can.”

“It’s maximum-clearance stuff, Ben, you understand that. You’ll have to go through the usual rigmarole, the polygraph, the vetting, and so on. Before you leave tonight, I’m going to give you a scrambler for your office phone which is compatible with the scrambler on my personal phone at work. But I must be honest: there are many people who will seek to hinder your work.”

“I understand,” I said. The truth was, I didn’t understand, or didn’t understand fully, and certainly I had no idea what precisely he had in mind until the next morning.

TEN

I remember the events of the next morning with an eerie clarity.

The offices of Truslow Associates, Inc., occupied all four floors of a narrow old brick town house on Beacon Street (a short walk, I realized, from where Truslow lived on Louisburg Square). A brass plaque on the ornate front door announced: TRUSLOW ASSOCIATES, INC., with no explanation; if you had to ask, you weren’t supposed to know.

The office was pleasantly upscale. You had to buzz to enter a small antechamber, where a well-coiffed receptionist checked you over, and then you were buzzed through to a sedate waiting room, quietly elegant and very expensively furnished. I waited for ten minutes or so, sunken in a comfortable black leather chair and browsing through Vanity Fair. The choice of magazines was that or Art and Antiques or Country Life: anything but business magazines, for heaven’s sake. No unsightly copies of Barron’s lying around here.

At exactly ten minutes past the scheduled appointment time, Truslow’s secretary emerged from whatever more important business was detaining her (coffee and danish, I guessed) and escorted me up a set of creaky, carpeted stairs to Truslow’s office. She was a classic executive administrative assistant, mid-thirties, pretty, and efficient, in a Chanel suit and belt and a power Chanel gold necklace. She introduced herself as Donna and asked if I wanted some Evian water, coffee, or freshly squeezed orange juice. I asked for a cup of coffee.

Alexander Truslow rose from behind his desk as I entered. The light in his office was so bright that I wished I’d brought sunglasses. It flooded in through the tall windows and bounced off the antique white walls.

Seated in a leather chair beside Truslow’s desk was a round-shouldered, dark-haired, bulky man in his early fifties.

“Ben,” Truslow said, “I’d like you to meet Charles Rossi.”

Rossi rose, gave me a bone-crushing handshake, and said, “Good to know you, Mr. Ellison.”

“Same here,” I said, though I doubted that would prove to be true. We both sat down, and I added, “Ben.”

Rossi nodded and smiled.

The secretary set a cup of freshly brewed coffee in an Italian ceramic mug before me. It was very good. I extracted a yellow legal pad from my briefcase and my Mont Blanc rollerball.

After she had left, he typed something into the Amtel keyboard in front of him, the device that allowed him and his secretary noiselessly to communicate during meetings or phone calls.

“What we’re about to discuss with you has to remain a matter of utmost secrecy.”

I nodded, took a sip of coffee. Some rich French-roast-plus-something-else blend; remarkably good.

“Charles, if you’ll excuse us,” Truslow said. Rossi got up and left the office, closing the door behind him.

“Rossi is our liaison with CIA,” Truslow explained. “He came down from Langley especially to work with you on this.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“I got a call from Rossi last night. Given the sensitivity of the project we’ve been hired to do, the Agency, understandably, is concerned about security. They’ve insisted upon implementing their own clearance procedures.”

I nodded.

“It seems a bit excessive to me, too,” Truslow went on. “You’ve been vetted and cleared and all that nonsense. But before you can be cleared fully, Rossi would like to run you through some preliminary stuff. We’re required, by contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, to flutter all outside employees.”

“I see,” I said.

He was referring to the polygraph, the lie detector, to which all Agency employees are subjected a few times in their careers-at the beginning of their service, periodically thereafter, and sometimes after vital operations or in extraordinary cases.

“Ben,” Truslow went on, “you see, as the centerpiece of our investigation, we’d like you to track down Vladimir Orlov, and learn whatever you can about what happened in his meeting with your father-in-law. Orlov may have been playing a double game on Hal Sinclair, and I want to know whether he did or not.”

“Track Orlov down?” I said.

“This is about all I can tell you until you’ve been cleared. Once you’ve been fluttered, we can talk more.” He pressed a button on his desk, and Rossi returned.

Truslow came around the side of his massive desk and clapped Rossi’s shoulder. “I’ll turn you over to Charlie at this point,” he said, and then gripped my hand. “Welcome, friend.”

I could see Truslow turn once again to his Amtel and punch a button on his phone. As I left his office, I caught a last glimpse of him, a brooding, dark figure of intense energy silhouetted against the brilliant morning sunlight.

Charles Rossi drove me, in a dark blue government-issue sedan, across the river to an ultramodern building in the Kendall Square section of Cambridge, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raytheon and Genzyme and all the other high-powered, high-tech corporations.

Leaving the elevator on the fifth floor, we entered a very functional-looking reception area, all chrome and steel and industrial-gray carpeting and blond woods. On the wall that faced us was a drab nameplate that said DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES: AUTHORIZED VISITORS ONLY.

I knew at once this was a CIA-owned operation. Everything about it-the unrevealing name, the anonymity, the forbidding stillness-screamed Agency. I knew CIA ran labs and test facilities in the suburbs outside Washington, and in a building on Water Street in New York City; I hadn’t realized they also had a facility in Cambridge, in the land of MIT, but it made perfect sense.

Saying very little, Rossi led me through a set of large metal doors, which he opened by inserting a magnetic card in a vertical slot. The doors opened, yielding a view of an enormous room containing row upon row of computer terminals. In front of most of them people sat typing.

“Not much to look at, huh?” Rossi observed as we stood at the room’s entrance. “Pretty dull stuff.”

“You should see our firm,” I replied.

He laughed politely. “There’s actually a range of projects going on here. Microdevices, automated cryptography, machine vision, things like that. Are you familiar…?”

“Not terribly,” I admitted.

“Well, take automated cryptography. This is funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, a part of the Defense Department.”

I nodded as he escorted me toward one terminal, a SPARC-2 workstation, at which a wiry young bearded man seemed to be working furiously. “Now, this terminal is made by Sun Microsystems, and it’s ‘talking’ to a supercomputer, a Thinking Machines Corporation CM-3.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, Keith here is developing plain-text encryption algorithms. That means codes that are, theoretically at least, unbreakable. In simple English, that will allow us to translate, encode top secret information into a form that’ll resemble some innocuous-looking document in English-not nonsense, but real prose. Then, by means of speech recognition, our computers will be able to decrypt it-trapdoor codes, I mean, knapsack codes, that sort of thing.”

I didn’t see, but I nodded anyway. Rossi, however, turned out to be quite observant. “I’m yakking,” he apologized. “Let me put it another way. An agent in the field will be able to encode a classified document into a script for an ordinary news program broadcast over the Voice of America. To anyone listening it won’t sound like anything unusual, but the right computer will be able to decrypt it.”

“Nice.”

“Oh, anyway, there are a number of things we’re working on. Microdevices, for instance, are being designed here-we have them made elsewhere, by a nanofabrication laboratory.”

“And what are they used for?”

He wagged his head back and forth, as if indecisively, and then said, “These are tiny devices made of silicon and xenon, a few angstroms wide, which can, let’s say, be placed undetectably into a computer, serve as a transmitting device. There are far more interesting uses, but I’m not really free to go into it. So, if I may…”

We returned to the white corridor, then entered another secured area, which Rossi accessed by inserting a different magnetic card in the vertical slot. He turned to me and observed simply, “Security.”

Now we were in an entirely white, windowless corridor. A plaque directly in front of us said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

Rossi led me down this corridor, through another set of doors, and into a peculiar-looking concrete chamber. At the center of the chamber was a smaller chamber, glass-enclosed, which contained a large white machine, maybe fifteen feet high by ten feet wide. It resembled a large square doughnut. Outside the glass walls was a bank of computer monitors.

“A magnetic resonance imager,” I said. “I’ve seen them in hospitals. But this one looks quite a bit larger.”

“Very good. The MRI you usually see in hospitals might range anywhere from a.5 tesla to a 1.5 tesla-a tesla is a measure of the strength of the magnet inside. Once in a great while you might see a two tesla in highly specialized use. This is a four.”

“Awfully powerful.”

“But quite safe. And modified somewhat. I directed the modification.” Rossi’s eyes roamed the bare concrete room as if distracted.

“Safe for what?”

“You’re looking at a replacement for the old polygraph. A modified MRI will soon be used by the Agency in debriefing intelligence officers, defectors, agents, and so on, to provide a reliable mental ‘fingerprint.’”

“Would you like to explain that?”

“I’m sure you’re aware of the many drawbacks of the old polygraph system.”

I was, but I listened as he explained.

“The old polygraph technique relies on blood pressure cuffs and electrodes that measure galvanic skin responses, sweat, changes in skin temperature, and so on. It’s crude, and it’s only-what?-sixty percent reliable. If that.”

“All right,” I said impatiently.

Rossi continued patiently: “The Soviets didn’t even use the thing, as you may know. They gave seminars on how to beat it. For God’s sake, do you remember the time when twenty-seven Cuban DGI double agents working against us were cleared by CIA flutter?”

“Sure,” I said. It was part of Agency lore.

“The damn thing registers only emotional responses, as you know. Which vary widely depending upon temperament. And yet the flutter is the cornerstone of so much of our intelligence operations. Not only for the CIA, but for the DIA and NSA and a number of intelligence agencies and divisions. Their operational security all hangs on this, establishing bona fides and reliability of product, even screening applicants and recruits.”

“And it’s easy to defeat,” I added.

“Embarrassingly easy,” Rossi agreed. “Not just sociopaths or people who don’t register the normal range of human emotions, guilt and anxiety, pangs of conscience, and whatnot. But any trained professional can beat the machine using any of a number of drugs. Even doing something simple like causing oneself physical pain during the test can skew the results. Stepping on a thumbtack, for Christ’s sake.”

“Okay,” I prompted him.

“So, with your permission, I’d like to get started, and have you on your way back to Mr. Truslow.”

ELEVEN

“Half an hour,” Rossi told me, “and you should be out of here. And on your way.”

We stood in the outer MRI chamber, inspecting 3-D computer reconstructions of the human brain, rendered on a computer’s color monitor. On the screen in front of me, a lifelike image of a brain rotated and then flew apart, section by section, like a pink grapefruit.

One of Rossi’s lab assistants, a small, dark-haired former MIT graduate student named Ann, sat at the monitor and called up the various images. The cerebral cortex, she explained to me in a soft, little-girl voice, was made up of six layers. “We’ve discovered that there is a discernible difference between the appearance of the cortex in someone who’s telling the truth and someone who’s lying,” she said. She added confidentially, “Of course, I still have no idea whether this originates in the neurons or in the glial cells, but we’re working on that.”

She produced a computer image of a liar’s brain, which seemed to be shaded somewhat differently from the nonliar’s brain.

“If you want to take off your jacket,” Rossi said, “you’ll be more comfortable.” I did so, and removed my tie, placed them both on the back of a chair. Meanwhile, Ann went into the inner chamber and began adjusting the machine.

“Now, anything metal,” he went on. “Keys, belt buckles, suspenders, coins. Your watch, too. Since it’s really just one big magnet, anything made of steel or iron is going to fly out of your pockets. The magnet can stop your watch, or at least screw it up pretty badly.” He chortled good-humoredly. “Also, your wallet.”

“My wallet?”

“The thing can demagnetize things like bank cards, magnetic strips, stuff like that. You don’t have a steel plate in your head or anything like that, right?”

“No.” I finished emptying my pockets and placing the contents on a lab table.

“All right,” he said, leading me into the inner chamber. “This might feel a bit claustrophobic. Does that bother you?”

“Not especially.”

“Excellent. There’s a mirror in there, too, so you can see yourself, but a lot of people don’t like looking at themselves lying flat in the machine. I guess it suggests to some people what they’re going to look like in their coffins.” He chortled again.

I lay down on the white platform, and Ann strapped me in. The straps around my head fit snugly and were cushioned with sponges. The whole setup was vaguely uncomfortable.

Slowly she moved the platform into the center of the machine. Inside the doughnut hole was, as they said, a mirror, enabling me to see my head and torso.

From somewhere in the room I heard Ann’s voice:

“-to start the magnet.”

Then, from a speaker inside the machine, I heard Rossi’s voice: “All right in there?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “How long does this take?’

“Six hours,” the voice came back. “I’m kidding. Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Very funny.”

“All set?”

“Let’s get on with it,” I said.

“You’ll hear a pounding noise,” Rossi came back, “but you’ll still be able to hear my voice over that. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said impatiently.

The head guard made it impossible to move my head, which was an unpleasant feeling. “Let’s get on with it.” Suddenly a loud jackhammer-like sound started, a rhythmic thudding, spaced less than a second apart.

“Ben, I’m going to ask you a series of questions,” came Rossi’s voice, metallic. “Answer yes or no.”

“This isn’t my first flutter,” I said.

“I understand,” came the metallic reply. “Is your name Benjamin Ellison?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Is your name John Doe?”

“No.”

“Are you a physician?”

“No.”

“Have you ever had an extramarital affair?”

“What is this?” I said angrily.

“Please, just bear with me. Yes or no.”

I hesitated. Like Jimmy Carter, I have felt lust in my heart. “No.”

“Were you employed by the Central Intelligence Agency?”

“Yes.”

“Do you live in Boston?”

“Yes.”

I heard a female voice from the room, Ann’s voice, and then a male voice coming from somewhere nearby. Then Rossi’s amplified question: “Were you an agent for Soviet intelligence?”

I gave a sputter of disbelief.

“Yes or no, Ben. You understand these questions are designed to test the parameters of your anxiety levels. Were you an agent for Soviet intelligence?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you married to Martha Sinclair?”

“Yes.”

“Holding up okay in there, Ben?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Continue.”

“Were you born in New York City?”

“No.”

“Were you born in Philadelphia?”

“Yes.”

“Are you thirty-eight years old?”

“No.”

“Are you thirty-nine years old?”

“Yes.”

“Is your name Benjamin Ellison?”

“Yes.”

“Now, Ben, I want you to lie for the next two questions. Is your legal specialty real estate law?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Have you ever masturbated?”

“No.”

“Now the truth. When you worked for American intelligence, did you at the same time work for the intelligence service of any other nation?”

“No.”

“Since the termination of your employment with the Central Intelligence Agency, have you been in touch at any time with any intelligence officer formerly associated with what was once the Soviet Union or the Soviet Bloc nations?”

“No.”

There was a long pause, and then Rossi’s voice came again. “Thanks, Ben. That’ll do.”

“So get me out of here already.”

“Ann will have you out in a minute.” The jackhammering stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and the silence was an enormous relief. My ears felt thick. I heard voices again, distantly: the lab techs, surely.

“All set, Mr. Ellison,” came Ann’s voice as she pulled the platform back. “I hope to God he’s all right.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I said, we’re all set.” She reached down and unstrapped the head guard, then undid the Velcro restraints at my ankles and thighs.

“I’m all right,” I said. “Except for my hearing, which I imagine will recover in a couple of days.”

Ann gave me a penetrating look, furrowed her brow, and then said, “You’ll be fine.” She helped me off the platform.

“That wasn’t so bad,” she said as I got to my feet, adding angrily, “Didn’t work didn’t work.”

“What didn’t work?”

She looked at me, puzzled again. She hesitated a moment, then said, “Everything went fine.” I followed her to the outside room, where Rossi stood, his hands in the pockets of his suit coat, in a relaxed stance.

“Thanks, Ben,” he said. “Well, you’re all clear. No surprise. The computer-enhanced images-the snapshots of your brain-wave activity, in effect-indicate you were being entirely truthful, except when I asked you to lie.”

Rossi then turned around to pick up a sheaf of files. I approached to retrieve my belongings, and heard him mutter something about Truslow.

“What about Truslow?” I asked.

He turned around, smiling pleasantly. “What do you mean?”

“Were you talking to me?” I asked.

He stared at me for a full five seconds. Shook his head. His eyes stared coldly.

“Forget it,” I said, but of course I’d heard him. We’d been standing no more than three feet apart; there was no way I could have misheard him. Something about Truslow. Baffling. Perhaps he didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud.

I turned my attention to the array of belongings on the table next to us, the watch and belt and coins and so on, and Rossi said again, as clearly as the last time, “Is it possible?”

I look at him and said nothing.

“Did it work?” came Rossi’s voice again, somewhat indistinct, a little distant, but-

– and this time I was quite certain-

– his mouth had not moved.

He had not spoken a word. The realization sank in, and I felt my insides turn to ice.