The Moscow Club

1

The Adirondack Mountains, New York

The first hundred feet or so had been easy, a series of blocky ledges rising gently, rough-hewn and mossy. But then the final fifty feet rose almost straight up, a smooth rock face with a long vertical crack undulating through it. Charles Stone rested for a long moment at a flat ledge. He exhaled and inhaled slowly, with a measured cadence, glancing up at the summit from time to time, shielding his eyes from the dazzling light.

Rarely was a climb as perfect as this: that trancelike serenity as he pulled and pushed with his hands and feet, laybacking up the tiered rock, the pain of physical exertion overwhelmed by the sensation of unbounded freedom, the razor-sharp concentration. And – only other climbers wouldn’t consider it corny – the feeling of communion with nature.

He was in his late thirties, tall and rangy, with a prominent jaw and a straight nose, his dark curly hair mostly obscured by a bright knitted wool cap. His normally olive-complexioned face was ruddy from the chill autumn air.

Stone knew that solo climbing was risky. But without the carabiners and the rope and the pitons and the chock-stones and all the customary apparatus of protection, climbing was something else altogether, closer to nature and somehow more true. It was just you and the mountain, and you had no choice but to concentrate utterly or you could get hurt, or worse. Above all, there was no opportunity to think about work, which was what Stone found most refreshing. Luckily, he was so valued that his employers permitted him (though reluctantly) to climb virtually whenever he wanted. He knew he’d never be another Reinhold Messner, the master climber who had solo-climbed Mount Everest without oxygen. Yet there were times, and this was one of them, when that didn’t matter, so much did he feel a part of the mountain.

He kicked absently at a scree pile. Up here, above the tree line, where only shrubs grew out of the inhospitable gray granite, the wind was cold and biting. His hands had grown numb; he had to blow on them to keep them warm. His throat was raw, and his lungs ached from the frigid air.

He struggled to his feet, moved to the crack, and saw that its width varied from about an inch or so to half an inch. The rock face, up close, looked more perilous than he’d expected: a vertical rise with little to hold on to. He wedged his hands into the crack and, fitting his climbing shoes into toeholds in the smooth rock, he hoisted himself up.

He grabbed onto a cling hold, pulled himself up again, and managed to wedge his hands into the crack. Finger-jamming now, he edged up slowly, inch by inch, feeling the rhythm and knowing he could continue climbing this way clear to the top.

And then, for a brief instant, his reverie was interrupted by a sound, an electronic bleat he could not place. Someone seemed to be calling his name, which was impossible, of course, since he was up here completely by himself, but–

–then it came again, quite definitely his name, electronically amplified, and then he heard the unmistakable racket of helicopter blades crescendoing, and it came again: “Charlie!”

“Shit,” he muttered to himself, looking up.

There it was: a white-and-orange JetRanger 206B helicopter hovering just above the summit, coming in for a landing.

“Charlie, Mama wants you back home.” The pilot was speaking through an electric bullhorn, audible even over the deafening roar of the helicopter.

“Great timing,” Stone muttered again as he resumed finger-jamming his way up the crack. “Some fucking sense of humor.”

Twenty more feet: they could just goddamn wait. So much for his day of climbing in the Adirondacks.

When, several minutes later, he reached the top. Stone bounded over to the helicopter, ducking slightly as he passed under the blades.

“Sorry, Charlie,” the pilot shouted over the din.

Stone gave a quick, engaging grin and shook his head as he clambered into the front seat. Immediately he put on the voice-activated headset and said, “Not your fault, Dave.” He strapped himself in.

“I think I just broke about five FAA regulations landing here,” the pilot replied, his voice thin and metallic as the helicopter lifted off the mountaintop. “I don’t think you can even call this an off-site landing. For a while there, I didn’t think I’d make it.”

“Couldn’t ‘Mama’ wait until tonight?” Stone asked plaintively.

“Just following orders, Charlie.”

“How the hell’d they find me out here?”

“I’m just the pilot.”

Stone smiled, amazed as always by the resources of his employers. He sat back, determined at least to enjoy the flight. From here, he calculated, it would be something like an hour to the helipad in Manhattan.

Then he sat upright with a jolt. “Hey, what about my car? It’s parked down there, and–”

“It’s already been taken care of,” the pilot said briskly. “Charlie, it’s something really big.”

Stone leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and smiled with grudging admiration. “Very thorough,” he said aloud to no one in particular.

2

New York

Charlie Stone mounted the steps of the distinguished red brick town-house on a quiet, tree-lined block on the Upper East Side. Although it was nearly afternoon rush hour, it was still sunny, the sensuous amber light of a fall day in New York. He entered the high-ceilinged, marble-floored foyer, and pressed the single door buzzer.

He shifted his weight from foot to foot while they verified his identity by means of the surveillance camera discreetly mounted on the lobby wall. The Foundation’s elaborate security precautions had annoyed Stone until the day he caught sight of the working conditions over at Langley – the cheap gray wall-to-wall carpeting and the endless corridors – and he almost got down on his knees and shouted a hosanna.

The Parnassus Foundation was the name given, by a CIA wag no doubt enamored of Greek mythology, to a clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency charged with the analysis of the Agency’s most closely held intelligence secrets. For a number of reasons, chiefly the belief of one former Director of Central Intelligence that the Agency should not be entirely consolidated in Langley, Virginia, Parnassus was situated in a graceful five-story townhouse on East 66th Street in New York City, a building that had been specially converted to repel any electronic or microwave efforts to eavesdrop.

The program was enormously well funded. It had been set up under William Colby after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the so-called Church Committee hearings of the 1970s) tore the Agency apart. Colby recognized that the CIA needed to attract experts to help synthesize intelligence, which had traditionally been the Agency’s weak spot. Parnassus grew from a few million dollars’ worth of funding under Colby to several hundred million under William Casey and then William Webster. It engaged the services of only some twenty-five brilliant minds, paid them inordinately well, and cleared them for almost the highest level of intelligence. Some of them worked on Peking, some on Latin America, some on NATO.

Stone worked on the Soviet Union. He was a Kremlinologist, which he often considered about as scientific a discipline as reading tea leaves. The head of the program, Saul Ansbach, liked to call Stone a genius, which Charlie privately knew was hyperbolic. He was no genius; he simply loved puzzles, loved putting together scraps of information that didn’t seem to fit and staring at them long enough for a pattern to emerge.

And he was good, no question about it. The way baseball greats have a feeling for the sweet spot of the bat. Stone had an understanding of how the Kremlin worked, which was, after all, the darkest mystery.

It had been Stone who, in 1984, had predicted the rise of a dark-horse candidate in the Politburo named Mikhail S. Gorbachev, when just about everyone in the American intelligence community had his chips on other older and more established candidates. That was Stone’s legendary PAE #121, the initials standing for Parnassus Analytical Estimate; it had gained him great renown – among the four or five who knew his work.

He had once casually suggested, in a footnote to one of his reports, that the President should be physically affectionate with Gorbachev when the two met, as demonstrative as Leonid Brezhnev used to be. Stone felt sure this sort of gesture would win over Gorbachev, who was far more “Western” (and therefore reserved) than his predecessors. And then Stone had watched, gratified, as Reagan threw his arm around Gorbachev in Red Square. Trivial stuff, maybe, but in such small gestures is international diplomacy born.

When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, almost everyone at the Agency was caught by surprise – even Stone. But he had virtually foreseen it, from signals out of Moscow he’d parsed, communications between Gorbachev and the East Germans that the Agency had intercepted. Not much hard data, but a lot of surmise. That prediction sealed his reputation as one of the best the Agency had.

But there was more to it than seat-of-the-pants instinct. It involved pick-and-shovel work, too. All kinds of rumors came out of Moscow; you had to consider the source and weigh each one. And there were little signals, tiny details.

Just yesterday morning, for instance. A Politburo member had given an interview to the French newspaper Le Monde hinting that a particular Party secretary might lose his post, which would mean the rise of another, who was much more hard-line, much more stridently anti-American. Well, Stone had discovered that the Politburo member who’d given the interview had actually been cropped out of a group photograph that ran in Pravda, which meant that a number of his colleagues were gunning for him, which meant that, most likely, the man was just blowing smoke. Stone’s record of accuracy wasn’t perfect, but it was somewhere around ninety percent, and that was damn good. He found his work exhilarating, and he was blessed with an ability to concentrate intensely when he wanted to.

Finally, there was a buzz, and he stepped forward to pull open the inner doors.

By the time he passed through the vestibule’s black-and-white harlequin-tiled floor and walked up the broad staircase, the receptionist was already standing there, waiting for him.

“Back so soon, sweetie?” Connie said with a dry cackle, immediately followed by a loose bronchial cough. She was a bleached blonde in her late forties, a divorcée who dressed, unconvincingly, as if she were twenty-five; who chain-smoked Kool menthols and called each of the men at Parnassus “sweetie.” She looked like the sort of woman you would meet sitting on a bar stool. Hers was not a difficult job: mostly, she sat at her desk and received top-secret courier deliveries from the Agency and talked on the phone with her friends. Yet, paradoxically, she was as discreet as they came, and she oversaw the Foundation’s connections to Langley and the outside world with an iron discipline.

“Can’t stay away,” Stone said without breaking stride.

“Fancy outfit,” Connie said, indicating with a grand sweep of her hand Stone’s dirt-encrusted jeans, stained sweatshirt, and electric-green Scarpa climbing shoes.

“There’s a new dress code, Connie – didn’t they tell you?” he said, proceeding down the long Oriental rug that ran the length of the corridor to Saul Ansbach’s office.

He passed his own office, outside of which sat his secretary, Sherry. She had been born and raised in South Carolina but, having ten years ago spent one summer in London when she was eighteen, she had somehow acquired a reasonable facsimile of a British accent. She looked up and raised her eyebrows inquiringly.

Stone shrugged broadly. “Duty calls,” he said.

“Indeed,” Sherry agreed, sounding like a West End barmaid.

Saul Ansbach, the head of the Parnassus office, was seated behind his large mahogany desk when Stone entered. He stood up quickly and shook Stone’s hand.

“I’m sorry about this, Charlie.” He was a large, beefy man in his early sixties with steel-gray hair cut en brosse and heavy black-framed glasses, the sort of man usually described as rumpled. “You know I wouldn’t call you back if it weren’t important,” Saul said, gesturing to the black wooden rail-backed Notre Dame chair beside his desk.

Ansbach had been a quarterback at Notre Dame, and he had never quite fit in with the proper, careful Ivy League types that once dominated the CIA. Perhaps that was why they had sent him to New York to run Parnassus. Still, as with most CIA men of his generation, his clothes were more Ivy League than the president of Harvard’s: a blue button-down shirt, a rep tie, a dark suit that had to have come from J. Press.

Ansbach’s office was dominated by a marble fireplace almost four feet high. It was suffused by the orange light of the late afternoon, which sifted in through the double-glazed, soundproof windows.

They had met when Stone was in his last year at Yale.

Stone had been taking a seminar in Soviet politics taught by a large brassy woman who had emigrated from Russia after World War II. He was the star of the class; here, studying the very thing that his father had once done for a living, he had found his natural milieu, the first subject in college he really cared about, and he began to shine.

One day after class the teacher asked him whether he’d like to have lunch the next day at Mory’s, the private club on York Street where the professors ate Welsh rarebit and complained about Guggenheim fellowships they hadn’t received. She wanted him to meet a friend of hers. Charlie showed up, uncomfortable in his blue blazer and the Yale Co-op tie that was threatening to strangle him.

Sitting at the small wooden table next to his teacher was a tall crewcut man with thick black glasses. His name was Saul Ansbach, and for much of the lunch Charlie had no idea why they’d invited him. They chatted about Russia and the Soviet leadership and international communism and all that sort of thing, but they weren’t just talking; later he realized that Ansbach, who at first said he worked for the State Department, was actually testing him.

When it came time for coffee. Stone’s teacher excused herself, and then Ansbach tried for the first time to recruit him for an intelligence program about which he remained vague. Ansbach knew that Charlie was the son of the infamous Alfred Stone, who’d been condemned as a traitor in the McCarthy hearings, but he didn’t seem to care. He saw instead a brilliant young man who had demonstrated an extraordinary flair for international politics and Soviet politics in particular. And who was also the godson of the legendary Winthrop Lehman.

Charlie, who considered the CIA vaguely sinister, said no.

Several times before he graduated, Saul Ansbach called, and each time Charlie politely told him no. A few years later, after Stone had embarked upon an illustrious career as a scholar in Soviet politics, teaching at Georgetown, then M.I.T., Saul asked again, and this time Stone finally gave in. Times were different; the CIA seemed far less odious. Intelligence work increasingly appealed to him, and he knew that now, with his reputation, he could have things his way.

He set down his conditions. He’d work when he wanted to (and climb mountains when he wanted); he wanted to work at home in New York and not have to move back to Washington, whose govern-merit buildings and white pedestrian “malls” gave Stone the shudders – to say nothing of dreary old CIA headquarters in Langley. And – since he was giving up the security of academic tenure – they’d pay him very, very well. For work he so enjoyed that he’d do it for free.

You never know, he later thought, how one quick decision can change your life.

Now Saul walked to the heavy mahogany double doors and shut them, emphasizing the gravity of what he was planning to say.

“It better be important,” Stone said with false gruffness, about to observe that being plucked from the mountaintop was a little like being interrupted during sex before you’re finished. But he held his tongue, preferring not to have Saul ask when Charlie had last seen his estranged wife, Charlotte. Charlie didn’t want to think about Charlotte right now.

If you tell yourself, Don’t think about white elephants, you will. The last time he saw her.

She is standing in the hallway. Her bags are packed for Moscow. And her eyes, unforgettable: too much makeup, as if her sense of palette had left her. She’d been crying. Stone is standing next to her, tears in his eyes, too, his arms half outstretched to touch her once more, to change her mind, to kiss her goodbye.

Ah, now you want to kiss me, she says sadly, turning away, a beautiful doll with smudged eyes. Now you want to kiss me.

Saul sank into his own chair, exhaling slowly, and picked up a dark-blue folder from his desk. He waved it and said, “We just got something in from Moscow.”

“More garbage?” Most of the intelligence the CIA receives from the Soviet Union consists of rumor and unsubstantiated gossip; the Agency’s Kremlinologists spend much of their time doing close analysis of information that is publicly available.

Ansbach smiled cryptically. “Put it this way: this file has been seen by exactly three people – the director, a transcriptionist cleared straight to the top, and me. Is that sensitive enough for you?”

Stone nodded appreciatively.

“I realize you don’t know much about how we get the intelligence we do,” Saul said, leaning back in his chair, still holding the file. “I like to keep collection and analysis separate.”

“I understand.”

“But I’m sure you’re aware that since Howard we’ve had hardly any assets inside Russia.” Ansbach was referring to Edward Lee Howard, a CIA Soviet Division case officer who defected to Moscow in 1983, rolling up virtually all the CIA’s human sources in the U.S.S.R. – a devastating blow from which the Agency had never fully recovered.

“We’ve recruited another,” Stone prompted.

“No. One of the few we had left was a driver in the KGB’s Ninth Directorate. Code-named HEDGEHOG. A chauffeur assigned to various members of the Central Committee. We got him early, with steady money, paid in rubles, since hard currency would be too risky.”

“And in return he listened to what was going on in the back seat.”

“We gave him a recorder, actually. He concealed it under the back seat.”

“Clever fellow.”

“Well, he’d been noticing that one of the people he was assigned to had been having an awful lot of late-night meetings outside Moscow with a number of other high-powered people, and his ears pricked up. We got several tapes from him. Unfortunately, the poor shmuck didn’t know how to operate a tape recorder. He kept the volume dial all the way down, so the sound quality is lousy. We’ve been trying to run a voice-print ID on the speakers, but the rumble is too loud. We managed to transcribe most of it, but we have no idea who’s involved, who’s doing the talking.”

“And you want to figure out what’s going on,” Stone concluded. He was looking not at Ansbach but at the framed prints of mallard ducks and botanical oddities that hung on the wall above the wainscoting. He admired Saul’s attempts to make headquarters resemble a baronial estate more than an office. “But, Saul, why me? You’ve got others who can do this.” He crossed his legs and added studiedly: “Who were already in town.”

Ansbach, by way of reply, handed him the blue folder. Stone opened it, frowned, and began reading.

After a few minutes of silence, he looked up. “All right, I see you’ve highlighted the parts you want me to pay attention to. So we’ve got two guys talking here.” He read aloud the yellow-highlighted fragments, skipping as he read, conflating them into one long string.

“ ‘Secure? … The Lenin Testament … Only other copy, Winthrop Lehman has … the old fart got it from Lenin himself … the tin god … can’t do anything to stop it …’ ”

Stone cleared his throat. “This Winthrop Lehman – I assume they’re talking about the Winthrop Lehman.”

“You know another one?” Ansbach asked, spreading his hands with his palms up. “Yeah. Your Winthrop Lehman.”

“No,” Stone said softly. “Now I see why you wanted me.”

Winthrop Lehman, who would become his godfather, had been national-security adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. In 1950 he had hired a brilliant young Harvard historian named Alfred Stone – Charlie’s father – as his assistant. Later, even during Alfred Stone’s disgrace, the so-called Alfred Stone affair, when Senator Joseph McCarthy had successfully branded Alfred Stone a traitor on a trumped-up charge of passing secrets to the Russians, Lehman had stood by him. Lehman, the statesman, aristocrat, and what news magazines had dubbed “philanthropist” (which simply meant he’d been passingly generous with his vast fortune), was now eighty-nine years old. Stone was aware that he would not have been recruited to Parnassus were it not for some behind-the-scenes power-brokering on the part of the enormously influential Lehman.

Saul Ansbach steepled his large, knobby hands and placed the point under his chin as if he were saying a prayer. “You recognize the reference, Charlie?”

“Yes,” Stone replied tonelessly. “The phrase ‘Lenin Testament’ came up during my father’s hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was never explained; it was never mentioned again.” In spite of himself, he found his voice growing steadily louder. “But I’d always assumed–”

“Assumed it was just some mistake, is that it?” Saul asked quietly. “Some glitch, some shoddy piece of research done by some young whippersnapper on the Committee’s staff?”

“No. The ‘Lenin Testament’ that I know about is no mystery. It was a document written by Lenin in his final days, in which, among other things, he warned about Stalin’s getting too powerful. Stalin tried to suppress it, but it came out a few years after Lenin’s death.” He caught Saul’s half-smile. “You don’t think that’s what they’re referring to, do you?”

“Do you?”

“No,” Stone agreed. “But why don’t you have HEDGEHOG find out more?”

“Because he was killed two days ago,” Saul said.

Stone’s eyes widened somewhat; then he shook his head slowly. “Poor guy. KGB got on to him?”

“We assume it was KGB.” He shrugged broadly. “Apparently, the hit was professional. As for how he was blown – well, that’s another troubling thing. We don’t know.”

“So you want me to find out what they meant by ‘Lenin Testament,’ if possible, right? Talk to my father, try to worm the information out of him, maybe? No, Saul. I don’t think I’d like that very much.”

“You know your father was set up. Did you ever ask yourself why?”

“All the time, Saul.”

All the time.

Alfred Stone, professor of twentieth-century American history at Harvard, had once been one of the stars in his field, but that was years ago. Before it had happened. Since then, since 1953, he was a broken man. He had published almost nothing. In recent years, he’d begun to drink too much. He was – it was a cliché, but in this case it was accurate – a husk of his former self.

Once, before Charlie was born, Alfred Stone had been a young, fiery lecturer and a brilliant academic, and in 1950, at the age of thirty-one, he was asked to join the Truman White House. He’d already won a Pulitzer Prize for his study of the United States and the end of the First World War. The president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, had asked him to serve as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but he decided instead to go to Washington. Winthrop Lehman, one of Truman’s assistants, and a holdover from the Roosevelt administration, had heard about this rising star at Harvard and had asked him to the White House, and Alfred Stone had accepted.

He should have gone on to become some sort of minor national celebrity. Instead, he returned to the Harvard campus in 1953 shattered, kept on at Harvard’s sufferance, never again to produce anything of any worth.

Charlie Stone had been ten years old when he first learned about his father’s tortured past.

One day, after school, he found the door to his father’s book-crammed study open and no one inside. He began poking around, exploring, but finding nothing of interest. He was about to give up when he found a large leather-bound scrapbook on his father’s desk. He opened it. His heart started pounding when he realized he had made a discovery, and he pored through the book with guilty pleasure and complete absorption.

It was a collection of clippings from the early 1950s concerning a part of his father’s life he had never heard about before. One article, in Life magazine, was titled “The Strange Case of Alfred Stone.” Another headline, in the New York Daily News, called his father “Red Prof.” Rapt, Charlie went through one yellowed clipping after another, as the mildewy, vanilla smell of the scrapbook enveloped him. Suddenly various bits of overheard conversation came together, things he had heard people say about his father, quick, nasty things, and arguments between his parents in their bedroom. Once someone had painted a large red hammer and sickle on the front of the house. A few times, he remembered rocks being thrown through the kitchen window. Now, finally, it made sense.

And of course his father had returned to his study suddenly and caught him at the scrapbook, whereupon he strode to the desk in a dark fury and snapped it closed.

The following day, his mother, the willowy, dark-haired Margaret Stone, sat Charlie down and gave him a brief, sanitized account of what had happened in 1953. There was a thing called the Un-American Activities Committee, she said, which was once very powerful before you were born. There was a terrible man named Joseph McCarthy who thought America was overrun with communists and who said they were everywhere, even in the White House. Your father was a very prominent man, an adviser to President Truman, and he was caught up in a battle between McCarthy and the President, a battle that the President wasn’t able to fight on all fronts. McCarthy dragged your father before his Committee and accused him of being a communist, a spy for Russia.

Lies, all of it, she told him, but our country was in a very difficult time, and people wanted to believe that our problems could be solved just by rooting out the spies and the communists. Your father was innocent, but there was no way of proving his case, you see, and …

Charlie replied, with the unassailable logic of a ten-year-old, “Why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he fight them? Why?”

“But did you ever ask your father?” Ansbach lifted an earthenware mug from the top of a stack of green-and-white computer printouts and took a swallow of what, Stone felt sure, had to be tepid coffee.

“Maybe once, when I was a kid. It became immediately clear that that was none of my business. You just didn’t ask about that stuff.”

“But as an adult …?” Saul began.

“No, Saul, I haven’t. And I won’t.”

“Look, I feel funny even asking you. Exploiting your relationship with your father, with Winthrop Lehman, for Agency business.” Ansbach removed his black-framed glasses and polished them with a Kleenex he took from a box in one of his desk drawers. When he resumed speaking, he was still hunched over the glasses, polishing busily. “Obviously, if our agent hadn’t been killed I wouldn’t need to ask you, and I know it’s outside the realm of the pure analysis you’re hired to do. But you’re our best hope, and if it weren’t important–”

“No, Saul,” Stone said hotly. He itched to light a cigarette, but he had quit smoking the day Charlotte had left. “Anyway, Saul, I’m no field operative, in case it slipped your mind.”

“Damn it, Charlie, whatever this ‘Lenin Testament’ is all about, it’s clearly a key to why your father was thrown in jail in 1953.” Ansbach wadded up the Kleenex and replaced the glasses on his face. “If you don’t want to do this for the Agency, I should think at least you’d–”

“I wasn’t aware you cared so deeply about the personal lives of your employees, Saul.” The appeal to family: Saul was a master manipulator, and Stone felt a surge of resentment.

Saul hesitated for what seemed an eternity, examining the cluttered heaps atop his desk, running his fingers along the desk’s worn edges.

When he looked at Stone again, he spoke with great deliberateness. His eyes. Stone noticed, were bloodshot; he looked fatigued. “I didn’t show you the last page of the transcript, Charlie. Not because I don’t trust you, obviously …” He took a single sheet of paper that had been face down on the desk in front of him and handed it to Stone.

It was stamped “Eyes Only/Delta,” which meant the need-to-know requirements were so stringent that no more than a handful of people at the very top of the U.S. government would ever be permitted to see it. Stone glanced at it quickly, then read it again, more slowly. His jaw literally dropped in astonishment.

“You see,” Saul said, dragging out his words as if it pained him to speak, “Gorbachev has been in trouble in the Politburo since the day he was named General Secretary. You know that; you’ve warned of that for years.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, massaging them wearily. “Then all this turmoil in Eastern Europe. He’s a man with enemies. And with the summit coming up in a matter of weeks, the President heading for Moscow, I thought it was vital–”

Stone was nodding, his face flushed. “And if we can figure out what this reference to a ‘Lenin Testament’ means, we can determine who’s involved, what their motivations are. …” His voice trailed off; he was lost in thought.

Ansbach was peering at Stone now with a fevered intensity. He asked, almost whispering: “You read it the way I do, too, huh?”

“There’s no other way to read it.” Stone could hear the faint sound of typing from down the hall, which had somehow managed to penetrate the massive doors, and for a long moment he watched the pattern of sunlight and shadow on the wall, a neat geometric grid cast by the slats of the window blinds. “These people – whoever they are – are about to pull off the first coup in the history of the Soviet Union.”

“But nothing inside the Kremlin,” Saul added, shaking his head as if he didn’t want to believe it. “Nothing like that. Something much, much worse. You with me on this?”

“Look, Saul, if that report is accurate,” Stone said, his glance still riveted on the wall, “we’re talking about the fall of a government. Massive bloody chaos. A dangerous upheaval that could plunge the world …” He shifted his gaze back to Saul. “You know, it’s funny,” he said softly. “For years we’ve wondered if this exact thing could ever happen. We’ve speculated about the terrible notion that someday the power that’s now held by the Kremlin could ever be seized by another, much more dangerous clique. We’ve talked and talked about it, so much that you’d think we’d get used to the idea. But now – well, the thought of it scares the hell out of me.”

3

Moscow

The word “dacha,” which means “cottage,” was a laughably modest designation for the palatial three-story stone structure tucked away behind a grove of pines in the town of Zhukovka, eighteen miles west of Moscow. Zhukovka is the enclave of some of the most powerful figures in the Soviet elite, and this particular dacha indeed belonged to one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union.

He and eleven other men sat around a dining table inside, in a low-ceilinged room whose walls were covered with religious icons that gleamed in the amber light. The table was set with Lalique crystal and Limoges china, caviar and toast points, an abundance of fresh baby vegetables, chicken tabaka, and French champagne. To all appearances, it was nothing more than the table of one of Russia’s privileged.

In fact, the room itself was swept regularly for electronic listening devices with a spectrum analyzer, which could monitor any transmissions on any frequency. Several small speakers mounted high on the walls emitted the steady, high-pitched hiss of “pink sound,” sure to foil any devices that had somehow escaped detection. Nothing said within this room would ever be overheard.

The twelve dinner companions, each of whom occupied or had occupied extraordinarily powerful positions in the government – from the top rank of the Central Committee, to the Red Army, to the military-intelligence agency GRU – were the leaders of a small, hand-picked group that called itself by the singularly undramatic name Sekretariat. Informally, sometimes, they called themselves the Moscow Club. They shared a fierce but secret zealotry: an unshakable devotion to the Soviet empire, which was, it seemed, crumbling day by day. And so they all nurtured a hatred of the Kremlin leadership under Gorbachev, and of the fearful direction in which the nation was headed.

At dinner, the conversation was as it always was. They spoke of the decline of the Russian empire, of the unconscionable chaos introduced into Russia by Mikhail Gorbachev. These men, ordinary Moscow bureaucrats of reasonable temperament, collectively incited one another to heights of pique and alarm. It didn’t take much.

The Berlin Wall had been bulldozed. The Warsaw Pact was little more than a name. East Germany was gone. One by one, like a house of cards upset by a puff of breath, the Soviet-ruled, pro-Communist governments of the Soviet-bloc nations were toppling. From Prague to Budapest to Vilnius to Warsaw itself, the lunatics really had taken over the asylum. Citizens were marching, demanding the abolition of Communism. Lenin and Stalin were no doubt spinning in their graves as they witnessed how Mikhail Gorbachev had given away the shop.

And the republics within the Soviet Union were, one after another, pulling out, raising a defiant fist at Soviet rule.

The whole empire, once so strong, a world power forged by Stalin, was disintegrating. It was a nightmare.

One of the Sekretariat’s leading members, an economist named Yefim S. Fomin, had been ousted from the Politburo for his outspoken views, and he was one of the most outspoken tonight. He was a member of the Central Committee in charge of industrial planning, and he spoke with some authority.

“Gorbachev’s economic schemes are disastrous,” he remarked. Fomin was a heavyset man with a thick shock of white hair who had a peculiar knack of speaking almost without moving his lips. “Our economy is falling apart, we can all see that. The Communist Party is no longer in control! The man is destroying our nation from within.”

When dinner was over, the first to speak was the Sekretariat’s coordinator, Colonel Gennadi Ryazanov, a pale, thin man of forty-five in charge of the GRU’s foreign-intelligence section. Ryazanov looked weary; he had been working himself almost nonstop in the last few weeks. He had four children and a wife, all of whom kept asking when he was going to spend some time away from the office. He had a boss at the GRU who knew he wasn’t working especially long hours there and wondered what the hell could be wrong – marital problems, a sick kid? No one but the men in this room and one other – the leader of the Sekretariat, who could not be seen with them – knew what was absorbing so much of his time and nervous energy: the very plans they were discussing tonight.

Ryazanov was a high-strung perfectionist who abhorred mistakes and miscalculations. He had awakened every morning for weeks with an acid stomach. He hadn’t touched his dinner tonight.

Now he spoke extemporaneously, occasionally consulting a sheaf of neatly typed notes, which he placed beside a glass of water. “It is generally accepted in the West – in fact, throughout most of the world – that the Soviet leadership is, to coin a phrase, coup-proof.” He turned up his lips in a small, tight smile. Ryazanov was not a natural speaker, and some of the men in this room, who knew him well, realized he had been working on this presentation for some time. “After all, we’ve now got some democracy here. Our Supreme Soviet routinely vetoes laws that the Kremlin demands. I think that perception will help us.”

He looked around the table to engage everyone’s eyes, paused a moment, and continued, tapping a pencil on his sheaf of notes. There was uncomfortable stirring; he had dilated too long.

“Your point?” the economist Fomin inserted between rigid lips.

“My point,” Ryazanov said, casting him a dyspeptic glance, “is that the reality and the perception do not coincide, and that will help us. I think we all agree that we can no longer wait. Extreme measures are called for. But there’s simply no logic in assassinations any longer. Such an act would create a backlash within the government – would make the Soviet Union even less governable. There are those who will tell us that if you cut off the head the body will die. But the head is not just Gorbachev; it’s all of his supporters within the Politburo, within the leadership. And the death of one man will not silence them. Quite the reverse.”

His pencil rat-a-tatted on his notepad. He was clearly still lobbying the few who weren’t fully convinced. Silently, he wished he could just go home and have supper with his family and play with his youngest, three-year-old Lyosha, who was probably asleep by now anyway. He felt a wash of stomach acid surge up toward his throat, but he continued gamely. “Our plan is difficult, but quite clever. Assassinations rarely work, and ‘accidents’ are rarely believed. But the world does believe, and believe firmly, in the presence of terrorism in all walks of life. Even in Moscow.”

“Is everyone in this room satisfied that there is no possibility any of our intelligence organs – KGB, GRU – will learn of our plans?” The question came from Ivan M. Tsirkov, another Sekretariat plant in the GRU, who was short and round-faced, with small eyes and a high tenor voice. He looked a little like Lenin, but without the beard.

Ryazanov’s eyes widened as he frantically tried to answer, but before he could do so, Igor Kravchenko, the head of Department Eight of the KGB First Directorate, cleared his throat. “There has been a breach of security,” Kravchenko said softly. He was tall and stocky, with an air of great complacency, his eyes calm behind his rimless glasses.

The shocked silence was almost palpable. Ryazanov himself shuddered inwardly.

“You, Comrade Morozov,” the KGB man said, extending a finger toward another of his colleagues, Pyotr L. Morozov of the Central Committee. “One of my people learned that the man who was serving as your driver was in the employ of the CIA.”

“What?” breathed Morozov, a plain-faced man of about fifty. Gentle and blond-haired, Morozov was descended from generations of Russian peasantry, and boasted of it regularly. “But you assured us all the drivers were cleared!”

“The matter has been taken care of,” Kravchenko said implacably. “The man has been executed. But did you discuss anything in front of the man that–”

“No, of course not,” Morozov protested, his thick hands flailing, hands that had never done work more menial than shuffling papers from one desk to another. “When Yefim Semyonovich” – he indicated Fomin the economist, who in response compressed his lips involuntarily – “when we spoke in the car, we closed the compartment. We knew better than to trust anyone outside this room.”

Colonel Ryazanov could feel his face redden with a prickly heat. He contained his anger, because he knew you never gained anything by venting anger. He gesticulated with his pencil and objected as mildly as he could: “Executed! But you can’t interrogate a dead man!”

“Yes,” Kravchenko agreed placidly, “that was a botch.” He used a vulgar Russian expression that referred to a whorehouse. “Our people screwed up. Too eager. But I didn’t want the agent interrogated by anyone at the Lubyanka, and better he was killed than that our existence becomes known. In any case, I am quite satisfied that the Sekretariat remains absolutely secret.”

“And the Americans?” Tsirkov persisted, his voice almost a chirp. “If there is even one leak from the American side, we are all endangered.”

Kravchenko answered. “Our American friends were the ones who notified us that this chauffeur was in their bag. They, after all, have more reason than anyone,” he said solemnly, “to keep their relationship with us an inviolable secret.”

“But what guarantee is there that the plans have not already been breached?” came an angry voice from the far side of the table. It was Morozov.

Kravchenko’s reply was, once again, calm. “That is being taken care of. Even as we speak, it’s being handled superbly. That will not present a problem.”

“Mokriye dela?” asked Tsirkov, using the Russian tradecraft term that means “wet affairs,” or killing.

“Of necessity. Nothing that will be detectable in any way.”

“Then what is the exact nature of the plan? What will happen on Revolution Day?” This came from Mikhail Timofeyev, the blustery, compactly built Red Army commander. “Our forces will be on maximum alert. But on what pretext?”

Colonel Ryazanov sighed nervously, wishing he didn’t have to present the carefully worked-up plan in so abrupt a manner, wishing he hadn’t been interrupted by this disconcerting news, disliking to set things out so plainly, without preface. Slowly and carefully he explained, and the room was absolutely silent. Finally, one voice came from the end of the table. It belonged to the economist Fomin. “That is brilliant,” he said. “Horrifying, but brilliant.”

4

New York

Everything about Stone’s apartment reminded him of his wife, Charlotte. It consisted of eight spacious rooms in a prized old cooperative building on Central Park West, a building whose potentates – a surly co-op board of three attorneys, a once-famous matinee idol, and two sisters who had inherited a fortune and lived in this building almost since time began – took pride in turning applicants away.

Stone had never been sure why he and Charlotte had managed to get past the board’s scrutiny, except maybe that they were a nice, respectable-looking couple, he an esteemed young State Department employee (or so the board believed), she a highly regarded television correspondent, and both of them (thanks to the Parnassus Foundation, though no one knew it) quite well off.

The place had a lot of Victorian detail, but it was obscured by hideous flocked wallpaper and kitchen appliances in Harvest Cold: the previous owner had had money but no taste. Charlotte, while looking for a job, had it entirely redecorated. Now it was plush and comfortable, eclectic and vaguely Edwardian. There was a paneled entrance with a floor of green Italian marble, and a pleasantly crowded sitting room where piles of books sat beside Lord Melbourne and Louis XV chairs. The bedroom was furnished with a Flemish rosewood armoire and a Queen Anne oak chest of drawers she’d spotted at a flea market in western Massachusetts. The kitchen, with its high-gloss black cabinets, bore Charlotte’s unmistakable imprint.

The library had walls of a deep wine color, recessed bookcases that held a complete set of Nabokov first editions, an eighteenth-century Russian traveling desk of ebony and mahogany with ormolu mounts, an immense Agra carpet, and a Regency library armchair with tufted leather seat that had been a gift from Winthrop Lehman. Lehman had been given the chair by Winston Churchill during the war, in gratitude for Lehman’s assistance in the Lend-Lease business; he had given it to Charlie on his wedding day.

Sixteen years of marriage, and then all of a sudden – what was it? a year and a half ago already? – she’d moved out. Since then the apartment had seemed ludicrously empty.

Sometimes, late at night, burying his face in the pillow in the bed they had shared for so long, he could smell her perfume, gardenia-scented, light and erotic, and he would remember the number of nights they had slept together – 5,980 nights; he had figured it out – and for a long time he would stare up at the ceiling.

He still dreamed of her often, which felt unhealthy and vaguely shameful.

There was something about her, an indomitability of spirit mixed with the vulnerability of a child, that Stone had recognized when he had first met her, during senior year in college. She had been sitting at one of the long dark wooden tables in the dining hall, her elbows resting on the overwaxed, uneven surface, holding a book. Everyone around her was talking and laughing, and she was sitting alone, reading, but not with the pensiveness or detachment you often saw in someone sitting apart from a crowd. She seemed to be enjoying her solitude, lost in it.

She was beautiful. Her blond hair was wavy and unruly; crinkly golden waves sprouted from the part at the middle of her head and just touched her shoulders. Her eyes, which were a spectacular hazel-blue, were spaced a little too far apart, beneath a prominent arched brow. Her jaw was strong and jutted a little, especially when she looked at you skeptically, which was often. When she smiled, which was just as often, long deep dimples emerged in brackets around her mouth. When she sat in the sun, her strong nose freckled.

She was in the dining hall, reading a book on Winthrop Lehman. Charlie could not resist interrupting her – with all the subtlety he could summon – “I wouldn’t put much stock in that biography. I know the guy, and he’s far nicer than that writer makes him out to be.” A cheap line, a cheap tactic, and it didn’t work. She looked at him blandly and replied, “That’s interesting,” and went back to reading.

“No, really,” Stone persisted. “He’s my godfather.”

“Hmm,” she said, politely disbelieving, not bothering to look up this time.

“Are you writing something on him?”

She looked up again and smiled. “A political-science paper. I’d rather not hear anything personal about him. I’m writing a critique.”

“What’s your angle?”

“I think his reputation is overblown. I don’t think he’s a great man at all. I think he was a perfectly ordinary diplomat and wheeler-dealer who happened to have a lot of family money and be in the right place at the right time.” She flashed a smile; there was a space between her front teeth. With impeccable timing, she added, “So you say he’s your godfather?”

A few days later, he managed to talk her into going out for pizza. She arrived in her Yale sweats, thereby wordlessly declaring that it was not really a date, just a study break. They bantered, argued. Each of Stone’s confident proclamations she met with an equal and opposite response, as if deliberately trying to provoke – and then she’d soften it all with a wonderful, heart-melting, endearing demi-smile.

Stone, nervous, found his heart racing. He chipped away at the foil label on the cold wet beer bottle with his thumbnail. He was fixating on, of all things, her complexion, which was milky-white with permanently blushing cheeks, the healthy flush most people get walking outside on a frozen winter day, only she had it all the time.

He walked her to the Gothic archway outside her dorm room, and they stood for a long moment, awkwardly. “Well,” he said, “good night.”

Suddenly she seemed as awkward as he, one long leg turned in front of the other in an unconscious ballerina’s stance. Once again the vulnerable little girl. “Good night,” she said, not moving.

“Thanks,” Stone said.

“Yeah, thanks.”

His heart now hammering, Stone asked, “Can I see your room?” and immediately felt foolish.

“My room?” Her eyes wide.

Stone gave an exaggerated shrug, a goofy smile. He couldn’t stand to leave her.

She took a deep breath, and Stone was startled to see her smile shyly and say in a small, hopeful, knowing voice: “Really?”

And then Stone was in over his head. In a haze of anticipation and amorousness, he leaned forward and kissed her. It took a few seconds, but she kissed back, with a passion that surprised and delighted him.

Every other college student listened to Jefferson Airplane or Strawberry Alarm Clock, but Charlotte put on a scratchy old Bessie Smith record, and they danced in the darkness of her cramped bedroom to the insinuating lyrics of “I Need a Little Sugar.”

They made love several times that night. She craned her soft white neck, twisting her head from side to side, eyes closed, back arched. Her lovely florid cheeks glistened with tears and triumph and sweat, and when she began to come she looked right at him, the first time during their lovemaking that she had had the courage to open her eyes, and right then, at the most intimate moment.

Afterward, in the first months, they made love constantly, it seemed, obsessively. They were inseparable; they lost touch with their friends. In the mornings, they would wake up late, too late for breakfast in the dining hall, and they’d lie nude on her narrow bed and drink instant coffee made in an aluminum hot-pot, scrape butter on English muffins unevenly toasted in the toaster oven she kept under her bed, and make love again.

They spent almost all their time in her dorm room, always in sweatpants, which could drop to the floor with a simple tug of the waist cord. Underneath, Charlotte’s blond triangle was always moist, excited by just his glance.

Stone studied her, majored in Charlotte Harper, intent on learning everything about her. He discovered that she was from a small town in Pennsylvania near Iron City, and both her parents worked in a plastics factory. They were second-generation Poles; “Harper” had been changed from something much longer and unpronounceable.

They weren’t poor, but they were always struggling, and they didn’t understand their daughter Charlotte, who insisted on going to college, when her older sister, Martha, was perfectly content to go right to work after high school in the Department of Motor Vehicles, where she met her husband and immediately produced three children. Charlotte had gone to the University of Pittsburgh but then decided in her sophomore year that she wanted to study history. All the professors she hoped to work with were at Yale, and so she transferred.

He couldn’t stand the idea of being away from her. Even the similarity of their names seemed a happy coincidence, a good omen – although she demanded he never call her Charlie.

She was one of the kindest, yet most fiercely independent people Stone had ever met. When he nervously took her to New York to have lunch with Winthrop Lehman at the Century Club – in effect, introducing to his godfather his girlfriend and the woman he planned to marry – she got into an argument with the living legend about American foreign policy – and then later told Charlie that she actually liked the old fart. Lehman, it was clear, was charmed by this lovely, feisty woman. As they left the club, Lehman took her hand and planted a dry, mandarin kiss upon her cheek, something Stone had never seen him do to anyone else.

At graduation, her parents met Charlie’s father. There were long silences at lunch. Her parents, simple people, were intimidated by this Harvard professor. But Charlotte had a way of drawing people into exuberant conversation, making them connect. She took to Alfred Stone instantly, and after maybe half an hour they were laughing and telling jokes, and Charlie sat there watching, amazed. Sometimes Stone felt that Charlotte’s magnetism was like the pull of a planet whose gravity is a hundred times ours.

Leaving the restaurant, Alfred Stone put his arm around his son’s shoulder and muttered, “You’d better marry this girl before someone else does.”

The next night. Stone asked her to marry him. She looked at him with that same you-can’t-possibly-mean-me, little-girl look Stone had first seen under that Gothic archway near her room, and said, “Really?”

They were married three months later, and for years, almost until the very end, neither one could imagine ever being without the other.

Now, as Stone packed a small overnight bag, he found that he could not help thinking of what Saul had told him the day before. He thought about the Alfred Stone affair, and he wondered how something so long past could have anything to do with what was now happening in Moscow. He walked over to the stereo and switched on the radio, which was set to his favorite FM classical station.

A piece by Mendelssohn – the Italian Symphony – was just ending, and then the portentous, gravelly voice of the announcer came on, giving an interminable synopsis of Mendelssohn’s life, then continuing, in annoying detail, about Mendelssohn’s E-flat Octet and how it prefigured the classical themes he would later develop, and how restrained his romanticism was, and how–

Stone snapped the radio off. He zipped up his suitcase and ambled over to the tall windows that looked out onto Central Park West. He watched a young woman walk by with a foolishly manicured poodle, then a couple with matching hooded college sweatshirts. He could not stop thinking about the Alfred Stone affair, and he realized suddenly that he dreaded going to Boston.

Alfred C. Stone, professor emeritus of history at Harvard, lived in a comfortable three-story clapboard house on Hilliard Street in Cambridge. It was the house Charlie had grown up in, and he knew all the odd corners, the places where the floorboards creaked, the doorknobs that didn’t quite turn. And the smells: lemon-oil furniture polish, wood fires, the not unpleasant mustiness of a hundred-year-old house.

The house was in a part of Cambridge where academics lived next to old money, where you never flaunted your wealth and you drove dented old Volvos and Saabs and wood-sided station wagons. The neighborhood was at once proper and Cambridge-informal, far enough from the punks and the riffraff of Harvard Square, but close enough so you could walk in and go to the right bank and shop at the right grocery store and maybe pick up an unstylish shirt at the Andover Shop.

Alfred Stone was seated behind his desk in his study, wearing his customary tweed suit, when Charlie arrived. He had been retired for four years, but he always wore a suit, as if he might suddenly be called upon at any moment to teach an emergency class on the New Deal and the Roots of Postwar Liberalism or some such thing.

He had been a handsome man, before his arrest and imprisonment had turned his life upside down, before he had begun to drink too much. His auburn hair was mostly gray now, and his cheeks were webbed with the fine broken capillaries of a heavy drinker. His horn-rimmed glasses, habitually smudged, had carved deep red ridges on either side of the bridge of his nose.

Beside the desk, in a loose heap on the floor, was Alfred Stone’s labrador retriever, Peary. Charlie had found him in the pound and given him to his father as a birthday present two years before. Peary sleepily raised his head, acknowledging Charlie’s presence with a slow wag of his tail.

“I think he has a real soul,” Alfred Stone said. “I’m convinced of it. Look in his eyes, Charlie.”

Charlie looked. Peary returned the look quizzically, gave another wag, exhaled noisily, and sank slowly to the rug.

“He’s a good influence on you,” Charlie told his father. “Why ‘Peary,’ by the way? I never asked.”

“This dog just loves being outside. So I named him after the polar explorer Robert Peary.”

“Peary’s a great name.”

“You know you’re putting on a little weight?”

“Just a little.” Charlie instinctually pinched his waist. “Too much sitting in front of the computer, and not enough climbing.”

“Maybe that’s it. Also, you quit smoking. Drink?” Alfred Stone got up from his desk and walked over to a small bar he’d arranged on top of a glass-fronted bookcase. He lifted a two-liter bottle of cheap Scotch, the liquor of a serious drinker, and turned to Charlie questioningly.

“Not in the afternoon, Dad.”

“Don’t get moralistic on me.”

“I’m not,” Stone said, although he knew he was doing precisely that. “Alcohol fogs my brain in the afternoon.” He added archly: “I need a clear head to fathom matters of national security.”

“Well, I don’t,” the elder Stone muttered, pouring his drink. “Lord knows, nobody’s asked me to do that in almost forty years. Anything interesting these days?”

Stone knew that his father rarely asked about Parnassus, respecting the super-secrecy, and when he did he expected his son not to answer. Charlie replied with a rumor that was all over Moscow and therefore not at all secret. “I think one of the Politburo members has got a bad heart.”

Alfred Stone returned to his desk chair and leaned back slowly. “They’ve all got bad hearts.”

Charlie grunted as he sank into a leather club chair. He liked the light in his father’s study at this time of day. The sun came in at a slant, casting a warm hue over the highly polished hardwood floor, the ancient Oriental rugs, the brown tufted leather couch, its surface scarred by hairline cracks, where Alfred Stone took his naps.

And the floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases, painted white. The shelves of history books that revealed Alfred Stone’s interests: Robert Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Churchill’s history of English-speaking peoples, Acheson’s Present at the Creation, Truman’s memoirs, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes, Carl Van Doren’s Benjamin Franklin, Walter Lippmann’s A Preface to Morals, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.

The walls were cluttered with framed pictures: a black-framed photograph of the young Alfred Stone, beaming with excitement, with Harry Truman (and autographed “with fond regards”); a photo of Alfred and Margaret Stone with Winthrop Lehman, taken at some formal dinner; a silver-framed picture of Margaret Stone, her hair done up in large Mamie Eisenhower curls, smiling knowingly.

“What?” Alfred Stone asked.

Charlie realized that he had muttered something aloud. The sunlight had shifted now, and it was shining directly in his eyes.

“Nothing,” Charlie said hastily, turning his head. “Listen, when was the last time you saw Winthrop?”

“Winthrop? Oh, it’s been years. I know he’s having some party in a couple of days, a publication party for his memoirs or something. I was invited. Weren’t you?”

Stone remembered the invitation, which he’d filed away, planning not to go because he expected to be up in the Adirondacks. “Yes, I was, come to think of it. Are you going?”

“Probably some very high-toned affair. No, I don’t especially want to, but I wish you would.”

“Maybe I will. I …” He shifted again, then moved the armchair, putting a ripple in the carpet as he did so. “There’s something I want to ask Winthrop about, actually.”

His father was still leaning back absently in his chair. “Aha.”

“I ran across something that I think has to do with, you know, with what happened to you. The McCarthy stuff and all that.”

“Oh?” His father involuntarily hunched his shoulders. A nervous tic began in his eyes, the old tic, which afflicted him whenever he was tense.

“I know you don’t like digging all this up. I realize that. But did you ever hear the phrase ‘Lenin Testament’?”

Alfred Stone stared at his son a beat too long, his face frozen, except for the old tic in his left eye, which was now wildly out of control. His reply, when it came out, was hushed: “What?”

“You’ve heard of it, then.”

The elder Stone removed his glasses and massaged his eyes. After a while, he spoke again, this time much more nonchalantly. “You’re the Russia expert. Didn’t Lenin leave some sort of testament behind, criticizing Stalin and so on?”

“Not that. Some other ‘testament.’ It came up at the McCarthy hearings, didn’t it? Didn’t McCarthy mention something about it?”

Alfred Stone spread his hands, palms up, a dismissive gesture that said, I don’t remember. He replaced his glasses, got up, and went over to the bar. “I got a card from your wife,” he said, pouring some Scotch, straight, into a crystal tumbler.

“Dad …”

“She said she’s coming back to the States on leave, sometime around now.”

He was transparently avoiding the subject, but Charlie knew that his father had always liked Charlotte, that they had always been close, and he replied: “I don’t think she likes Moscow too much, Dad.”

“I trust she’s having a better time of it than I did there.” He spoke gently now: “You want her back, don’t you? But you’re too much of a man to admit it, is that right?”

“I can’t be very specific about why I want to know, but it’s important. Please.”

“Charlie, I’m not interested,” Alfred Stone said, his voice betraying his alarm.

“There was some state secret involved, wasn’t there?”

Alfred Stone shook his head, his eyes wide and glistening. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said angrily.

“Would you mind if I asked Winthrop?”

“Don’t, Charlie,” Alfred said too sharply. Peary, startled, looked up and barked once, warningly.

“Why not?”

“Please, just do me a favor. I don’t want you reminding him of that whole nightmare.”

“I very much doubt he’d mind. He and I’ve talked plenty of times about his role in history, his meeting with Lenin, that kind of thing. I doubt he’d–”

“Charlie, I don’t know how much he stuck his neck out for me in those days. More than anyone knows, I suspect. I don’t know what he had to lie about to save my skin. Please, don’t ask him.” He leaned over and began massaging the loose skin at Peary’s nape. Peary uttered a low, throaty growl of contentment. “There’s a lot I’ve never told you about – this whole thing. About Winthrop, and my situation.” He looked up. Charlie had never seen him so shaken. “I realize you want to … I suppose ‘vindicate’ is the apt word … vindicate me, but I really don’t want you opening that can of worms again. I mean, it – means a lot to me. Genuinely.”

“What do you mean by ‘can of worms’? You’ve seen a reference to this testament, haven’t you?”

After a long pause, Alfred Stone replied, “Yes. Yes, I have.” He didn’t look up as he continued to speak. “Winthrop asked me to go through his personal files at the White House one day for some reason, I forget what. We all had central files and personal files, and these were the personal ones, the ones you can take with you when your White House service is over.”

“You saw something.”

“A mention of it, yes. I remember it catching my eye, because it seemed so peculiar. Something to do with Stalin.”

“With Stalin? Did you ever ask Winthrop?”

“No, and I wish you wouldn’t, either.”

“But for you–”

“Don’t,” he said. His face was even more flushed now; he was visibly disconcerted.

Charlie hesitated a moment. “All right.” No, he thought: he wouldn’t have to ask Lehman a thing. There were the famous Lehman archives, in the subbasement of Lehman’s New York townhouse. Surely the answers would be there.

“You never would have gotten a security clearance without Winthrop, you know that. Because of me–”

“I know.”

“Charlie, did you come to see me expressly to ask about this thing?”

“And to see you.”

“What’s past is past, Charlie.”

Stone nodded contemplatively, not replying, knowing his father was wrong. The past had become the present.

The sun was setting now, and the room had grown suddenly dark. Charlie thought of the young Alfred Stone in the photo with Truman, the excited smile, and then he looked at his father now, and he thought: Whatever’s happening in the Kremlin, I’m in this for you. You’ve always deserved the truth.

Later, even just a few days later, he would desperately wish he had dropped the matter then and there.

5

Washington

Since there weren’t any significant parties in Washington that conflicted that night, Roger Bayliss decided to put in an appearance at the Italian Embassy’s gala. Bayliss, the chief Soviet expert on the National Security Council and an aide to the assistant to the President for national-security affairs, secretly enjoyed donning his white tie and tails and attending these affairs, bantering with the other Washington powers. Publicly he bemoaned having to drag himself there.

Bayliss had reason to be pleased with himself. Not yet forty, he had already carved out an enviable position in the government. He’d been selected by the NSC directly from the prestigious Soviet section of the National Security Agency, the group of one thousand analysts privy to the highest-quality intelligence from the Soviet Union and around the world. A handsome, jut-jawed man, he radiated a gladiatorial self-confidence that turned a lot of people off (but turned a lot of not very bright but very ambitious Washington women on). In the last few years, he had formed alliances with some extraordinarily powerful people, from the director of the CIA to the director of his own alma mater, the NSA – alliances that, he felt sure, would soon push him to the very top.

It was during cocktails that the peculiar incident took place. He had been chatting up a prominent Washington hostess when he happened to collide with a man he recognized as Aleksandr Malarek, the first secretary of the Soviet Embassy, who was talking with the French ambassador.

Although they’d never met, he knew who Malarek was, just as Malarek no doubt knew who he was. Malarek was not a handsome man, but something about his manner – the fluidity of his movements, the well-tailored American suits – made him seem elegant, and disguised the fact that his legs were somewhat too short for his body. He was slender, with a swarthy complexion. Unlike quite a number of Soviet diplomats, Malarek had good teeth. His eyes were brown and, as more than one writer for The Washington Post Style section had observed, seemed sincere. His hair was prematurely gray, actually silver. He was smooth, a witty conversationalist, a charmer, and a favorite at Washington parties.

“Pardon me,” Malarek said, grinning and shaking his head self-deprecatingly. “You’re Roger Bayliss, aren’t you?”

“Aleksandr Malarek,” Bayliss returned, just as jovially, and added wryly: “Nice to bump into you.”

There was the customary minute or two of mindless small talk, and then Malarek said something that disturbed Bayliss for the remainder of the evening.

“I hear you bought a new car,” the Russian said.

He was right – Bayliss had recently invested in a turbo Saab, obsidian-black – but how did Malarek know? Later Bayliss understood.

He left the party an hour and a half later, still faintly puzzled by the strange encounter with Aleksandr Malarek, and walked the two blocks to where his new Saab was parked. He unlocked the driver’s seat and got in, and then he saw it.

Wedged between the passenger seat and the car door was some kind of card. It looked as if it had been slipped into the car from the top of the window.

Bayliss reached over to retrieve it. The card was a postcard of the tacky variety you often see for sale on spinning racks at tourist sites. This one was of Miami Beach, Florida, and it bore no message on it at all, just an address in Washington, D.C.

When Bayliss recognized the address, his heart suddenly began beating very quickly. This was it. At last, after all these decades. This was it.

Gingerly, he placed the card into the breast pocket of his dinner jacket and, actually trembling from excitement, started the car.

6

New York

For over an hour, Stone had been staring at the luminous green computer monitor in his Parnassus office. Anyone watching, unfamiliar with Stone and the kind of work he did, might have reasonably supposed the man had gone into a catatonic trance.

He sat, immobile, in the comfortable old suit he wore to work most days. His office was considerably plainer than Ansbach’s, the furniture purely functional, the bookcases jammed with the standard reference works.

On the screen was a list of the members of the Soviet Politburo. Next to each name was a highly classified synopsis of the man’s medical record. Something was nagging at the back of his mind about the rumor circulating around Moscow, that one of the leaders was in poor health and had been recently treated for a serious heart-related illness in the Kremlin Clinic. The Agency wanted some good, informed speculation as to which one it was and had put it to the brain bank at Parnassus.

A Politburo member was ill. Okay. Which one?

He stretched his long legs, folded his arms, and leaned his head back all the way. After a moment, he sat up and accessed the CIA’s records of each man’s travels in the last three months. The screen went blank for a few seconds, and then a complex chart came up. Stone scanned it for a moment and got to his feet.

Nothing.

Sometimes he thought Kremlinology was like putting a ton of carbon under intense geological pressure: eventually you’d get a diamond, if you waited long enough.

What happens to a Soviet leader when he gets sick? Stone asked himself.

Well, sometimes nothing. He gets sick and he dies. Or he gets sick and he recovers.

But in an unstable political system – and, God knows, the Politburo was unstable these days – sometimes it wasn’t a good thing at all to get sick, to stay away from the Kremlin for very long. Sometimes when the cat’s away the mice will … usurp his power.

The brainstorm – or brain squall, as Stone self-deprecatingly called the aleatory flights of inspiration that had helped him out of many a logjam – came several hours later.

Khrushchev had been overthrown when he chose a bad time to take a vacation on the Black Sea. Gorbachev had almost been ousted in 1987 while on holiday. If you happen to have the misfortune to be one of the Kremlin’s rulers and you want to hold on to your power, the rule of thumb is: Don’t take vacations. And don’t get sick.

Whoever was ill might well have lost some modicum of power. And power in the Kremlin is measured, in part, by the number of your cronies you can drag up the hierarchy with you.

Stone keyed in a code to access a roster of recent promotions and demotions within the Soviet bureaucracy. The list, when it came, scrolled on and on: a lot of action within the Kremlin’s ranks. Not at all like the Brezhnev years, when things were static. Moscow these days was hopping, the leadership constantly in flux.

Then he accessed a program he’d designed himself specifically to spot patterns of hirings, firings, and demotions and the common thread among them. Stone called it KremWare, and regretted that it wouldn’t have much of a sale.

After another hour or so – the software was complicated, after all – he began to see a pattern.

A diamond. Yes.

In the past few weeks, there had been a marked pattern of demotions of officials whose careers had in some way crossed paths with the new head of the KGB, Andrei Pavlichenko. There it was.

A number of ambitious Moscow bureaucrats who thought that by knowing the head of the KGB they would rocket to the top of the heap, suddenly found themselves pushing paper in small, badly heated offices in Omsk or Tomsk.

Unconsciously he reached for a cigarette, remembered for the millionth time that he no longer smoked, and said, “Shit.”

Yes, Pavlichenko was almost certainly the one that was ill. Stone was quite sure of it; the pattern was there. You couldn’t be one hundred percent certain, but the odds were excellent that it was Pavlichenko.

He rewarded himself by reheating a third cup of coffee in the microwave, then stuck his head out of his office door. “Sherry?”

“Yes, Charlie.”

“I’ll have a PAE ready to go out in an hour or so.”

“All right.” She’d have to get it into presentable form, hard copy – the people at Langley didn’t like working with their computers if they didn’t have to. Many of them, especially the old-line types, favored Underwood manual typewriters and Parker fountain pens. Which was of course decidedly ironic, since their daily work relied for the most part on some of the most advanced technology in the world.

“What the hell are you doing in today?” It was Saul. “I thought you’d be out. …” He glanced at Stone’s secretary and gestured toward his office. Charlie followed.

“Did you find me the holy grail?” Saul asked, shutting the door.

“I’m working on it,” Stone said, sitting on the edge of Saul’s desk. “In the meantime,” he continued, “I think I’ve got one nut cracked.” He explained his deduction.

Ansbach’s face lit up in a grin. “Jesus, you’re good.”

Stone gave a slight bow.

“Sounds right,” Saul said. “In fact, I’d be inclined to be more certain about it than you seem to be.”

“Okay, you see the connection to the – the HEDGEHOG report, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Pavlichenko’s losing his grip on power, right? So KGB suffers. Which means diminished party discipline.”

“And?”

“Just a theory, Saul. Pavlichenko is Gorbachev’s man, brought in personally by Gorby – partly so Gorbachev can get a handle on the KGB, partly to guard against any attempts to oust him, since if anyone would have their ears to the ground it’s the boys at Dzerzhinsky Square.” Stone was pacing the room now, as he usually did when he was excited. “The same folks, after all, who helped get Gorby in there in the first place–”

“Right,” Ansbach said, infected by Stone’s enthusiasm. Like most of the Agency’s old guard, he relished the delicious irony of Russia’s most progressive leader’s ever being supported by one of history’s most repressive agencies of control.

“Okay. So” – Stone whirled around and pointed a finger at Ansbach – “if Pavlichenko weren’t in failing health, maybe there wouldn’t be any conspiracy.”

“So how does that help us?” Ansbach asked, shaking his head.

“When was the last time there was a coup in the Soviet Union – after the Bolshevik Revolution, I mean?”

“Never,” Ansbach replied, good-humoredly playing the model schoolboy. “Hasn’t been one.”

“Well, not quite. Sixty-four.” In 1964 Nikita Khrushchev was ousted by a hard-line, neo-Stalinist coalition made up of Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksei Kosygin, and Mikhail Suslov.

“That was hardly a coup,” Ansbach objected. “That was a good old orderly palace revolution.”

“All right. In ‘64 you had dissatisfaction with the chaos Khrushchev was wreaking.”

“Like Gorbachev.”

“So maybe it’s conservative hard-liners.”

“Maybe,” Saul said. “And maybe it’s one of the many nationalities that now openly hate Moscow – the Latvians or the Estonians or the Lithuanians. Or maybe it’s people who are pissed off with the way Gorbachev dismantled the whole fucking Warsaw Pact.”

“Possible.”

“Possible?” Saul shot back, but he was interrupted by the buzz of one of his telephones. He picked it up, listened for a moment, then said, “Jesus Christ. All right, thanks.”

When he put down the receiver, he gave Stone an ominous look. “A bomb went off in Moscow a few minutes ago.”

“A bomb? Where?”

“In the Kremlin, Charlie. Right inside the fucking Kremlin.”

The Nite & Day Restaurant was a small place below street level on East 89th Street, with dark wooden booths and Formica tables, steel napkin-holders, bottles of Heinz ketchup. It had been “discovered” when New York magazine called it the best “retro diner” in the city, an “unpretentious little spot.” Stone, who had been having lunch there for years, considered it a little more akin to a dive, which was why he liked it.

He was having lunch with Lenny Wexler, one of his Parnassus colleagues who worked on Japan, especially the Japanese intelligence services. Wexler was small and bearded, with wire-rim glasses, a hold-over from the sixties who often took time off from the Foundation to drive to Grateful Dead concerts in his van. He was quiet and reflective, undoubtedly brilliant, and had a weakness for endless obscene shaggy-dog jokes, one of which he was just now finishing.

“ ‘I’m keeping an eye out for you, too,’ ” Wexler concluded, and laughed uproariously. Stone, who normally enjoyed Wexler’s jokes but now found himself distracted, laughed politely.

Wexler tucked into his bacon cheeseburger with a side order of macaroni and cheese. He was watching his cholesterol, he had announced as he blithely ordered; three oat-bran muffins every morning, he explained, allowed him to eat whatever he wanted during the day.

“Did I tell you Helen and I have been trying to get pregnant for the last six months?” Wexler asked.

“Tough job,” Stone said, and took a bite of his burger.

“Yeah, well, it takes the fun out of it.”

“I imagine. Go out there and win one for the Gipper,” Stone said as he put down his half-eaten hamburger. He was thinking of Charlotte again, and Wexler sensed that.

“Oh, sorry. Well, you’re better off without her. Anyway, I’ve got a girl for you. She works with my sister.”

Stone smiled tightly. He had always liked Lenny. During the difficult period after Charlotte had moved out, he’d been a steadfast friend, a rock.

“What the hell,” Wexler asked with alarm, “you still thinking you two’re going to get back together, is that it?”

“Possibly. I’d like that.”

“Yeah, well” – Wexler swallowed a large forkful of Day-Glo-yellow macaroni and cheese – “lot of fish in the sea. Guy like you with money and looks,” he managed to say through the macaroni, his words muffled, “don’t sell yourself short.”

“I don’t.”

“So what do you make of this thing about the bomb in the Kremlin?”

“I’m not sure yet.” They usually didn’t talk about work, almost never in public places.

Wexler nodded slowly and went back to the macaroni and cheese. “Did I tell you one of our assets in Tokyo was caught?” he said sotto voce.

“I don’t think so.”

“Oh, yeah. They arrested him, interrogated him. Solitary confinement for three days. They probably got him to spill everything.”

Stone suddenly stopped eating, holding his burger in midair.

HEDGEHOG. The KGB hadn’t arrested HEDGEHOG, or interrogated him, or anything of the sort. They’d killed him.

Why?

Why was HEDGEHOG simply killed?

“Something wrong?” Wexler asked.

“Nothing,” Stone said, his mind spinning. “Hey, how’s the old cholesterol count doing there?”

Wexler looked up, his eyes wide, his mouth full. “Good.”

“That’s nice. Ever try their Boston cream pie here?” Stone asked silkily, a wide grin on his face. “I hear it’s excellent.”

“Really?” Wexler said, glancing over toward the dessert case.

Saul Ansbach leaned back in his chair, waiting for the secure connection to Langley to be completed. Absently, he cleaned his fingernails with an orange stick, thinking. After a minute, his secretary’s voice crackled on the intercom.

“Okay, Mr. Ansbach.”

“Thanks, Lynn.”

He leaned forward, picked up the phone, and listened for the voice of Ted Templeton, the Director of Central Intelligence. The secure connections were free of the usual noise or static, and as a result Templeton sounded eerily close. The DCI’s voice was always confident, a resonant baritone; over the phone it was even more so, almost operatic.

“Saul, good morning.” His What’s up? voice.

“Morning, Ted. Say, what do we have on this bomb in the Kremlin?”

“Not much, unfortunately. The Russians cleaned it up before anyone could get anything. A terrorist, evidently a Soviet citizen, tossed a pipe bomb in the Kremlin Armory. Really did a lot of damage. American girl killed. Some Faberge eggs got scrambled.”

Ansbach gave the half-smile he wore whenever life began to approximate a Kremlinologist’s wildest madcap imaginings. The Kremlin Armory was where the Soviets stored, in proud disdain, all the czarist treasures, crown jewels and whatnot. “The Russians get the guy?”

“The shmucks shot the alleged perp dead,” Templeton said, his ungainly imitation of cop-speak. “Good old Kremlin guards. What’s up, Saul?”

“Listen, we’re a little closer to understanding what that HEDGEHOG thing is all about–”

“Saul, I want this thing to go no further.”

Ansbach furrowed his brow. “In what–”

“We’re dropping it, Saul.”

“What do you mean, ‘dropping it’?”

“NFA, Saul. No further action.”

A few minutes later, after they discussed other matters, Saul hung up the phone, puzzled and alarmed. He took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. He had begun to develop a throbbing headache.

Outside, it was starting to rain.

One of the small privileges of being the godson of Winthrop Lehman was that, when you went to his townhouse, you never had to suffer a New York taxi ride. Lehman’s Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow picked Stone up in the early evening, in front of Stone’s apartment building on Central Park West, to take him to the party.

The rain that had begun that afternoon had become a dark, howling torrent, the sort of downpour that, in New York, with its skyscrapers and concrete canyons, always seems like the end of the world.

The chauffeur, a ruddy-faced red-haired man in a yellow rain slicker, opened the car door for Stone.

Stone smiled as he got in. “You’d think Mr. Lehman could arrange a nicer day than this for his publication party,” he said as he got in.

The chauffeur was not to be outdone. “He knows a lot of people, sir,” he called out, “but I don’t know if he’s got any strings to pull up there.”

Stone chuckled politely.

Once behind the wheel, the chauffeur said nothing; that was the way Lehman preferred it, and Stone did not try to make small talk. Driving through Central Park, the Rolls’s suspension so good that he could scarcely feel the uneven streets below. Stone felt as if he were in another world. The car’s interior was immaculate, its leather aromatic of some kind of oil, the air cool and dry. Outside, the unfortunate pedestrians struggled with ruined umbrellas and gargantuan puddles and powerful gusts of wind.

He sat, absorbed by his thoughts. He recalled Lehman, the rich and distinguished man in his expensive bespoke suits, the skin of his head like speckled parchment stretched tight over his cranium. As a child, an adolescent, even a young man, Charlie had felt somewhat elect because of his family’s connection to Winthrop Lehman. If his family had been besmirched by his father’s jail term, the unfair but unmistakable aura of disrepute that surrounded his father – the whispered allegations that Alfred Stone really was, after all, a spy, once – things were almost put right by their association with Lehman. Almost.

Lehman was the man whose portrait had several times been on the cover of Time magazine, whose photo had hundreds of times been on the front pages of newspapers. He was the man who had gotten Alfred Stone out of jail.

Stone remembered the first time he had met Winthrop Lehman.

It was 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, air-raid shelters, and duck-and-cover. Most of the fourth-graders, marching silently through the halls of the elementary school with the terrifying air-raid-drill siren whooping, believed the bomb might drop at any minute, without warning. Anticommunism was rampant: the sort of grave, vacuous politics at which nine-year-olds excel. Charlie’s mother had just died, a few days earlier; he had suffered the funeral, and the burial at Mount Auburn Cemetery, in silence.

A kid named Jerry Delgado had grabbed him in the cloakroom outside of Mrs. Allman’s chalk-dusty classroom and whispered for the hundredth time a quick, biting insult about Charlie’s father being a commie spy, and Charlie, unable to hold it back any longer, took off after the boy with a brute force he didn’t know he had. A gaggle of nine-year-olds watched, thrilled and fascinated, as Charlie knocked Jerry Delgado to the floor and pummeled him with tightly clenched fists. When Mrs. Allman broke it up, punishing both parties equally by sending them to the principal’s office, Charlie felt a warm, pleasurable glow: being strong was after all so much more effective than being smart.

After school, Charlie returned home to find, parked in the driveway, a long black Chrysler limousine. His first, scared thought was that it was someone official, the police or the FBI, come to tell his father about Jerry Delgado, or maybe it was even Jerry Delgado’s parents.

But it was Winthrop Lehman, the famous Winthrop Lehman, about whom his parents had spoken so often. He and Alfred Stone were in the study talking, and Lehman came out in a dark-blue suit to say hello. The great man shook Charlie’s hand with rapt concentration, as if Charlie were some world leader. Lehman was in town for the day – something to do with giving his collection of Impressionist paintings to the Fogg Art Museum – and after he and Alfred were finished talking, Lehman asked Charlie if he wanted to go for a walk. Charlie shrugged and said sure.

They walked into the square, had ice cream at Bailey’s, and then walked around the Fogg. Charlie had never been inside, wasn’t much interested in painting, but Lehman pointed his favorites out, telling him about van Gogh and Monet. Lehman noticed a scrape down Charlie’s face, and he asked what had happened. Charlie told him, not without pride. Finally, Charlie brought himself to ask Lehman: “If my dad didn’t give documents to the Russian government, why did they put him in jail?”

Lehman stopped in the echoey stone courtyard of the museum, leaned over slightly as he placed a large hand on Charlie’s shoulder, and replied: “Your father is a terribly brave man.” He did not explain what that was supposed to mean, and Charlie didn’t pursue it.

Later, intrigued by his godfather, Charlie went to the library and looked up everything he could find on Winthrop Lehman. He learned that Lehman was an heir to a railroad fortune; that he’d survived two wives and had no heirs; that in the early 1920s he had lived in Moscow for several years, doing business with the Russians, as had Armand Hammer and Averell Harriman; that Franklin Roosevelt had asked him to come to Washington and help guide the country through the New Deal and later to arrange Lend-Lease assistance to the Soviet Union during the war; that Harry Truman had asked him to stay on as a national-security adviser. A cover story in Time in 1950 estimated his wealth at over a hundred million dollars; a picture caption described him as “America’s pre-eminent statesman.”

Knowing he was connected, even in a small way, with such a famous and powerful man gave Charlie something certain to cling to, at a time when he didn’t have a whole lot else.

By the time Stone arrived, Lehman’s party was in full swing, if ever a party at Winthrop Lehman’s august townhouse could be said to swing.

A servant took his coat; Charlie stood for a moment before the mirror in the foyer, smoothing the lapels of his charcoal-gray business suit, straightening his tie, running his hand quickly through his hair.

From the other rooms, he could hear the energized babble of cocktail-party conversation, the laughter and the clinking of glasses. A black-and-white-liveried waiter went by, carrying a tray of caviar canapes. Stone smiled: Winthrop Lehman did not skimp. As he entered the main room, he passed a table on which were displayed several copies of Lehman’s memoirs, A Lifetime.

The interior of Lehman’s endless apartment had been built, in the nineteenth century, to resemble an eighteenth-century French château: deep-brown mahogany paneling with elaborately carved pilasters, mammoth fireplaces of black marble, Venetian crystal chandeliers, gold fixtures, sconces, and escutcheons. Empire furniture upholstered in the original beige silk, several large Aubusson rugs. Portraits by Sargent hung on the walls; porcelain Oriental vases mounted in centuries-old ormolu adorned the Baroque giltwood side tables.

The room in which the party seemed to be centered – where Winthrop Lehman sat holding court, in an overstuffed gold-striped wing chair, surrounded by admirers – was the immense library: high cathedral ceilings, oak wainscoting, floors of rich green marble partly covered by sumptuous Kirman rugs; great swags of heavy pale-green silk drapery dominating the tall windows.

Stone spotted a few faces he knew and quite a few more he recognized. The senators from New York and Connecticut were speaking with an elfin real-estate mogul; the Vice-President seemed to be deep in colloquy with the Speaker of the House and the anchorman of a national evening news program.

The crowd was glittery, old New York society consorting with investment bankers, a handful of fashion designers, the heads of Citibank, ITT, and General Motors, a sprinkling of university presidents, the directors of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt (both of which had benefited handsomely from Lehman’s contributions over the years). There were a number of very thin-armed, very rich dowagers, including one society matron who had brought her two miniature Chinese dogs, which snarled and snapped at anyone unfortunate enough to brush by.

“Charlie Stone!”

Stone winced inwardly at the approach of someone he didn’t particularly like, a terminally dull and self-important investment banker he had met once, a few years earlier.

The investment banker, who was holding aloft a glass of wine as if he were Madame Curie displaying her first test tube of curium, clasped Stone’s hand heartily, and began to say something tedious about the International Monetary Fund.

“How’s tricks, Charlie?” he asked solicitously. “Pensions, is that right?”

Very few people even had an inkling of what Stone did for a living. He told anyone who asked that he was a private consultant. No one knows exactly what a consultant does, and most. Stone found, ask no further. He learned, too, that when he gave the plausible-sounding lie, “pension-fund actuarial analyst,” he could see, with great satisfaction, eyes begin to glaze over. At parties, anyone who asked him out of politeness to explain would receive a stultifying explanation that dampened any curiosity, provoked quick desperate smiles and the sudden urge to excuse oneself and get a refill.

Stone said something indeterminate about a new development in the pension funds of a Hartford insurance company.

“Hmph,” the investment banker said. “I suppose anything can seem interesting if you do it for a living, right?” He meant it sincerely.

“Exactly.”

The investment banker took another sip of his wine and began telling a story about the Saint-Emilion he was drinking and how it was the favorite wine of Julius Caesar. Stone, who knew that Lehman never served anything but burgundy, smiled and nodded. No reason to puncture the poor man’s affectations. Stone thought.

Lehman was seated as if on a throne, nodding deliberately in response to something one of the surrounding throng had said. He wore a beautifully tailored dark-gray English suit, but it looked as if it had fit him beautifully decades ago. Now he had shrunk within it.

Lehman’s eyes were a cool, even chilling, gray. They seemed watery, and they were grotesquely magnified by the lenses of his glasses, whose frames were a pale flesh-tone. His nose had once been what was often called aquiline, but now it seemed merely sharp and protruding.

As he spoke. Stone could see the off-white of his too-perfect false teeth.

Suddenly he saw Stone, and he extended a liver-spotted hand. “Charles. How good to see you.”

“Congratulations, Winthrop.”

“My godson, Charles Stone,” he explained to a dowager at his left. “Come closer, Charlie. It’s good to see you.”

“You’re looking well.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Lehman responded lightheartedly, in a reedy voice. He added, with a raised eyebrow: “Your clients are treating you well?”

“Quite well.”

“Your clients are lucky to have you.”

“Thank you.”

Stone came close to asking about the “Lenin Testament,” but he restrained himself.

“Is Alfred here?”

Stone’s attention was momentarily distracted by something he glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, a familiar silhouette.

“Excuse me?” he said, and turned to see a lovely blond woman in a white low-necked dress with high taffeta shoulders, huddled in intense conversation with Saul Ansbach, in the adjoining foyer.

“No, he’s not, Winthrop. Excuse me for a moment, please,” he said, feeling his stomach constrict.

It was Charlotte.

At about that time, roughly 150 miles to the north, a young seminarian at the Russian Orthodox monastery in Maplewood, New York, packed a small valise and got into a car that belonged to the seminary.

After an hour’s drive, he arrived in Saratoga and pulled into the parking lot of the De Witt Clinton Rest Home, a graceful nineteenth-century stone structure, rough-hewn and yet symmetrical, in the architectural style of H. H. Richardson. He found the set of keys secreted exactly as he had been told they would be – magnetically affixed under an iron staircase at the back of the building – and he made his way in.

When he found the correct room, he checked his bag once again. The 5 ml vial of atracurium besylate was there.

The moonlight illuminated a shriveled figure in a wheelchair, an old man who sat dozing. He had no legs.

The seminarian recognized the man immediately. He was named Alden Cushing, once one of the most important industrialists in the country. At one time, he had been the business partner of the industrialist and statesman Winthrop Lehman, going back to Lehman’s years in Moscow. The seminarian had studied the file on Cushing and knew that Cushing’s name was usually paired with Lehman’s in old issues of Fortune magazine from the twenties and thirties. He was often seen in photographs with William Randolph Hearst and John D. Rockefeller the original, playing golf at San Simeon, hunting in West Virginia. The seminarian wondered what could possibly have reduced such an extraordinarily powerful man to such a state, from San Simeon to a small, grimy nursing home in upstate New York, a room that stank of medicines and salves and bad institutional food.

“Mr. Cushing,” he said quietly in English, opening the door and switching on the light.

Cushing awoke gradually and seemed disoriented. He shielded his eyes from the light. “Who …?” he demanded weakly.

“I’m a priest,” the seminarian said. “We have some mutual friends.”

“A priest? What– it’s the middle of the night!”

“Everything is all right. You will be all right.” The seminarian’s gently accented voice had a hypnotic quality to it.

“Leave me–!” Cushing croaked.

“Everything will be all right.”

“I kept my promise to Lehman!” Cushing’s head shook involuntarily. His voice was high and cracked. “I never said a word.” His eyes filled with tears, which gathered at the corners of his eyes and then spilled onto the mottled cheeks in odd rivulets.

Within a few minutes, the seminarian had found out everything he wanted to know. Then he placed a soothing hand on Cushing’s mottled arm, smoothing back the pale-blue cotton pajama sleeve.

“You’re obviously very upset, Mr. Cushing,” he said. “I’ve got something to calm you down a bit.” His voice was soothing.

Cushing’s eyes were large and round with terror.

The seminarian held up a small syringe, which he fastidiously knocked against his hand. “This is to keep any air from getting in your bloodstream,” he explained. He tightened the tourniquet on Cushing’s upper arm, deftly located the vein, swabbed the spot with an alcohol pad, and inserted the hypodermic needle.

Cushing was now looking at him furiously. His mouth worked, opening and closing, but no sound emerged. He could see a slight backwash of his own blood enter the syringe just before the priest injected.

Cushing’s limbs had gotten heavy. He felt his eyes close.

“You’ll be feeling fine very soon,” he could hear the priest saying. What kind of accent was that? Nothing made sense. He wanted to shout, to push him away.

But Cushing could not have replied, or moved, much as he wanted to.

He was completely alert – he could hear every word the intruder spoke, every sound in the room – but he realized with a steadily dawning terror that he could not breathe. Or speak. Or move. Or scream.

A minute later, he began to lose consciousness. Everything darkened, until slowly the room was completely black. Cushing’s body had gone flaccid. Anyone passing by would have thought he had fallen fast asleep.

The atracurium that had been injected into his bloodstream – a muscle relaxant that is metabolized by body temperature and body pH – acted quickly. Within a very short time, it would be entirely metabolized. There would be no trace, and the presumptive cause of death would be cardiorespiratory arrest. Even if Cushing’s body were subjected to a routine pathological examination – which it would not be, because of his age – the metabolite of atracurium would not be detected. If they found the needle mark in his arm, well, he had asked for a sedative the day before. Cushing, everyone knew, was a very high-strung man.

7

New York

Stone approached Charlotte and Saul noiselessly, careful not to be noticed. He wanted to see her, hear her for a moment, without his wife’s knowing he was there.

They were speaking in hushed voices in the dark alcove, Saul shaking his head, Charlotte beaming at him.

She had changed. Her hair was different, shorter, but it was becoming. She had aged a bit, too; you could see it around her eyes, but they were laugh lines, and they suited her. She had lost a little weight. She looked spectacular. If she wanted, she could look un-nervingly like Grace Kelly, and tonight she must have wanted.

Stone realized with a flash of anger that she wasn’t wearing either her diamond engagement ring or her wedding ring. He was embarrassed by the rush of his feelings for her. He considered turning around, not greeting her.

Instead, he watched, and listened, for the moment unobserved.

“But how do you know it’s Russian?” she was saying with a toss of her head.

Saul’s voice, barely audible, came back: “I didn’t say that.”

“But you implied it.”

Saul shrugged. “True, but–”

Charlotte, urgently whispering: “Then, if a bomb went off in the Kremlin–”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“But you’ve just admitted your people are looking into it. Which means I have a story.”

“Come on, Charlotte. Go easy on me. What about journalistic ethics?”

“Ain’t no such thing.”

Stone smiled to himself, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

Saul muttered, “Charlotte, I’ve been with Langley, on the Soviet account, for thirty-five years. Thirty-five years of studying Moscow. Thirty-five years of infighting at Langley. Thirty-five years of never being sure whether what we know about Russia is right.”

“That’s – that’s a hundred and five years, Saul,” Charlotte said, giving Saul’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “You don’t look half that.”

“You’re a doll.”

“Don’t worry, Saul. I won’t use it – yet. Professional courtesy, let’s call it.”

“Thanks, kid. And if I can ever – Well, it looks like you have an admirer.”

Charlotte turned slowly and saw Stone.

Her face registered in a split-second a range of emotions – surprise, love, sadness, a flash of anger – all melding, in barely a second, into a look of defiant poise.

“Hello, Charlie.”

“Hey, Charlotte. I hope you’re not surprised to see me here.”

She paused and smiled wistfully. “I knew you’d be here. Excuse us, Saul.”

Saul, nodding, departed with a broad smile.

They each stood frozen for a long moment, until Charlie slipped one hand around to the small of her back and said, “Need a little sugar?”

He leaned slightly and touched his lips to hers. She responded almost imperceptibly.

“So?” Stone asked.

“So?” she repeated, shy, awkward, the girl on a first date.

“Been here long?”

“You mean the party, or the country?”

“Both.”

“I just got here, to the party. I’ve been in the States four or five days. Visited my parents, and I happened to be in the city yesterday when I heard about Lehman’s–”

“Were you planning to give me a call?” Stone tried to smile, but couldn’t suppress a note of accusation. Several other men nearby were noticing her, the way men always did. One important-looking older man was giving her a lecherous once-over. Stone shot him a menacing, proprietary glare, followed by a swift deflating smile.

Charlotte sighed and looked down. Stone had never seen this dress on her, and he wondered if she’d bought it for the occasion. How many new outfits had she bought in the last year or so, and what were the occasions at which she wore them? “Yes, I was,” she said at last. She flushed and looked up again.

“You want a drink or something?”

“I’ve given up alcohol. And coffee.”

“Coffee? You were the caffeine queen of Central Park West.”

“Yeah, well, no more. I hate instant, and that’s all you get in Moscow. Nescafe.”

“I like your lipstick.”

“Thanks.” She pursed her lips in a burlesque of Marilyn Monroe. “Diane Sawyer recommended it.” She gave a quick, only-kidding laugh. “Do you still smoke? I don’t smell it on you.”

“I gave it up.”

“Really? When?”

“I don’t remember,” Stone lied.

When you left, Stone thought.

Right after their marriage, they moved to New York, where he attended graduate school at Columbia’s Russian Institute and she worked at a series of temporary jobs. They lived in an awful, dark studio apartment in the Village, but they didn’t mind. After he got his Ph.D., he was asked to join the Georgetown faculty, and they moved to Washington – a move neither one relished. Charlie, whose dissertation on power in the Kremlin was widely lauded, gained immediate recognition as one of the finest Soviet scholars of his generation, and Charlotte, none too happy about not really having a career to speak of, found a job doing rewrite at a Washington newspaper.

Then Charlie was lured to a tenured job at M.I.T., in Cambridge, and they moved again. And there Charlotte’s career began to take off. She talked her way into a job at a local Boston TV station, rewriting AP newswire copy, and in a matter of months they offered her the position of “weather girl,” which she turned flatly down. She became a reporter, assigned to the lowliest of stories – Cops & Cadavers, she called them – but she learned fast. She learned how to do “cutaways,” reaction shots during interviews, without nodding, which always looked bad. She learned how to look right into the camera with her direct gaze and project sincerity and strength.

Once in a while, she’d wish aloud that someday she’d have a chance to use the Russian she, too, had learned in college, which was even better than Charlie’s (Stone attributed that to her Polish blood). Someday she would. In the meantime, she became first a good reporter, then a terrific one. But of course, since this was television, it was her poise and her looks that attracted all the attention. In the era of Barbara Walters and Jessica Savitch and Diane Sawyer, stations were searching for female anchors, and Charlotte had not only the looks but the authority. The station asked her to anchor a morning news show – grimly early, from six to six-thirty in the morning, a show called “Boston a.m.”

After a network executive happened to be in Boston for a business meeting and happened to be up early one morning watching the news, he called Charlotte and offered her a network news-reporting job on the spot. In New York.

Which was right around the time that Stone had decided to take up Saul Ansbach’s offer to join Parnassus, to leave the academy for the murky world of intelligence. And so they returned to New York, apparently in triumph.

Stone remembered this as the happiest time of their marriage. Both of them, finally, were doing work they loved. Stone plunged himself into the top-secret Kremlinology with a zeal he hadn’t known he possessed. Charlotte applied to her reporting that bulldog tenacity, fierce intelligence, and warmth that had carried Stone away the first time he met her back at Yale. She propelled herself through the large pool of network general-assignment reporters until she was getting a story on the news almost every night. A rising star.

They settled into the easy, old-shoe routines of marriage. They watched TV together, cooked once in a while, went out with friends. Charlotte began to learn photography; Charlie became a weekend “gearhead,” teaching himself everything about how cars worked, working under the hood of his old BMW 2002 more for relaxation than anything else.

There were squabbles, of course. Things didn’t always go smoothly. The feverish, obsessed passion of the early years had settled into something steadier, richer. Stone’s love for Charlotte had, if anything, deepened. From time to time, they spoke of having kids, but never seriously; or it would be serious for a week and then one or the other would back away from it. That would come, when they were ready. Older parents were better anyway, weren’t they?

And then everything came crashing down.

One day late in 1988, the CIA received reliable indicators that Gorbachev was about to be ousted. There was no time for the Agency to put together a courier package for him, so they flew Stone down to Langley and put him up in a nearby hotel to do an emergency analysis, pore over the files at headquarters. No visitors allowed: Agency rules.

The project went on for weeks. Stone and Charlotte called each other every night. Every night Charlotte would ask when he was coming back; every night Stone would say he didn’t know.

Then Charlotte’s sister, Martha, committed suicide.

Charlie immediately flew to Pennsylvania for the funeral, then went back to New York with Charlotte to comfort her. She didn’t sleep, and hardly cried; she sat in a chair in the bedroom, and stared at a Jane Austen novel without reading it. She seemed inconsolable. After a few days, believing he’d done all he could, he returned to Washington.

That was his mistake. Later he realized he should have stayed on with Charlotte. At first he called her every night, but after a while he was working night and day and he didn’t call but once or twice a week. Perhaps he should have known then how desperate she was for companionship.

He returned to New York at the end of the month to surprise Charlotte.

He did.

She was coming out of their apartment building arm in arm with a man he’d seen before. He was an executive from another network, a pretty-boy in an Armani suit with a flashing, perfect smile, who made TV miniseries or some such thing.

The affair had been going on for two weeks, Stone later learned. He confronted Charlotte wildly, furiously, late that night, after letting himself into their apartment. Then he stormed out, got drunk, and called a woman friend who was divorced, a sensuous, bosomy redhead. They spent the night together.

And the golden bowl had cracked.

The next morning, Stone returned to their apartment, his anger cooled, ready to talk. He was just in time to see Charlotte packing her belongings in boxes and suitcases, sloppily and hastily, weeping all the while. She refused to talk. That afternoon, she moved out to a friend’s vacant apartment, and she refused to take Stone’s calls.

A few weeks later, she returned one more time, to gather a few last things. They didn’t talk about what had happened; there was an air of finality that was terrifying.

She said that the network was sending her to Moscow. Not exactly a widely sought-after position, since it was considered off the traditional career track. But someone at the top of the network had made a decision to “glamorize” coverage of the Soviet Union, and she was certainly glamorous enough.

“I’m taking the job,” she said.

Stone, who knew this was coming, felt his stomach turn inside out, but he didn’t plead with her, and later he wondered whether he should have. “Don’t, Charlotte,” he said. “You’re making a mistake.”

“If we don’t take time off from each other, this marriage won’t survive,” she said.

Charlie went to kiss her, moving slowly, as if through water, and she turned away, spilling tears.

“Ah, now you want to kiss me,” she said cruelly. “Now you want to kiss me.”

For the first time in his life, Charlie, who was never without an apt retort, could think of nothing to say.

Stone held out a hand to Charlotte. “We need to talk,” he said. “Alone.”

“Can’t it wait until after the party?”

“No.” A servant passed by, on her way to the kitchen.

When she was gone. Stone continued. “You remember the story about my father?”

“Which story?”

“The story, Charlotte. The prison, all that.”

“What the hell does that have to do–”

“There’s a document in Winthrop’s personal archives. Down in the subbasement. I think it might explain something about what happened to my father.”

“Charlie, I don’t understand–”

“I need your help. I need you to get us in there.”

Charlotte hesitated, her insatiable curiosity already threatening to overwhelm her. “Winthrop’s your godfather. Why don’t you ask him?”

“I can’t. He’d be suspicious. But you’re a journalist, and Winthrop is a man of considerable ego. You see? Do it for my father, at least. For him.”

“Unfair, Charlie.”

“Winthrop,” Charlotte said to Lehman a few minutes later, placing her small shapely hand atop his large knobby one. “I’m leaving the country tomorrow, but I’m thinking of putting together a television profile on you, your legacy in Russia today.” She watched as Lehman’s vanity took him over. “Charlie’s offered to guide me around.”

Oak wainscoting gave way to plainer oak paneling as the two walked down the narrow corridor. A copper-haired middle-aged woman, probably an employee, passed by and smiled deferentially. The noise of the party grew fainter.

Winthrop Lehman’s archives were located a long walk away, behind a steel door that locked electronically. They comprised some ninety filing cabinets in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment, and in those green steel cabinets were some of the most fascinating documents Stone had ever seen – a veritable inside history of twentieth-century American diplomacy.

He had visited Lehman’s personal archives a few times before, as an undergraduate, when he was working on his senior thesis on the formation of American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union. Stone was one of the very few people ever allowed to see the archives. There was a historian from Stanford whom Lehman permitted to browse, but most scholar-squirrels and packrats, as Lehman called academics, were politely but firmly turned away. Lehman had decreed that the files were not to be opened to the public until after his death, when they would be given to the Library of Congress. Some of the papers would probably not be declassified for years.

“You’re not really leaving the country tomorrow, are you?” Stone asked. They passed a supply closet, then a dumbwaiter that was filled with dirty dishes.

“I am.”

“Christ, Charlotte. What are the terms of this separation, anyway? Complete and utter exile, is that it? We never see each other?” They passed a room that exuded the strong odor of chlorine bleach. He spoke with a quiet, cool anger. “You know I’d visit you in Moscow if the Agency allowed that. But they don’t.”

Charlotte nodded, her face a mask of neutrality. She scratched at her chin.

“Do you want to just throw our marriage away, is that it?” Stone asked.

She didn’t reply. They walked down a creaky set of wooden stairs.

“How’s your love life?” he asked. His voice echoed in the stairwell.

“Uneventful,” she said. Her tone was too airy, too offhanded.

The walls were concrete now; the floor was some kind of hard gray institutional stone. He pulled open a door, held it for her, and saw that her blush had still not gone away.

She said, “I don’t know what you’re–”

“Just tell me, Charlotte. Make it easy.”

“Look, Charlie.” They stopped for a moment in front of a small service elevator. “I’ve seen people. You have, too. But there isn’t anyone now. For one thing, there isn’t any time.”

“Or anyone.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“You’re right,” Stone conceded. “You never had a problem attracting men. So why haven’t you?”

“Did it ever occur to you, Charlie, that I might want to be alone for a while?”

He flashed for an instant on the last vacation he and Charlotte had taken together, before she first went off to Moscow. They flew to Barbados, to a rustic, secluded resort on the rock-strewn east coast of the island, where they drank rum and ate flying fish and made love. He remembered her greedily grinding her pelvis against his for more, just once more. He remembered the wind blowing the front door of their bungalow open so that the Canadian woman who lived next to them, who was sunning herself on the deck a few feet away, could suddenly see into their room, see them making love, and she turned away, hotly embarrassed, scowling; and Charlie and Charlotte, after an instant of mortification, both laughed until they thought they’d be sick.

“What’s our arrangement, anyway?” Stone said, pressing the button to summon the elevator. “When are we going to get back together? Not to put too fine a point on it.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

The elevator arrived with a muted click, and they got in.

“Let me be even clearer.” He wanted to shout, I love you, but he said merely, rationally, “I want us to get back together. We both made stupid mistakes. But that’s the past. We can undo them.”

Charlotte didn’t know how to answer. She turned away from him, staring dumbly at the steel wall of the tiny, close elevator, and she felt a great bloom of feeling, like something physically rising in her, compressing her throat, bringing tears to her eyes. She was glad he couldn’t see her.

But he suddenly grabbed her shoulders and, with an unexpected forcefulness, kissed her. She suffered it at first, warily, as if receiving a vaccination shot.

Her arms stayed at her side; her eyes remained open, alert. “Don’t–” Her protestation was barely audible. Her lips, trembling, barely moved in response. They parted slightly, almost not at all, and then closed tightly, for punctuation. The elevator door opened in front of Lehman’s archives.

The archive room was small, with a low ceiling and a highly polished, tiled floor. Its walls were lined with filing cabinets. The chamber went on for fifty feet or so, its rows of cabinets so close together that the place felt uncomfortably cramped.

At the back of the room, in gloomy darkness, was one row of locked cabinets, which contained the classified material. Stone remembered from years ago that you could not turn on the lights in that area without setting off an alarm somewhere upstairs in the main house. The fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling gave off a bluish glare, their faint buzz the only sound in the chamber’s absolute silence.

“How do you know where to look?” Charlotte asked. She was nervous; they both were. They were poking around areas of the archives where they hadn’t any business, and at any moment someone might come in.

“I remember these drawers are organized by year, and month, and then by subject.”

It was possible, certainly, that Lehman might send a servant after them to make sure things were going all right. To summon them up to the party, perhaps, for a toast. Anything was possible. And if he discovered …

But Stone didn’t want to think about it. He quickly went through the drawers, looking for that slip of paper his father had seen years ago, while just inches away Charlotte sat on a small steel table, next to a dusty old Canon copying machine, her legs dangling. She was keeping watch on the door.

“Won’t Winthrop think it’s odd, you rooting around down here while upstairs the party is in full swing?” she asked tensely, watching Stone open drawer after drawer.

“He thinks it’s you rooting around. Anyway, I think it strikes him as perfectly plausible that someone might want to do a TV retrospective on him. He’s never been a shy man.” A long silence passed, while Stone slid open metal drawers and glanced at the tab indexes.

A half an hour passed, then an hour. “Getting close,” Stone said. He could sense her staring at his back, and turned to confirm it. She was. “You doing okay?”

“I’m okay.” Charlotte seemed pensive. “What are these lights for?” She pointed at a small square panel next to the brushed-steel door, on which were rows of pinpoint lights.

“The alarm system,” Stone replied. “Marjorie used the key to admit us, so the primary system was deactivated.” Marjorie was Lehman’s secretary.

“But why so many lights? I don’t get it.”

“You see those cabinets back there?” He pointed without looking, his left hand moving quickly through the files.

“Where it’s dark?”

“Right. Those two rows back there are alarmed. Marjorie explained it to me once.”

“What’s in them? The locked cabinets, I mean.”

“She said they’re mostly confidential, boring documents – records on Lehman Shipping, legal papers, that sort of thing.”

“Which is why they’re alarmed.”

“I didn’t say I believed her.”

“But if they–”

“Bingo,” Charlie said.

“What?”

“We’re on our way.”

It was a small, yellowed slip of paper, a memorandum on FBI letterhead, dated April 3, 1953, addressed to Lehman, badly typed:

At the bottom of the note was a pencil scrawl: “File to 74.”

Charlotte looked up when she’d finished reading it. “That’s drawer 74, right?”

“Right.”

“Over there.” She pointed at the dark row of locked cabinets.

“That’s it.”

“One of the locked ones.”

“I’m not surprised.”

There was a metallic click.

“What was that?” Stone asked.

Charlotte didn’t reply. Her eyes were wide. She watched Stone as he glanced around the chamber.

“Oh,” he said. “The ventilation system just switched on. That’s all.” The chamber’s silence was now intruded upon by a distinct, almost but not quite subsonic whine, a hum, the white noise of finely calibrated instruments filtering the air, removing the moisture, maintaining it at precisely sixty degrees Fahrenheit.

He reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a small square dark-blue velvet case and a tiny black Mag-Lite flashlight.

“What’s that?”

“Just an old trick I picked up.”

He walked over to the dark end of the archives.

“Can you see what you’re doing over there?” Charlotte asked.

He switched on the Mag-Lite in response. “No sense alerting Lehman’s people. They’ve got their hands full with the party.”

The small bright-yellow circle from the flashlight located cabinet number 74. It was an old-fashioned filing cabinet painted in somber dark green; very likely it dated from the late 1940s or early 1950s.

He inserted the two instruments into the lock. One, the torsion wrench, was about six inches long and was shaped like an elongated L. The other, the feeler pick, resembled a wig pin or a dental probe. He held the torsion wrench at the bottom of the lock to keep the tension and, with the feeler pick, raised each tumbler pin, one by one. He had practiced on other locks, but this one was his first serious attempt, and it was a little more difficult than he’d anticipated. He felt a slight give on the torsion wrench as each pin lined up. Finally, the lock popped out with a satisfying click.

“Charlie, what the hell are you doing?”

“Picking the lock. I had a feeling the good stuff might be locked up.”

“If anyone sees you–”

“Charlotte,” Stone said patiently, “Winthrop Lehman is a very stuffy, very old-fashioned man with some very old-fashioned notions of what state secrets are. For God’s sakes, the stuff in here has got to be decades old. Whatever he did to help my father, whatever behind-the-scenes help he gave, I’m sure he considers the matter a closed chapter. …”

His voice trailed off. For a long time, he was silent.

“Where’d you learn to pick locks, anyway?”

“That detective friend of mine,” Stone murmured, but his mind was elsewhere. “Sawyer.”

“Great,” she said unenthusiastically.

It felt as if a great mass of ice had suddenly welled up in his stomach. All he could hear was the thudding of his heart, the sibilant rush of his breath.

“What is it, Charlie?”

“Oh, Jesus,” he managed to say hoarsely. “Here it is.”

“What?” She got up and walked over to where Stone was standing in darkness, his flashlight beam illuminating a yellowed piece of paper. Looking over his shoulder, she read.

“Oh, Charlie,” she said two minutes later. Her voice shook. “Oh, my God.” She put her arms around his waist and hugged him. “Oh, God, Charlie, I’m sorry.”

“There’s a phone in here, Charlotte,” Stone said tightly. He had to reach his father at once: a brief phone conversation was all that was required, a cryptic exchange that would signify nothing to anyone else. “I need to make a call. I want you to switch on that copying machine and make two sets of copies of each of these pages. I need to make a call.”

In a small rented studio apartment on East 73rd Street, at precisely the same time, a man with a swarthy complexion and dark hair – anyone familiar with the various Soviet nationalities would have noticed the hint of Asiatic in his face – sat monitoring a radio transmission, which was being recorded on a small cassette machine. He listened with the resignedness of one who has been doing a monotonous task for a very long time and resents the monotony; he chain-smoked Marlboros.

The man was far from good-looking. His face was pitted with the tiny deep round scars of childhood smallpox. He looked out the window, which was grimy with the foul city air, and watched the rain on the slick black streets. The neighborhood was a peculiar mix of well-dressed young people and more settled-in older ones; he watched them scurrying. Someone walked by with a giant radio blasting rap music, if you could call that music, and the man was suddenly filled with great irritation.

He worked as a security guard at a Russian-émigré newspaper in lower Manhattan. The job was, of course, largely a fiction – the newspaper had no need of security – but he put in enough time to earn a declarable, if pitiful, income. He was known as Shvartz, which sounded Jewish, although it wasn’t his real name; he had been given the name as well as a false career and family background a few months before he had left the Soviet Union, and even a record – fictional as well – of past anti-Soviet activity.

Shvartz listened to the transmission with little interest. He had been at work since early this morning, nonstop, and after eight hours of this he was close to fed up with what he felt sure was a pointless exercise.

The radio transmission emanated from a telephone in a house a few blocks away. So clear was the signal that it was as if he were listening in on an extension in the same house – which in a sense he was. The system before him was equipped to monitor as many as sixteen telephone lines, but it was now monitoring only three, and each of them came from the same house. Clearly the project was a priority.

He crushed out a cigarette, lit another, and continued listening.

Then the man noticed that a call was being made on the rarely used third line, and from then on he paid very close attention to the conversation.

A man was speaking to a woman.

Frankly, Shvartz had not expected any calls on that line at all. When the decision had been reached a few months ago to place the rich man’s home under telephonic surveillance, the men who took turns sitting in the uncomfortable apartment, listening, knew they were in for a bad time of it, a long dull stretch. An endless, achingly routine assignment.

Placing a bug or a tap on someone’s premises or telephone requires access, at least in some way, to either the home or the telephone lines. Breaking-and-entering the subject’s townhouse had been rejected immediately as too risky: the man was too rich, too well guarded.

So the organization had obtained, by means of an untraceable payoff, a NYNEX phone-company repair van and a set of uniforms and hardhats. The two men designated by the organization located the correct telephone switching box behind 71st Street; one of them opened the fixture and began to test the pairs of wires. He used a piece of equipment familiar to telephone repairmen: a handset with a dialer attached to a miniature computer.

Tapping into each pair of wires, he repeatedly punched in the code, and the computer’s LCD readout displayed the telephone number of the wires he had selected. After a few trials, he had isolated the three desired lines. Across each line he installed a small high-frequency transmitting device, each of which emitted signals up to a thousand feet away. They relied on the same sophisticated, if now common, technology employed in car telephones.

Of course, the tap was detectable, by someone using anti-eavesdropping equipment, or by the telephone company, should it be inclined to investigate, but it was highly unlikely that either event would occur. The rich man had not ordered a sweep of his telephone lines in many years, since the time he stopped working for the government. Careful surveillance had confirmed this. Although, as a matter of habit, there may have been subjects he didn’t speak about openly over the phone, he had no reason to suspect a tap on his line.

Shvartz had no idea what this business was all about. He was never told; that was a necessary precaution. He knew that the operation was carefully concealed from the KGB, the GRU, and every other Soviet intelligence agency.

The long dull stretch was over. The man glanced at the digital readout and copied down the numbers. The call was going to area code 617. Boston area. Interesting. He picked up his own telephone, punched out the number of a local telephone, said a few brief words, and hung up.

He took the last cigarette from the pack, lit it, then rewound the cassette.

The dark-haired man thought for some reason about the crude wood-and-iron rat traps he had designed as a boy, remembered watching with dispassionate curiosity as the rats, who knew nothing except the most primal fear, struggled furiously. You could watch a rat die with, not pleasure exactly, but distance, the same sense of distance you felt watching, from a New York skyscraper, the ant-sized pedestrians.

His job, he now realized with some pleasure, was no longer going to be quite so routine.

The apartment buzzer sounded, and he got up and walked over to the panel by the door and pressed the button. “Yes?”

“A package,” came the voice from downstairs over the speaker.

“Where’s it from?”

“California.”

He pressed another button to open the door downstairs, and then watched through the spyglass. About a minute later, the blond Russian stood before the door. The dark-haired man released, one after another, the three locks that had been specially installed by the organization, and let the Russian in.

The Russian was out of breath; his suit was wet with rain. He had been running.

“So we’ve caught ourselves a fox,” he joked.

We’ve caught ourselves a rat, the dark-haired man thought, as he pulled the cellophane off a fresh pack of Marlboros.

8

“The answering service didn’t know where he was,” Stone said.

Charlotte looked up and said, puzzled, “Doesn’t he always tell them where he is, where he can be reached?”

“It’s unlike him,” he conceded. He picked up the papers and read them again, numb with shock and anger. For some reason, he didn’t want Charlotte to know how deeply this discovery affected him, how it was turning his insides to ice. As he read, his face was impassive.

The file was seven pages long, no more. It consisted of one letter, from an FBI agent to Winthrop Lehman, and one report, filed by this agent – originally, it seemed, for the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Joe McCarthy committee; the witch-hunters, as Alfred Stone always called them.

Suddenly it was clear – almost clear – why Alfred Stone had been imprisoned so many years ago.

“Jesus Christ,” Stone could not help murmuring.

He reread the memorandum several times, still unable to believe what was so clearly there.

In effect, Winthrop Lehman had cooperated with the FBI to put Alfred Stone in jail.

Why?

Because he knew something about an extremely secret intelligence operation, was that it?

Because he had taken this Lenin Testament to a woman in Moscow named Sonya Kunetskaya?

It had always been an item of faith to him that the spy charges leveled against his father were laughably false. But now … was it possible that they were true? Stone had seen countless documents from the McCarthy furor, and this memorandum was archetypal. The stilted language, the undercurrent of ominousness, the shred of substance served up into a banquet of allegation.

But might there be some truth to it?

“The alarm,” Charlotte said. “Let’s get out of here.” She stood so close to him that he could smell the faint traces of her perfume, which was called Fracas. He remembered: he had always been the one to buy it for her. He could feel her warm breath on his neck as she spoke, and wondered if she, too, sensed a sexual charge, even now, at this tense moment.

Stone nodded absently.

He turned next to the photocopy of the “security report” that had been clipped to the memo. It was a three-page, stapled, single-spaced report, also filed by Warren L. Pogue. The original had been encased in a brown-tinged glassine envelope that felt as if it might crumble beneath even the most delicate handling.

This was even more remarkable. It told of a meeting several Americans – among them Winthrop Lehman – had had with none other than Joseph Stalin, in 1952:

“Charlie,” Charlotte said, “did you notice one of the row of alarm lights is flashing?”

“Hmm?” Stone was not listening.

“One of the rows of lights is blinking now. The blue row. It wasn’t flashing before.”

“What?”

“Do you think it’s possible that the drawers themselves are alarmed, too?”

“That’s impossible,” he said suddenly. He glanced away from the file. “I didn’t see any … Unless the floor … Sometimes they put pressure-sensitive plates on the floor.” He groaned.

“I think you set off an alarm, Charlie,” she said. “You’d better get away from that area.”

He glanced up at the flashing blue lights in the alarm panel. She was right; any moment, someone might decide to investigate. He’d explain that it was an accident, that he’d forgotten about the alarmed section.

But Stone could not take his eyes off the document.

“Charlie, can we please get out of here?”

“We’ll be all right, I’m reasonably certain. I want to look further, now–”

Charlotte gave a long anxious sigh. “Your father was set up by Winthrop, wasn’t he?”

Stone didn’t reply.

“Charlie, what’s ‘M-3’?”

He peered into the copying machine’s dusty works for a long while before he answered. “Probably just some routine FBI designation. Nothing terribly interesting.”

But he was lying. He knew that M-3 was a mole, a penetration agent. The “M” series, he knew, was nomenclature from the early 1950s for penetration agents. The fledgling CIA had more code labels prepared than actual moles to be coded: it wasn’t a very successful program.

Apparently, Alfred Stone had come upon evidence of an American mole in Moscow, and someone or some group of people – who? – was or were afraid that he would reveal the secret.

“I don’t follow this,” Charlotte said, tugging at a strand of hair and tucking it behind her ear. “The FBI interrogated everyone who was at this dinner with Stalin and heard Stalin mention something about a Lenin Testament, which probably meant nothing to anyone there – do I have this right? But clearly it was urgent that word of this document not get out, right? Why?”

Stone shrugged and compressed his lips. “I can only guess.” He hesitated a moment. “I want to ask you to do me a favor. I want you to feel free to say no.”

She looked at him, her face open, inquiring.

“This – this Sonya Kunetskaya that the document mentions. Do you think you might be able to–”

“To track her down, see if she’s alive, right?”

“Right. But if you don’t want–”

“I’ll take a stab at it, sure.” She tucked a lock of hair behind her left ear. “But I’m puzzled about something. If Winthrop betrayed your father, sold him out, why did your father put up with it? Why did he take it?”

“Well, I see you two are still down here.” The voice, high and reedy, yet strong for a man who was almost ninety, startled them.

Winthrop Lehman, supported on his left side by a powerful-looking bodyguard, stood in the door of the archives. The light caught his glasses so that they couldn’t see his eyes. The bodyguard, who had a short, neat haircut and the build of a linebacker, glared menacingly.

“Winthrop,” Charlotte began, and got up quickly from the table.

Lehman advanced slowly toward them, aided by the bodyguard. “You know, the party’s long over,” he said. “Everyone’s gone home. I think it was a success, don’t you?” He came closer, his voice echoing metallically. He seemed short of breath. “When Marjorie told me the blue alarm had gone off, I told her I’d go investigate for myself. I knew it wasn’t a burglar; I knew it was just you two. Always good to see people hard at work.”

The documents lay on the table beside the copying machine, in Lehman’s line of vision. But he was an old man, after all, and it was unlikely he would be able to see them.

“I hope you’re planning to say nice things about me, Charlotte,” Lehman said. “What’s that?”

He was looking at the documents. The red stamp on the folder had attracted his attention, the mark that indicated the file was top-secret. He walked closer, the bodyguard helping him along.

“What’s this?”

He waved a hand weakly at the documents, and then bent over slightly to get a look.

“Where did you get this?”

He snatched them up from the table with a suddenness that startled Stone.

“I may have set the alarm off by mistake,” Stone said blandly, hoping to divert the old man, but Lehman cut him off.

The elderly man’s voice trembled with fear – or was it anger? “I never said you could go into the locked drawers!” With a shaking hand he handed the sheaf to his bodyguard. “How dare you invade my private files!”

“You did him in, didn’t you?” said Stone fiercely. “After all these years, I guess I misunderstood your motives. Guilt – is that right?”

Stone quietly slipped the dossier into his back pocket. Lehman had grabbed the photocopies that Charlotte had made while he was on the phone.

“Get out of here,” said Lehman. His voice quavered with anger. “I did everything I could to help your father. What you think you’re doing, breaking into the locked cabinets with the tools of a burglar, I can’t possibly imagine. You have no business … What do you think you’re doing?” Now his voice rose to a shrill, horrifying shout, and Charlotte put her arm, which was shaking, around Stone’s waist.

“Get out of here,” Lehman rasped. “Get out of here! Damn you! Get out of here!”

He clutched on to the bodyguard. “Get them out of here!” he hissed, with the ferocious, white-hot anger of a man with a great deal to hide.

They spent the night together.

She refused to go to their apartment; he went to her hotel. They talked late into the night, sharing a bottle of wine they’d ordered from room service. They wanted to dance, but there wasn’t a radio, so they put the TV on and found one of those endless late-night ads for cheap-imitation polka records, and they danced distractedly to the lousy music and talked, more honestly than they had in years.

“There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t think how stupid I was to do what I did,” Charlotte said. “But I was crazy. I was out of my mind. I needed someone, and you were off in Washington.”

“I understand. I forgive you. Do the same for me.”

“Have you been faithful?”

“No,” Stone admitted. “Have you?”

“No. Whatever ‘faithful’ means.”

“Then we’re even.” He shrugged and turned his palms up. “All right …?”

“All right what?”

He exhaled and shook his head, feigning annoyance to mask his nervousness. “Look, do you want to try again? You know, love among the ruins? Piece it back together?”

Charlotte didn’t know how to answer. She only knew that she’d been changed by what had happened between them, that part of her would never be hurt again because it would never again be accessible. She thought of those sea creatures that scuttle about the ocean floor, naked and vulnerable, until they lodge themselves in a protective shell. Well, she’d grown herself a shell.

Confused now, she was pensive, even tender. Charlie kissed her, first lightly, then with growing passion. Charlotte let him kiss her, let him stroke her breasts, but she felt nothing. Or, more accurately, she wouldn’t allow herself to feel anything. She was immensely attracted to this man, her husband, but some toggle switch inside her had gone off. He was her real love, the man she was convinced she’d love forever, and now she didn’t know if she could trust him or anyone else. All she wanted, even a year and a half later, was to be left alone. Was that so crazy?

She wouldn’t make love with him. Charlie was hurt, confused, but soon they both fell asleep, next to each other in the big hotel bed, their bottoms touching, and she cried softly as he slept beside her.

Very early the next morning, they said goodbye at Kennedy Airport, at the Lufthansa terminal, where she was catching the first flight to Munich. A few days visiting friends there, she said, and then back to the Soviet grindstone.

Both of them were tired, worn out from the night before. There were long, silent pauses in their conversation, which neither one rushed to fill. The terminal bustled around them, its frenetic pace a counterpoint to the slow melancholy they both felt.

“Send my love to your father,” Charlotte said, lifting her green leather carry-on bag to her shoulder.

“Charlotte–”

“Thanks for seeing me off. I should go. They’re announcing my flight.”

“Charlotte, this is crazy–”

But she continued briskly, unable to talk about feelings she didn’t understand. “I’ll try to find that Russian woman for you. That Sonya Kunetskaya.”

“Not for me, Charlotte. For my father.”

“Okay. For your father.” She shook her head slowly, sadly. “You know, we had something wonderful. …”

“Jesus, Charlotte, we still do.”

Now, suddenly, she was sobbing, as if she’d been holding back for hours. Probably she had. Stone put his arms around her, squeezing hard. She nestled her chin in the hollow of his shoulder. He felt her tears, burningly hot, run off against his neck, into his open shirt collar. “Be careful, Charlie, will you?”

“I was going to tell you the same thing.”

The amplified voice announced the last boarding call.

Making his way languidly out of the terminal, Stone passed a bank of telephones, and he stopped short. Impulsively, he picked up one of the handsets, dropped a quarter in the slot, and dialed his father’s number.

Three minutes later, he hung up the phone and began to run for a taxi.

Alfred Stone had been rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital.

9

Moscow

The killing of an American girl within the very walls of the Kremlin shook the Soviet leadership to its core, and an urgent session was called at once.

President Mikhail Gorbachev spoke with quiet anger. His fellow Politburo members were used to his flashes of anger, but even his enemies knew that, when he lowered his voice in this way, he was not to be interrupted.

“A bomb thrown by a Russian,” he said tonelessly. “Who was shot dead on the spot. And therefore cannot be linked to any subversive organization.”

He removed his steel-rimmed glasses. He looked around the table, but there was only silence, furrowed brows, here and there a bemused shake of a head.

“Gentlemen, this incident has attracted the attention of the world. This, on top of everything else. We are perceived as a regime that is spinning out of control.”

The silence was unbroken, tense. Gorbachev waited, then gave an acidulous smirk. “Are we?”

The room in which the small group of men who rule the beleaguered Communist party of the Soviet Union – the Soviet Politburo – meets has rarely been seen by Westerners. In fact, the inner sanctum is disappointingly plain. It is located on the third floor of the Council of Ministers building in the Kremlin, a baroque yellow-fronted structure, topped with green domes, known as the Old Senate Building, built in the late eighteenth century by the Russian architect Matvei Kazakov. One can approach it by means of an ancient elevator, down a parquet hallway carpeted with a pink-and-green runner. The ornate door behind which the Politburo meets is ten feet high.

The room is a long barren rectangle, its walls covered in light-yellow silk, devoid of hangings. The molding and trim are painted with gold leaf. The only clock in the room is located on the conference table, a long highly polished wooden table whose top is covered in green baize. Around this table are fifteen chairs, enough for the entire Politburo and the rare invited guest; against the walls are dozens more chairs for candidate members, ministers, assistants, and others, although today only the full members were present, a portent of the seriousness of the discussion.

Disconcertingly, the chairs around the table have cushions upholstered not in, say, silk damask, but in green vinyl. They had been re-covered during the reign of Brezhnev, who was opposed to anything either too regal or – because he disliked long meetings – too comfortable. But no one wanted to return to the chaotic, arbitrary days of Khrushchev, when Politburo meetings might be called in the Kremlin dining room, or even around some vodka bottles at his dacha.

Contrary to much that has been written, there exist no full transcripts of Politburo meetings. This is a custom that goes back to Lenin’s time – as is the day on which the Politburo invariably meets, Thursday, and the hour, almost always three o’clock in the afternoon. The minutes reflect only what has been decided, which resolutions made, and copies of these resolutions are sent to all Central Committee members in maroon envelopes. Of course, the top-secret resolutions do not circulate.

Soon the Politburo would be entirely phased out, its chief governing duties transferred to a similar, non-Party body known as the Presidential Council. There were those in Moscow who wondered whether members of the present Politburo would sit idly by and watch their power ebb.

The business on the agenda of this particular Politburo meeting was what is known among its members as “yellow-priority,” a designation just short of emergency.

The first to break the silence was one of Gorbachev’s allies, Anatoly Lukyanov, chief of the Central Committee’s General Department. He was to Gorbachev what a White House chief of staff is to an American president.

“If I may suggest something,” Lukyanov said, “I think the problem lies with security.” He did not have to elaborate; he turned to look at Andrei Dmitrovich Pavlichenko, the head of the KGB, who sat several places away. “It is almost unthinkable to me that a KGB chairman who’s doing his job properly wouldn’t know of an underground network of criminals with the resources to accomplish such a thing. For there must be a network.”

Everyone present understood the import of Lukyanov’s charge. Such things had never happened under Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB throughout the 1960s. Even Pavlichenko’s predecessor, Vladimir A. Kryuchkov, had been more vigilant. Terrorism was virtually unheard of in Moscow – and within the Kremlin walls? Unfathomable.

Pavlichenko was, Gorbachev knew, probably the brightest man in the room – but he was far easier to control than his predecessors at KGB, largely because he owed his position and his allegiance entirely to Gorbachev. He was also known to have suffered recent heart trouble, which meant that he was even less of a threat to his colleagues. One could not ignore such human frailties; they had their uses.

To everyone’s surprise, Pavlichenko’s reply was temperate, not at all defensive. “It is, indeed, unthinkable,” he said evenly. “This has been an embarrassment both to me and to my people.” He shrugged and spread his hands, seemingly casual, but tension creased his face. “Ultimately, it is my responsibility, as you all know.”

“Perhaps you could use a medical leave.” The suggestion, put icily, came from Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the foreign minister, a vociferous Gorbachev supporter.

Pavlichenko paused, visibly restraining a less temperate response. He gave a polite smile. Sometimes he thought that every Politburo meeting was like entering the lions’ den. “No,” he said. “The moment my health begins to interfere with the performance of my job, I’ll resign at once. You can be assured of that. We are digging very deep, questioning widely, making whatever arrests are appropriate.” Pavlichenko was now addressing not only the President but the entire conference table. “And I shall not rest until we are all satisfied.”

The KGB chairman knew, as did everyone else in the room, that in a very real sense Gorbachev owed his political survival to KGB. Wouldn’t, in fact, be here without KGB. A lot of people who didn’t think much of KGB called it Gorbachev’s Faustian bargain. But it was true: Gorbachev would have been long gone without either KGB or the army behind him, and the army boys felt queasy about the man, who made no secret of his intention to slash military spending. But the people at KGB, infinitely more cosmopolitan than their military comrades, saw the sense in Gorbachev’s plan, saw that he wasn’t weakening Russia but (in the long run, anyway) strengthening it, and so they stood behind him throughout the turmoil.

Pavlichenko did not have to vocalize what was on everybody’s mind: the delicate negotiations that were about to bring the President of the United States to Moscow for a summit meeting might easily be wrecked by the bomb in the Kremlin Armory – the President could easily, and justifiably, cancel on the grounds of security.

The American President was to arrive in early November to observe Revolution Day, the date of the Bolshevik Revolution. As a bit of propaganda the occasion was unmatched: it legitimated the Bolshevik Revolution, placing it, in the eyes of the West, in the same category as the French and American revolutions. No question the White House hadn’t taken the decision easily, and the President was as aware as anyone that this was an important gift to Gorbachev, more than just a simple reciprocation of Gorbachev’s previous visit to the United States.

There was more.

Two months earlier, the Politburo had voted to convey a private invitation to the American President: to observe, with his wife and the American secretary of state, the anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution. This was an honor the Politburo usually accorded to foreign Communist leaders of the highest rank. Some in the Politburo had opposed the invitation as a form of ideological pollution, but they had nevertheless voted to extend the invitation.

And the President had accepted.

Gorbachev now looked up. His theatrical timing was, as usual, impeccable.

“Well, I received a communication from the President last night. He expressed his regret as well as his firm belief that we were as angered and disturbed at the death of the girl as he was. He also said he looked forward, once again, to meeting with me in Moscow on November 7. And standing with us together on Lenin’s tomb.”

Several of Gorbachev’s supporters smiled at the cleverness with which he had played his hand. The opponents, though similarly impressed, were more reserved.

“The question remains,” came the querulous voice of Yegor K. Ligachev, Gorbachev’s most outspoken opponent, almost shouting, “how was this incident allowed to happen? Who is behind this? Is it true – are we not fully in control? Are there elements that threaten not only the summit but our very existence?”

“We will meet again in a few days–” Gorbachev began, but then he noticed Pavlichenko’s raised index finger. “Yes?”

Pavlichenko spoke softly. “The President may not be fully in control of his own government.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The results of the forensic analysis of the bomb were brought to me this morning,” the KGB chairman continued gravely. “The bomb was no Molotov cocktail. It was not dynamite. It was a C-4 plastique explosive.” He paused for emphasis. “This particular type of plastique is manufactured only in the United States.”

The faces of the men around the table were visibly shocked. There was a long, electric silence.

The President finally raised his eyes from his legal pad. “This meeting is sealed,” he said, meaning that not even closest aides were to be informed of what had just been discussed in the room. Yes, he thought, something is going on. He shook his head slowly; his instincts rarely failed him. Something ominous. He passed a handkerchief over his damp forehead, and rose to call the meeting to a close.

10

Boston

The hall outside Alfred Stone’s hospital room in the coronary-care unit rang with the insistent, irregular beeps of a dozen cardiac monitors, all at different pitches: a discordant, jangled electronic chorus. His room was small and bare, furnished with an intravenous stand, a beige telephone, a television mounted high on the wall opposite his bed, and, directly above the bed, a monitor on which a jagged green line traced his heartbeat across the screen. The ledge beside the plate-glass window was bare as well; it was too soon for it to be cluttered with flowers. The customary hospital smells wafted through the corridors, the vague odors of tomato soup and rubbing alcohol.

Alfred lay asleep on the bed, under a light-blue blanket. He seemed to have aged twenty years: his face was drawn and chalky-white. A clear plastic tube ran from a tank behind him to his nose and up around his ear, carrying humidified oxygen. Three wires, affixed to his chest, were connected to the monitor.

“Your father awoke from a nap yesterday afternoon with heartburn and a crushing pain in his chest,” the nurse explained wearily. She was tall and mannish, somewhere in her fifties, her gray-flecked black hair pulled back into a bun so tight Stone wondered whether it hurt. “He wisely called an ambulance. In the emergency room they determined he’d had a mild heart attack.”

“How soon will he be well enough to go home?” Stone asked. “Tomorrow?”

“I should say not.” She tugged at some loose skin at her jawline. “A few days here at the very least. He’s been admitted for what we call a rule-out MI. That means we’ll be following his blood chemistries, seeing if there are any changes in his EKG, monitoring his blood pressure.”

“Is he on any medications?”

“A beta-blocker called Inderal,” she said brusquely, as if it were none of his business. “All right? Anything else?”

“No, that’s fine. Thank you.”

For a long time, Charlie stared at his father. In sleep he seemed to have shed the cares of the world, his mouth slightly open, his breathing regular.

A few minutes later, Alfred Stone woke up, looked around disorientedly, and smiled when he saw Charlie. “Is that you, Charlie? How was the party?” he asked. He reached over to the night table and retrieved his glasses, then slowly eased them on. “There,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

“Feeling any better?” Stone asked gently.

“A little. Mostly just weak now.”

“It’s a scary thing to go through.” Stone looked at his father penetratingly, wondering what sort of terrible stress could bring on a heart attack all of a sudden.

“The party …?” Alfred Stone began.

“Uneventful.”

“Winthrop,” the elder Stone said, smiling wanly. “That old generous bastard.”

Generous! Stone thought. If you knew … But he said only: “He sends his regards.” There was now no question in his mind that Alfred Stone knew far more about this Lenin document than he was saying.

“Can you ask the Hovanians to take care of Peary? They’ve done it before. They like him.”

“Everyone likes him. Anything I can get you – books, magazines, anything like that?”

“Oh, I’m fine. One of the nurses, that big English one, gave me People magazine. Have you ever seen it? What a fascinating magazine.”

“I read it every week in line at the supermarket.”

“Listen, Charlie,” Alfred Stone said, and halted.

“Yes?”

“Well, I hope you didn’t ask Winthrop about – about that matter you mentioned to me.”

Stone didn’t know how to reply. He had rarely had to lie to his father. The most important thing now was not to upset him. “I didn’t ask him,” he said at last.

“You know, you really took me by surprise. I suppose you could tell.”

Stone nodded.

“I had heard of it. You know, they asked me about it at the hearings.”

Stone, reluctant to press him, nodded again.

“That trip to Russia I took. The one that got me in all that trouble. I’ve always told you I was on official business, a fact-finding mission, a visit to our embassy in Moscow.”

“There was another reason?”

“A favor to Winthrop. Winthrop couldn’t get a visa to Russia.”

“A favor?” Stone asked. The word sounded ominous as he spoke it.

“He was so good to me, Winthrop. Out of hundreds of historians in the country, he selected me to serve in the White House. I could hardly refuse.”

“What did he want you to do?”

“He wanted me to meet with a woman. A real beauty.”

“The woman you were photographed meeting with in the Moscow metro. And what did Lehman want you to do, exactly?”

“Very little. Just meet with her, on the sly, and give her a document he had concealed in a framed photograph of himself. What I mean is, he said it was a photograph, but I’m sure there was something concealed in the frame – why else would he bother? I assumed he wanted to smuggle a message to this woman, and he was unwilling to use the diplomatic pouch, which would mean relying on an American intelligence agent as a conduit. I didn’t think I’d be followed to the rendezvous.”

“Do you think she was a Soviet agent of some sort?”

His father frowned. “No, she wasn’t.”

“How do you know?”

Alfred Stone stared for a long time at the television screen, which was dark. “At first I thought she was a sweetheart of Lehman’s. I thought he was helping her to get out of the country.”

“But now–?”

He shrugged. “You know, Stalin died on March 5, 1953. Maybe a week before that, Winthrop asked me to go. Three days after Stalin’s death, I arrived in Moscow.”

“You think the document was connected in some way with Stalin’s death?”

“In some way, yes. I’m convinced of it,” Alfred Stone said, almost whispering. “But still – I didn’t want Winthrop to be linked to it.”

“You took the Fifth to protect Lehman.”

“He said he’d do what he could to get me the lightest possible sentence.”

“But you took the fall for him.”

Alfred Stone looked around the room helplessly. “I couldn’t betray his trust.” The beeps from the cardiac monitor were coming more quickly now.

Stone felt as if he would burst, wanting to shout. Do you know how he betrayed you?

“I often wish I’d married again,” Alfred Stone said. “Margaret died so young. When you were so young.”

Charlie examined the beige-tiled floor for a few moments, not knowing how to reply, hearing the beeps slow down; and in several minutes, his father had fallen asleep.

For ten minutes, he sat there, thinking, trying to understand why his father had accepted Lehman’s betrayal, wondering how much of the truth Alfred Stone knew.

There was a noise at the door: a doctor examining the vital-signs sheet on the door. He was a pudgy, balding young man in a rumpled shirt and tie, carrying a clipboard.

“Are you Mr. Stone’s son?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dr. Kass. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Sure.”

“Do you have any history of heart disease in your family? Do you know how your father’s parents died?”

“I think his father died after a stroke.”

“Is he taking any medications?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Has he been under any stress lately?”

He’s been under stress for forty years, Stone wanted to reply. “Yes, I think he has.”

The physician strode briskly over to the bed, touched Alfred Stone’s shoulder, and said, “Sorry to wake you. Professor. How are you feeling?”

“Sleepy, if you really want to know,” Alfred Stone said.

“Let me just take a listen to the old ticker,” Dr. Kass said, drawing back the blanket and placing a stethoscope on Alfred Stone’s chest. After a minute, he said, “Sounds okay. Sounds okay.”

“Probably sounds better than it feels,” Alfred Stone said. He looked over to where Charlie was sitting and gave a wry smile. “As soon as you go to sleep, they wake you up. They have an instinct for it.”

A few minutes later, he was fast asleep again. Charlie watched the traffic go by silently, twelve flights below. Quietly, he put his arms into the sleeves of his coat, preparing to leave, but changed his mind. He sat for a long while.

His father’s eyes fluttered open. “You’re still here, Charlie?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I am.”

11

Moscow. Lefortovo Prison

All of the lurid and sexy passages had been torn out of the library’s books by the inmates, even the stodgiest nineteenth-century love scenes. The prisoners were starved for sex; it was all they thought or talked about, and sometimes at night they would have what they called “seances,” when one inmate would read these passages aloud to his cellmates. Or else one of them would recall, embellishing the details as he went along, a racy sexual encounter he had once had. Once, in one cell, they had even put up a photograph of Angela Davis to masturbate by.

In the KGB’s Lefortovo Prison, where the porridge reminded you of burnt mucus, you thought about sex a good deal. Yet, if one were particularly inclined to read – and the conditions gave one a lot of time to do so – the library was excellent, and an inmate could get as many as five books a week, everything from Faulkner to Dickens to Lermontov to Gogol.

Stefan Yakovich Kramer, a twenty-six-year-old ambulance worker, had been in Lefortovo Prison, in central Moscow, for almost four months. He had not been tried yet, but he had been charged with violation of Article 70 of the Criminal Code – anti-Soviet agitation. That meant he had assembled with a crowd of other Jews in front of the OVIR office, which controlled emigration, to protest that they and their relatives and friends weren’t being allowed out of the country.

Sure, there was a lot of talk about the new Russia under Gorbachev. And, indeed, more people were emigrating than in many years. But for every ten who applied to leave, maybe one was allowed to go.

Jews, ethnic Germans, and a few other minorities were officially permitted to leave the country. Yes. The Soviet government had announced to the world that everybody who wanted out was gone. And yet the imprisonment of innocent people continued.

Yes, there was talk about the new Russia, the “glasnost,” and all that. But to Stefan, it was all bald lies.

Stefan, his brother, Avram, and his father, Yakov, had each applied three times, and three times, for the most ludicrous reasons, they had been turned down. Yakov had served in the Red Army during World War II, and now the authorities were maintaining that he knew state secrets, which hadn’t even been true forty years ago. And the gates had slammed shut. And when Stefan and a few dozen of his friends and acquaintances had attempted a pathetic, scraggly demonstration, the secret police had shooed them away. And arrested only him, Stefan Yakovich Kramer.

What made things even worse was that his father had spent time in the gulag, the Stalinist concentration camps, for little more than being a Jew unlucky enough to have been taken prisoner of war by the Nazis. Although Yakov Kramer had managed, by dint of hard work and some clever politicking, to land a job as an editor at a prestigious publishing house, Progress Publishers, that was all in jeopardy now. Even after applying three times to leave the country, he was fortunate enough to be allowed to keep his job – most people were fired from their jobs the instant they applied to emigrate – but now he had been told that if he applied again he would lose the job, in a country without unemployment benefits.

There were people who were content, even happy, in the Soviet Union, but the Kramers were not among them.

Stefan sat on his cot, leaning against the cracked paint of the cement wall, and read aloud to his cellmate, Anatoly Ivanovich Fyodorov. Fyodorov was a rough sort, a tall, gangly, ill-educated guy who enjoyed talking. Stefan liked him. He had managed to pry from Fyodorov his life story. Fyodorov had been a soldier in Afghanistan who’d been disillusioned by the experience, he said, then a machinist in an automobile shop who had been caught for petty black-marketeering – moonlighting as a car mechanic. Fyodorov was his third cellmate in three months; the first two seemed to have been “stoolies,” provocateurs, put in to try to wrest information out of him and incriminate him further. But Fyodorov was different; for weeks, he had little but the most elemental interest in the nature of Stefan’s “crime,” and, if anything, he incriminated himself. Obviously the prison authorities did what they could to provoke the political prisoners, and after a while, if their efforts failed, they gave up. Fyodorov was a little crude, but he was genial, and he loved to hear Stefan read poetry. Stefan read aloud:

“Wretched and abundant. Oppressed and powerful, Weak and mighty, Mother Russia!”

He looked up at the ceiling, around the room at the washbasin and the lavatory pan, and eventually over to Fyodorov, who was smiling.

“Who wrote that?” Fyodorov asked.

“Nekrasov. Who Is Happy in Russia?”

“Ah, that’s brilliant. Read it again.”

Stefan did, and when he was done, Fyodorov said, “The answer, my friend, is no one.”

“Anatoly Ivanovich, I don’t think either one of us is a good judge of happiness.”

A few weeks later, Fyodorov was almost killed in a prison brawl during the evening meal. He was saved by Stefan.

Fyodorov had provoked some petty smuggler, who somehow had gotten himself a knife. The guards were talking among themselves, clear across the room. Stefan suddenly glimpsed the flash of steel and slammed his body against the attacker’s, throwing him off-balance, giving Fyodorov just enough time to get to his feet and subdue the smuggler.

“Thanks,” Fyodorov grunted. “I owe you.”

Once a day, the prisoners were allowed to exercise, walking or running on the prison’s fenced-in roof under the supervision of the guards. Fyodorov normally used the exercise sessions as an opportunity to tell Stefan the things he would be afraid to say aloud in the cell – afraid because the guards were known to listen at the judas holes in the doors.

“Is your brother as naive as you?” Fyodorov asked, somewhat out of breath from the running.

Stefan easily kept up a pace alongside. “Naive? My brother’s clean. He’s smart; he doesn’t get involved in politics. What do you mean, naive?”

“A tree that falls and isn’t heard falling hasn’t fallen,” Fyodorov said. “You can complain and complain until you turn blue, but if no one hears your complaint, it’s as if it hasn’t been uttered. If you want to be allowed out of the country, you have to make your complaint heard.”

“We tried that already,” Stefan said. “You suggest we do it again – gather together in a public place and stick placards up in the air and get thrown back into prison, is that it?” The rage that he had kept bottled up erupted momentarily. “God damn it all, I was thrown in this stinking place for assembling peacefully and asking for my rights under the Soviet constitution.”

“Ah, fuck that. You’re a bunch of trees that haven’t fallen, you understand? The only thing the Soviet government understands is violence. Everyone knows that. You want to be let out, be a troublemaker. What you need to do is to appeal to world public opinion.”

“A letter to the editor of The New York Times, is that what you mean?” Stefan asked bitterly.

“Come on. The Kremlin is terrified of a breakdown of public order. Don’t you understand that?”

They were silent for a moment as they passed a guard, and then resumed the conversation. “You know nothing about bombs, do you?” Fyodorov asked.

“Bombs?”

“I owe you, man.”

“I don’t want to know anything about bombs.”

“Look. You never know what you might want to know someday.”

As they began another lap around the roof, Stefan started to protest, but something held him back, and he listened.

Over the next few weeks, Fyodorov taught Stefan all he knew about the making of bombs, about blasting caps and chemical pencils, dynamite and plastic. Each afternoon exercise period on the prison roof became a tutorial session. Fyodorov lectured, then interrogated, conducting his lessons in a Socratic manner. Fyodorov had done this sort of thing in Afghanistan, he explained.

It was teacher and student, master and apprentice, the car mechanic lecturing the young intellectual ambulance driver. They grew closer. “You’ve saved my life,” Fyodorov once told him, in a rare, fleeting moment of emotion. “They could have put me in with any fucking stoolie. The old guy with the crippled hand. Any of those guys. Instead, they put me in with a literate, intelligent man. Me, a lousy black-market car jockey who got caught, with someone like you. I think they expected us to kill each other.”

“It’s nice to have a captive audience,” Stefan said simply. He could not help liking the guy, someone his father would have dismissed as nyekulturnii, an uncultured boor.

It was not easy to describe the working of unseen mechanical objects, but Fyodorov did his best to describe the shape and appearance of the weapons of terrorism that he had learned to use in Kabul. Naturally mechanical, Fyodorov had figured out how to use the things on his own, he said, and although he had no use for them himself, he would teach anyone who wanted to know. Not many in Russia wanted to know. A few years ago, he said, a bunch of Estonians wanted to set off a bomb in the metro, and he managed to turn up some dynamite and some blasting caps from a source in Odessa – who in turn had gotten the stuff from East Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia – and then he taught the Estonians how to use it. The underground trade in explosives in the Soviet Union was tiny and impossible to penetrate if you weren’t well trusted, but Fyodorov had friends going back a long way.

“Probably you’ll never come across something this sophisticated,”

Fyodorov told him in one of their last sessions on the prison roof. “I haven’t seen a trembler switch in years, but they exist, and if you can find one you’ve got a fine switch for a car bomb.”

“Trembler switch?”

“Or a vibration switch. Motion or vibration can close the switch, completing a circuit, setting off the bomb. It’s a fairly simple apparatus, and not very big. A cylinder not much more than an inch and a half in diameter, about four inches long. There’s a small copper ball inside a small cup. Around the edges of the cup, but not touching, are vertical copper rods that close to form a cage. Motion causes the ball to roll, bridging the gap between the cup and the cage, closing the switch. Can you envision it?”

“Yes,” Stefan said. “For a car bomb, right?”

“Exactly. When you turn the car’s motor on, it vibrates, and that motion can set the bomb off. Simple but ingenious. The best things are simple. There are other, more complicated things. Accelerometers and transducers that convert mechanical energy into electric energy. But I like the simple things.”

Fyodorov told him about even more sophisticated things. “Hypersensitive fuses,” he announced. “Oh, there’s all kinds of stuff. A couple of years ago, the American CIA sabotaged a Middle Eastern terrorist group by giving them explosives with fuses that go off prematurely when they’re jostled a bit. You see, there are lots and lots of tricks. The technology is fascinating.”

A month later – just days before each of them was to be tried – they were released, suddenly and unexpectedly. Each was called out of the cell, brought before a commander, and given the good news. The two of them returned to their cell and waited for the guards to come and escort them out of the prison, and Fyodorov looked at Stefan Yakovich for a long time. “Hey, comrade,” he said. “You got me through these four months. Your stories, your jokes. The Nekrasov and the Gogol. You got me through. And you saved my fucking life. I owe you.”

12

New York

Saul Ansbach’s private club was located in an old gray building on West 46th Street. A brass plaque on its white-painted door read phoenix CLUB. Inside the door, a broad staircase led up to a cloakroom, where dark herringbone topcoats hung beneath a long rack of fedoras: this was the kind of place where members wore hats, while the rest of the world walked around bare-headed. It was, of course, all-male: precisely the sort of place Charlotte found offensive.

They were New York’s Brahmins who, some decades ago, had reluctantly admitted to their ranks gentlemen who, though distinguished partners in the right law firms and presidents of good, quiet banks and corporations, were not old-line New York. Saul had been asked to join when he was a partner in the prestigious law firm of Sheffield & Simpson, during a hiatus from his Agency career. No doubt the Phoenix Club’s members enjoyed having among them a man so powerful in American intelligence.

Ansbach had taken Stone to lunch here every few months or so since the first time in New Haven, when he was trying to recruit Stone for Parnassus; they still met here from time to time, whenever Saul wanted to have a long conversation.

“I’m sorry about your father,” Ansbach said. “He’ll get through it with flying colors, though. He’s a strong man.”

“I hope you’re right,” Stone said. He had just taken a cab in from La Guardia, and he felt peculiar about leaving his father alone in the hospital.

Ansbach put on his reading spectacles, Benjamin Franklin half-glasses, and held the photocopy up about twelve inches away from his eyes. Stone watched him examine the documents. Ansbach’s forehead was creased with tension.

“You’re right,” he said at length. “This ‘M-3’ does refer to a U.S. mole in Moscow. But it’s the first I’ve ever heard of it.”

Stone nodded. A steward cleared away the remains of Ansbach’s prime rib and Stone’s hamburger. “Mr. Ansbach, would you like coffee?” he asked.

Saul nodded. “We both would.” He continued, waving his hands in airy circles as if to push his thoughts along: “You think your father gave this Lenin Testament to a woman in Moscow on behalf of Winthrop.”

“He handed over a document. It may have been the Lenin Testament.”

“So Winthrop used your father to convey something, presumably not merely a framed photograph, to this woman, who then conveyed it to an American mole.”

“A theory. But you’re the boss; what do you think?” Stone wondered fleetingly why Ansbach was sweating even more copiously than usual. The room was not especially warm.

“That must be it,” Ansbach said. He took off his half-glasses and put on his black-framed ones. “Jesus. We had a mole in Moscow I’ve never been informed of. Could that be what this whole thing is all about now? Charlie – the man the FBI interrogated – this Alden Cushing – you recognize the name?”

The steward returned, set down two bone-china cups, and poured coffee in silence.

“Lehman’s business partner from years ago,” Stone said. “He might be someone to talk to, if he’s still around. Saul, what’s the matter? I’ve never seen you like this.”

“Cushing’s dead.” He took a small sip of coffee. His hands were trembling ever so slightly, and he spilled a few drops of coffee on the heavy white linen tablecloth. The drops expanded to large tan circles.

“Well, scratch that idea.”

“No, Charlie. You don’t understand. It was on the AP newswire this morning.”

“This morning? My God!”

Stone shoved his coffee away. “The coincidence isn’t …” He faltered, and began again: “He was at that dinner with Stalin in 1952. Could it be a coincidence that he just died?”

“But what do this mole and the Lenin Testament have to do with each other?” Ansbach said impatiently. “And what the hell does this all have to do with what’s going on in Moscow?”

“Let’s take one thing at a time,” Stone said. “Like the remark Stalin made, to the effect that the esteemed Lenin is made of wax.”

“What are you getting at?” Ansbach examined his fingernails.

“Just this,” Stone said, and, changing his mind, he drew the coffee cup toward himself and took a swallow. “I spent a few minutes on the phone before I left Boston. Doing a little research. You know, it’s entirely possible that Lenin’s body is wax. Apparently the state of the art has gotten so good that a talented restorative artist – not just anyone, I’m saying, but someone really good – can create a replica of a human face so incredible that you couldn’t tell, standing a few feet away, that it’s not the real thing.”

Ansbach drained his coffee cup and signaled the steward for another. “You’re going to connect this to the HEDGEHOG report, I hope.”

Stone continued: “Then there’s the story of Evita.” He closed his eyes to aid his memory. “In 1952 she died, when she was in her early thirties. Cancer. Juan called in an embalming specialist, who knew all the most sophisticated techniques. This fellow had developed a method that used an arterial injection of paraffin and formalin, which prevented dehydration.” He recited: “Alcohol, glycerine, formalin, and thymol. Then he’d immerse a body in a solution of – of nitrocellulose dissolved in trichloroethylene and acetate, to leave a thin plastic-like film on the body.”

“My God, Charlie. This from memory? You’ve got a mind like a god-damned Steinway concert grand, I’d forgotten. Okay, what’s the connection?”

“Juan Peron wanted his beloved Evita to be on permanent display, the way Lenin is in Moscow. He was adamant about this, and even when Evita was on her deathbed they wouldn’t allow her to take any drugs that might counteract the embalming chemicals, make embalming impossible.”

Ansbach glanced at Stone sharply. “Chemicals?”

“Quite a number of drugs can act on the tissues in such a way as to block the infusion of the embalming solutions. They break down the body’s capillary system so that when embalming is attempted it doesn’t work. There’s no osmotic pressure, the embalming fluid doesn’t filter adequately, and the electrolytic balance is thrown off. So the embalming is incomplete and won’t last.”

“These drugs– do they include, for example, poisons?”

“Exactly,” Stone said. “Arsenic, strychnine, any number of poisons can block the process. Other stuff, too. It’s often not easy to embalm a man who’s been poisoned.”

“Jesus,” Ansbach said. “That explains …”

“There are stories – just rumors, you know, but fairly widespread – that Lenin was poisoned. That Stalin had him done away with. I remember reading something about that in Trotsky’s memoirs. I mean, nothing more than unsubstantiated blather. But still.”

Ansbach nodded. “I’ve been hearing that rumor around Langley for decades.”

“Do you know of a book called Face of a Victim? It was published in the fifties by a Russian woman named Elizabeth Lermolo.”

“No.”

“In it, I remember this woman said that, while in an NKVD prison, she met an old man who was Lenin’s personal chef in his last years. On the morning Lenin died, the old guy brought in breakfast, and Lenin signaled that he had something to say – he couldn’t speak, but he slipped the guy a note saying he’d been poisoned.”

“The founder of the Soviet Union …” Ansbach said quietly. “If it’s true – then you’re right. My God. The consequences would be enormous. The embalming of Lenin couldn’t possibly have lasted, because he – the very founder of the Soviet state – was poisoned.” He was silent while the waiter refilled his cup. “That’s the last thing Gorbachev needs made public.” Something was odd, almost automatic, about the way Saul was speaking, as if his mind was elsewhere.

“Saul, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know,” Stone said. “What’s going on?”

Ansbach exhaled noisily. “Just … Just lay off, Charlie. Lay off it.”

“What are you saying?”

“Look, you know as well as I do that this isn’t something purely historical.”

“Obviously. But it still doesn’t explain how this mole M-3 is connected. What are you trying to tell me, Saul?”

“Nothing, Charlie. Just an instinct. A smell. This whole thing has the rotten smell of an intelligence operation gone bad, and I think you’re just lifting up a corner of the rug. I shudder to think what you’ll find if you keep lifting.”

“You’re beginning to sound paranoid, Saul.”

“As my friend Henry Kissinger once said. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not really out to get you.”

“He wasn’t the first to say it, Saul.”

“Look. You know damned well that the Agency has ways of expressing its displeasure. They – we – don’t go in much for legal niceties. They can do more than terminate your contract.”

Stone shook his head slowly, contemplatively. “I’m not really concerned about that,” he said, his voice steely. “I think you know how important this is to me. It’s a question of my father’s reputation. His life.”

“You’re not going to drop this, Charlie, are you?”

“Not until I learn the truth about what happened to my father.”

“Your father was framed, damn it! End of story. The why isn’t important anymore.”

“I notice you haven’t given me any explicit orders. You’re scared about this, and I can’t blame you.”

Ansbach gave him a long, stony glare. “Christ. What do you want, Charlie?”

“There’s an old woman, living today, who actually was a private secretary to Lenin. Emigrated in the twenties, lives under an alias. I came across her name in one of the data banks.”

“I know. I heard about her from Bill Donovan, in my OSS days. So?”

“I want to know her whereabouts. I think it’s a good place to start.”

Ansbach gave another sigh. “I don’t like this at all,” he said, and pushed back his chair.

Several hours later Stone returned to his West Side apartment with photocopies of the dossier he’d taken from Lehman’s archives. He removed his coat and hung it in the hall closet, beside the mountain-climbing equipment he so rarely had a chance to use these days.

He knelt down and ran a hand across the smooth marble floor, feeling for a slight ridge, which he located after a few seconds. Grasping the ridge, which even on close inspection looked like nothing more than a slight defect in the grout between two tiles, he pushed at it. One tile slid open, revealing a small safe. He dialed it open and placed the original dossier in it, alongside a small wad of cash, some papers, and the Smith & Wesson revolver he had used maybe once or twice, only for target practice at a range in Lexington, Massachusetts, years ago. He’d bought his father an identical one.

He closed the safe and slid the tile over it. Then, as he circled the room, saw the flashing ruby light on his answering machine, a winking red eye.

He hit the playback button. One was from a woman he had met at a party and hoped he’d never hear from again. One from his father, calling to thank him for coming by and to say he was feeling better.

And the next two were from Saul Ansbach.

Saul sounded increasingly desperate. His words were at times drowned out by the roar of traffic; clearly he’d made the calls from a street phone. Ordinarily, Saul would have used a secure line.

“Charlie, it’s Saul. I’m at the law firm. Call me as soon as you get in.”

Beep.

Ansbach was still “of counsel” at Sheffield & Simpson, and occasionally he and Charlie would meet there, when Saul was attending a firm meeting and wanted to see an analysis Stone had done.

“It’s Saul. You– listen, you’re on to something. I want you to meet me at the law firm. Not at the office. I’ll be there from seven to around eight. And listen – don’t call me at the Foundation. I don’t trust the phones there. This is serious fucking business, Charlie.” There was a long, long pause, during which an ambulance siren could be heard. “How much time do I get on this fucking machine? Charlie, listen. I got some stuff for you. Had it flown in by courier – pulled some strings.” Another long pause; the roar of a truck. “Does this machine cut you off? Charlie, shit. Get over here.”

Stone raced for the door.

Sheffield & Simpson occupied the twelfth, fourteenth, and fifteenth floors – there was no thirteenth – of a stately old twenty-floor building near Wall Street, a building with a grace and simplicity that the newer structures lacked.

Stone arrived a little after eight. The evening rush hour was just about over; a few stragglers in topcoats and carrying briefcases emerged from the ancient elevators. He’d always liked this old building – it whispered stability and solidity and longevity. The elevator was paneled in cherry wood, with lamps in sconces mounted on the walls.

He pressed the button for the fourteenth floor and leaned back against the elevator walls, admiring the well-oiled smoothness of the old machine. The elevator’s doors opened at the fourteenth floor a few seconds later. There were a few lights still on; although most of the secretaries were gone, several of the associates were working. Stone silently thanked the deities that he hadn’t become a lawyer.

And then he remembered that Saul would probably want to meet him upstairs, on the fifteenth floor, which at night was mostly empty; it was taken up by rooms of filing cabinets, old law books and reporters, discarded equipment. Half the floor was unrented. But there were a few conference rooms there, too. Whenever Ansbach wanted to meet in privacy, he chose one of the empty conference rooms upstairs.

Stone took the elevator up one flight, to the dimly lit fifteenth floor. Fluorescent light flickered from alternating ceiling panels; there was no one in sight. No sign yet of Ansbach. He passed a plate-glass window and noticed the view of New York twinkling below. The two conference rooms were halfway down the hall, on the right. Both doors were closed. Stone turned the knob of the first door and pulled it open.

“Saul Ansbach,” he called out heartily.

And whispered: “Saul?”

What he saw made him freeze in terror.

Saul Ansbach, the big beefy man, sat reclining in a cushioned chair beside a conference table, staring straight ahead through his heavy black-framed glasses. His head lolled peculiarly. The eyeglass lenses were partially obscured by rivulets of blood that ran down from a neat, perfectly circular hole in his forehead, just above his brow. His hands were curled into loose fists, as if he’d been about to rise from his seat to challenge an intruder. Before he’d been shot dead.

Stone was unable to emit a sound. He opened his mouth, his mind whirling with terror. He took a step forward, then a step back, before he heard the creaking of a floorboard, the ever-so-faint groan of the wooden floor beneath the wall-to-wall carpeting, beneath someone’s tread, a few feet away in the hall.

13

He took a few silent steps backward.

It was there again, the scrunch of a footfall in the corridor. Someone was unquestionably there, standing, shifting his weight.

The sound was coming from off to his left, outside the room.

The blood that covered Saul Ansbach’s face was visibly wet, sticky. He had just been killed, within the last thirty minutes at most.

The killer was out there.

Stone turned his head slowly and saw the figure of a man, poorly illuminated in the flickering hall light. He stood perhaps ten or fifteen feet away, a squat, compact man wearing a black leather jacket with wide lapels. Small eyes, a bull neck. Jet-black hair combed straight back. Something bulky concealed in the jacket’s pocket, probably a gun. The man was looking directly at Stone, with a calm expression of dull incuriosity.

And he saw what Stone knew, what Stone had seen.

Stone’s heart hammered, his body surging with adrenaline. With an enormous lurch, he bounded down the hallway.

The man was running now, great loping strides.

Careening down the hall, around the corner. Stone whipped past the elevator, unable to see anything but the stairway door twenty yards away.

The man was gaining on him, accelerating his pace with amazing agility, a great burst of speed.

Jesus oh Jesus oh Jesus. Stone had never moved so fast. Please God get me out of here oh God. He flew across the space, grabbing at the door handle. If the door is locked–

The door was unlocked.

Thank you.

The man in the leather jacket was mere feet away. Stone lunged into the stairwell without looking, momentarily almost losing his balance as he clattered down the stairs. The man was behind him, his footsteps thundering on the metal-and-concrete steps. Stone could feel the man behind him, could feel the rush of cold air.

There was an agonized yelp of pain as the man stumbled. Stone could hear, as his legs pumped down, down, the impact of the man’s leg against the steel.

Must get out of this stairwell, out of the direct line of fire. Why wasn’t the man shooting? Now, for sure, he would, but Stone couldn’t look back, wouldn’t know when it came, when the bullet came singing toward the back of his head.

Out of the stairwell. Another door: Stone grabbed at the knob and felt the surge of relief when it opened. It couldn’t be locked. Stone knew that; he would have to run. How many flights had he descended? Three? Four? The floor was dark, a deserted office, shut down for the night.

And nowhere to go.

The man had regained his balance; Stone had a few seconds. He could hear the footsteps sounding.

Desperately, he looked around for a way out.

He lunged at the elevator button, jamming his thumb against the down button, which lit up. Somewhere the elevator machinery hummed into life.

Oh, God, there was no time!

Stone ran toward the stairwell door, crazily searching for a lock of some kind, and when he found none, he wrapped his hands around the knob and pulled toward himself with all of his considerable mountain-climber’s strength, pulling the door shut, and then the squat man with the jet-black hair was there, throwing himself against the door, tugging at the knob with more force than Stone could counter, and then–

The elevator, with a high-pitched bing, had arrived, its doors yawning lazily open, its interior light blazing into the dark lobby, its cherry-wood paneling bright and welcoming. Stone had no choice. He tore himself from the doorknob, lunging in an awkward sideways motion toward the elevator at the instant that the stairwell door swung open, and he was inside the elevator, and the man was in the lobby, extending an automatic gun and–

The explosion was enormous. The bullet crashed into the closing doors as the man jammed his free hand in between them, the elevator doors closing agonizingly slowly around the man’s extended powerful fingers, which grasped the inside of the door to trigger the automatic opening mechanism–

But there was none. The ancient elevator had no modern safety precautions, and its doors were closed inexorably. The man yanked his hand back with a roar of pain, and the elevator sank slowly. For the first time in endless minutes. Stone took a giant gulp of breath.

He had escaped.

The elevator would outmove his pursuer, would descend much faster than the man would run, and it was the only one. In a haze he watched the numbers light up as it moved, with steadily increasing speed, down the building, down toward the main floor and freedom–

And then the elevator jolted to a stop.

Please God no, Stone shouted inwardly. The elevator was between floors, its power source no doubt, somehow, shut off.

He was trapped.

“God damn it,” he said aloud, looking around at the gleaming wood of the interior. “Fucking stupid move.” His voice shook with fear. He was a prisoner in this elevator cage. He lashed out wildly and struck the buttons for each floor. Nothing. The elevator did not move. He formed his hands into two claws and inserted them into the microscopic space between the double doors. There was give, he was forcing them apart. Behind the doors he could make out the discolored grayish concrete: he was definitely between floors. But the doors would open no farther than an inch or two.

He was trapped.

Suddenly he knew what the man would do. Of course. You could call the elevator up, or down, express, by throwing one switch, located somewhere in the building. Even the old elevators like this one could be moved from the first floor to the top, or the top floor to the first, without stopping in between.

He was a prisoner.

What was taking the man so long? Do it, just do it, get it over with, Stone chanted to himself. Get it over with. Jesus God, this is it. Whoever had murdered Saul Ansbach would certainly not hesitate to do the same to a witness.

He looked around the car. He could hear the blood rush past his ears, the sound of the ocean captured in a seashell, the sound of terror. He was sealed in this gleaming wooden box, paneled and elegant, an electric coffin.

–With an escape hatch on the ceiling. There it was. Of course; all elevators had them, were required to have them. A panel on the white-painted metal ceiling, a large rectangle fastened with protruding thumb screws. He reached his arms upward, as far as they would go, but the ceiling was too high; he could not quite reach it.

Think! Climbing the crack on a mountain’s face, you had to make do with the elements, with whatever was there. What was here? Wooden paneling: a toehold. And – oh, thank God – a brass fixture, the sconce that held the lamp. He grabbed it; it held firm. He pulled at it with all his strength, lifting himself up, grabbing a hold on the panel’s indentation, and with his left hand – yes – he twirled the thumb screws, one, and then another, and then, in one sudden motion, he slammed against the hatch. With a metallic groan, years of corrosion and disuse at last gave way, and the panel was open.

And he was looking up at absolute darkness.

The elevator shaft.

He pulled himself up until he could reach into the hole, grasping the sides. His palms sliced against something sharp, and he could feel the skin torn open. The stars of pain shot through his left arm.

With his other hand, more carefully now, he grabbed, and thrust his head and shoulders into the dark opening. He had leverage; he pulled himself up, his hands slapping against greasy metal.

He knelt atop the elevator cabin and inhaled the dank, oil-smelling air. His eyes were straining to become accustomed to the pitch-darkness of the elevator shaft, but it wasn’t absolute pitch-darkness. Somewhere way up there was a meager source of bluish light, maybe a skylight, and his surroundings came into sudden, horrible focus.

The vertical tunnel was perhaps eight feet by eight feet by – well, it was impossible to say how tall it was. His legs struck something: the coiled steel hoist cable on top of the car, which stretched vertically the length of the shaft, as far as Stone could see.

Terrified, Stone inspected further. On three sides the shaft was encased in pale glazed bricks; the other face was concrete. Two of the walls were crisscrossed with horizontal steel girders.

He could make out the rails on which the elevator rode, the vertical steel beams that seemed suspended in the shaft, two feet away from the walls. Were they electrified? If he grasped them, would he …?

“Now what the fuck?” Stone said. Get back into the elevator, his instincts told him. You can get killed here.

And I will get killed in there, another inner voice responded.

Gingerly he reached out to the steel rail, his fingers coming closer and closer and then wispily brushing against it and – nothing. No. Thank God, it was not electrified. With one hand, and then the other, he gripped the rail.

There was only one way to go: up.

He slid his shoes, leather dress shoes not meant for climbing, against the elevator car’s ceiling, until they hit the brick wall, angling the toe of his shoe into the cracks between the bricks. And slipped. The bricks were coated with some sort of grease, the deposit of decades of use. He could not get a toehold.

Layback, damn it. Just like you’d do climbing up a crack. Lay-back. Grab the rail and pull as hard as possible, and the simple pressure of your feet pushing against the brick will give you some traction.

Yes.

He pulled and pushed, pulled and pushed, and now he was moving up, slowly and awkwardly at first, then with increasing assurance, and then he allowed himself a glimpse above. A few more feet.

He could tell he was close to the next floor: there was a vein of horizontal steel, the thing the elevator normally rested against when it came to a stop. He looked down. A mistake; the drop, even after only a minute of climbing, was dizzying. Sickening. You don’t look down. Never look down; look up. He laybacked up, up, and then, from somewhere, he heard a click and then a hum. The elevator was starting up. His stomach lurched.

If it moved up, if he didn’t release his hold, he would be crushed.

No.

Maniacally, he pulled himself up, then kicked at the double doors that opened into the shaft. Nothing. He flailed one arm outward, grabbing at the place where the doors met. It would not open. The elevator car hummed smoothly upward, ten feet away maybe, and then Stone saw the roller guides, these protruding round things connected to the double doors, the things the inner door hits, triggering the outer door. He kicked at it, hard – and the outer door opened. With one foot on the ledge. Stone leaped forward, and just as he did so, the top of the elevator car cracked against his shin, but he was safe, out of the shaft, sprawled on the floor.

His hands were bleeding, his legs scraped and bruised. He struggled to his feet and loped to the stairwell door, saw from a painted number in the stairwell that he was on the sixth-floor landing, and took the steps down three and four at a time.

The lobby was deserted, lit only by lamps from the street. His body heaving with pain and exhaustion. Stone ran toward the revolving door and out into the street.

14

Moscow

When Stefan Kramer returned to the free world – if, he mused, Moscow could really be considered “free” – he found that the world had gotten even more terrible during the four months he had been in Lefortovo Prison.

The food stores were even emptier, street crime was on the increase, people complained more bitterly than usual. He rented a room in a communal apartment with five people he barely knew, so that when he wanted a good meal he would visit his father’s apartment, where Sonya, his father’s lover – there was no other word for it; they weren’t married – would always prepare a fine dinner of chicken and potatoes and a good hot solyanka soup.

Stefan didn’t quite know what to make of Sonya. She was in her early sixties, with a kind face that appeared to have once been beautiful. Stefan thought of her as his mother; his real mother had died when he was a child.

There was something about Sonya – a dignity, a gravity, a gentleness – that set her apart from all the world-weary Russian women of her generation. She demanded nothing of life; she seemed to draw her oxygen only from helping others. Sometimes her timidity broke Stefan’s heart.

Yet at times she seemed aloof, utterly private, impossibly remote. Then she would be distracted, her attention elsewhere, and she’d glance suddenly, sharply, at Stefan, as if she had no idea who he was, what she was doing here.

At dinner one night, barely a week after Stefan’s release from Lefortovo, Sonya set down a plate of soup and placed her hand over Stefan’s.

“Your brother has been arrested,” she said, giving a sad glance at Yakov, who sat in pensive silence.

“Avram? What for?” Stefan could hardly believe it. Avram, the quiet, diligent, law-abiding researcher at the Polio Institute did not have it in him to do anything that might get him arrested.

For a moment, it looked as if his father’s ruined face would contort into a cry of anguish.

“They say he wrote a letter to the Kremlin protesting their refusal to let us emigrate,” Yakov replied. “They say he wrote a viciously anti-Soviet letter.”

“What? That’s insane. That makes no sense.”

“I know,” his father said sadly.

“It’s a lie,” Sonya put in quietly. “They must have set him up. It has to be a setup to keep you from emigrating.”

“Where is he?” Stefan asked.

Sonya looked at Yakov, who suddenly bowed his head and held a crumpled napkin to his eyes, which brimmed with tears. He was unable to speak.

“He’s in a psikhushka,” Sonya said, putting her arms around Yakov’s shoulders. A psikhushka – a Soviet psychiatric hospital-prison, the terrible place from which few ever emerged with their minds intact. “They just put him in yesterday.”

“I thought they weren’t putting political prisoners in those places,” Stefan said.

“Well, they are,” his father said.

“We’ve got to do something!” Stefan shouted suddenly.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Yakov said, looking up at his son.

Sonya shook her head dolefully, wanting to say more, but keeping her silence.

One day, a few weeks later, Stefan was shopping for food for his father and Sonya when, standing in an endless mineral-water line at Yeliseyevsky’s, the food shop on Tverskaya Street that since the Revolution has been known officially as Gastronom Number 1, he spotted Fyodorov, looking ridiculously out of place.

“Hey, what the fuck are you doing here?” Stefan asked, clapping a hand on the mechanic’s shoulder.

“Waiting for you, comrade,” Fyodorov responded. “Where else would a nice cultured member of the intelligentsia buy his sturgeon? Actually, I saw you going in here last week, and it wasn’t hard to figure out when you had your day off.” He looked around, subtly, as if deciding what to buy next, and then said very quietly, “I’ve been asking around about you, and I heard about your brother.”

Everyone always knew when someone was thrown into a psikhushka, and people never knew how to react. Should one be ashamed that a relative was a victim of the state’s oppression? Stefan was touched that his old cellmate still cared enough to keep up with his family’s misfortunes.

“Yeah,” Stefan said simply.

Fyodorov said more quietly still, “Those fuckers don’t stop, do they? I’m sorry to hear about it.”

“Yeah, well …”

“Listen, comrade: I owe you.”

“Oh, bullshit.”

“You have a car?”

“No. Why?”

“Can you get one?”

“I suppose so – my dad’s.”

“Meet me tonight. I want to give you a token of my esteem.”

The place Fyodorov had arranged to meet Stefan Yakovich Kramer was a deserted garage in the far south of Moscow that smelled of motor oil and gasoline. It was owned, Fyodorov explained, by a friend of his; Fyodorov used it to work on cars. Four months in jail hadn’t diminished Fyodorov’s enthusiasm for moonlighting.

Fyodorov emerged from under a bashed-up Zhiguli that was up on a lift. He was covered with grease.

“I didn’t think you’d show up. A nice cultured boy like you.”

“Come on,” Stefan objected.

“I told you I owe you. Well, I called in some favors. What I have for you is worth thousands and thousands of rubles on the black market, but that would be only if you could get it on the black market, which you can’t. Since I don’t believe in hiding your light under a bushel, let me tell you: it cost me a lot of nights under this god-damned lift.”

He went to the back of the garage and returned with a tattered cardboard box. At first glance, it appeared to Stefan to be filled with junk – bits of wire and metal. On closer examination, he saw what it was – all of those things he had learned about on the prison roof. Somehow he had imagined them looking different. The box was filled with blocks of plastic explosives, cartridges of dynamite, chemical pencils, a couple of remote transmitters, and blasting caps.

“Christ!” Stefan exclaimed into the stillness.

“Enough for two car bombs and maybe three ordinary bombs. You’re not going to be able to level the Central Committee building or anything, but you’ll get an awful lot of attention, believe me. Now, go chop down some trees.” He was beaming with pride. “Use it in good health. Think of it as a repayment.”

Stefan didn’t know how to reply. This was terrifying, unbelievable. The thought of his brother’s arrest enraged him. But now – faced with the hardware of terrorism, the blocks of plastique, the coils of wire – Stefan was rendered speechless, paralyzed by indecision.

“I … I can’t,” he said.

“A token of my appreciation,” Fyodorov said.

“But I can’t. I mean it – I–”

“You’re scared.”

Stefan replied slowly: “Yes. I am.”

“They won’t release your brother. They never do. And if by some freaky chance they do, you won’t recognize him, my friend.”

Stefan nodded and looked around the greasy room. He was terrified someone might discover him here; he wanted to take off; yet he couldn’t bring himself to abandon such a valuable, and possibly useful, gift.

“I’m here, friend. You know how to get in touch with me. And you will, my friend. You will.”

15

New York

The pain exploded into a million shards, a million needles, a million stars. Stone pulled the alcohol-soaked gauze pad away from the long gash on his right cheek, then switched off the medicine-cabinet light. It was garishly bright. He had been hurt more badly than he’d realized: his face and hands were cut in a dozen places, and there was a painful contusion at the back of his head.

He would be all right, though. Even now the pain was beginning to subside. He walked slowly into his bedroom, collapsed on the bed, and examined the outside of the envelope Saul Ansbach had sent him.

The envelope. It had been slid underneath his apartment door, waiting for him when he returned, a voice from the grave.

A few minutes earlier, bleeding and out of breath, he had telephoned the New York Police Department and reported Saul’s murder, then hung up before the call could be traced. It made no sense to get involved at this point.

Saul, his old friend. Murdered. Stone bit his lower lip.

The man who had chosen the shadowy world of intelligence over the safe and bland and tranquil and orderly world of corporate law.

Whoever murdered Saul must have … must have not wanted him investigating…. What were his words on the machine? This is serious fucking business, Charlie. And: I don’t trust the phones…. Who was he afraid of? It didn’t make sense for the CIA to kill their own, especially one so important in the organization. Did it?

How long, Stone wondered, before I’m linked as well? How long before it’s not safe for me here?

He slid a finger under the flap of the manila envelope and tore it open. He pulled out a black-and-white, eight-by-ten glossy photograph.

Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting on a bench, conferring gravely. Around them people rushed by, blurred. Russians: Stone recognized the hats, the shoes, the clothing. The woman, too, was a Russian, a beautiful woman with delicate features, her glossy black hair in a loose chignon. Speaking to her, in earnest conversation, was someone Stone recognized well; it looked like a picture of himself. It was Alfred Stone, meeting with a Russian woman.

Could this be Sonya Kunetskaya?

Charlie turned the photo over and saw that it was stamped property FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION CENTRAL FILE 002–324.

There was one more item in the envelope, a small note that bore the letterhead of Sheffield & Simpson. The scrawled, almost illegible handwriting was Saul’s, evidently dashed off in great haste. Words and phrases were underlined, sometimes double-underlined.

His head thudding dully. Stone understood the message. The photo he held in his hand, the one the FBI had taken in Moscow and used as evidence against Alfred Stone, Saul had obtained from some friend at the FBI. Not from the CIA.

The old woman who had once been Lenin’s secretary was living under a deep-cover alias, Irene Potter, provided for her by the U.S. government. Which meant she had once been useful for intelligence purposes of some kind. Otherwise, she wouldn’t need a cover.

But the terrifying thing was the information Saul had got from his “friends”: a rogue operation in 1953, involving an American mole – but unknown to responsible elements of American intelligence? A mole who was still in place in Moscow – and who would therefore be undoubtedly very, very highly placed indeed.

Was that the conspiracy at which the HEDGEHOG report hinted?

Nineteen fifty-three. The year was significant. It was the year of Joseph Stalin’s death, a time of great turbulence in the Kremlin.

Had Alfred Stone been imprisoned to conceal an attempt to place an American agent deep into the Soviet government?

And – four decades later – had Saul Ansbach been murdered to protect the same secret? Why?

They kill their own.

I’m one of their own.

The thoughts were coming too swiftly now, their meaning too awful. Who else knew about this Lenin Testament, which – somehow, unexplainably – was connected with this rogue operation?

I do, Stone thought. I and my father.

The notion was inconceivable.

I’m not safe here any longer. And I have to make sure my father is safe.

Boston

“What happened to you, Charlie?”

Alfred Stone was sitting up in bed, looking considerably healthier. They had disconnected him from the cardiac monitor. It was early the next morning, and Stone – who had not contacted the Parnassus office – had done his best to bandage the cuts on his face and hands.

“A foolish accident.”

“You didn’t go out climbing yesterday, did you?”

“That’s right.”

“New Hampshire.”

“Right.”

The large British nurse swept into the room, heedless of the conversation. “I’m just going to check your pump,” she said. “Good morning, Mr. Stone.”

“A pleasure to see you,” Charlie said insincerely.

She finished a minute later and departed without a word.

“Did you know Rock Hudson was homosexual?” the elder Stone said. The tic had returned to his left eye; it winced as regularly as clockwork. He was nervous.

“Of course. Where’d you get that startling piece of old news?” What was really on his mind? Did he know what had happened? Had he heard what had happened to Saul Ansbach?

“People magazine. I had no idea.” He smiled wanly; Stone now was certain his father was deeply anxious. “In any case, I think they’re going to let me go home tomorrow.”

“You’re going to be well enough?”

“They seem to think so. I still feel weak, but I’m better. You didn’t have a climbing accident, did you, really?”

“Really.” But he wasn’t fooling his father, he felt sure.

“Would you mind terribly spending tomorrow night at the house? In case I need anything, you know.” Casual, too casual. What did he know?

“I’d be glad to.”

Stone was lost momentarily in thought. He remembered the rounded lines of the old Frigidaire that was still in his father’s kitchen. The memory was vague now, remote.

I am a boy. Was it four? Five? Just a child, playing in the kitchen, already climbing everything. I’d been climbing on a dusty set of water pipes in the corner of the kitchen. Mother’s not cleaning the house the way she used to. All she does now is sit at her typewriter pounding out letters. Later, when I’m older, she explains that they were letters to congressmen, civic groups, editors of newspapers, arguing Fathers innocence.

Playing on the pipes, I reach up and hug a hot-water pipe – so unbelievably hot, I scream. My forearm is badly burned. Mother rushes in, terrified, hollering, a typing eraser parked behind her ear. She picks me up, crying and angry all at once. She finds the first-aid kit, bandages the bum.

And then Father comes home and sees the bandages, and he erupts like a long-dormant volcano.

I run, terrified, and cower in the crawl space under the stairs, listening. Father is beside himself with rage, pushing Mother against the Frigidaire, chanting, “What kind of mother are you? You’re the only mother he has! You’re the only mother he has!”

And Mother, who knows better than I why he is so crazed with anger, says through her sobs, “I didn’t ask you to go to prison! I didn’t make you go to prison! Be angry at him, don’t be angry at me!”

Be angry at him.

He was never angry at Winthrop Lehman.

Why not?

Alfred Stone was now polishing his eyeglasses with a corner of the bedsheet. His eyes seemed luminous and penetrating. It was as if he could X-ray his son’s mind and discern the thoughts within.

“Thanks, Charlie,” he said distractedly. “Oh, what time is it? It’s time for my show.”

“Your show?”

“Television,” Alfred Stone announced. He pushed a switch on the remote-control box beside his bed and seemed glad to have such a toy at his fingertips. “I’ve begun to watch the soap operas, God save us all.”

Inscribed in granite on the exterior of the Boston Public Library is a slogan that takes up the length of a city block. THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE, it shouts to Copley Square, AS THE SAFEGUARD OF ORDER AND LIBERTY.

A fat lot of good education did Saul Ansbach, Stone thought grimly as he walked into the periodical reading room and found a stack of Boston Globes going back two months. He began methodically to go through the newspapers, looking particularly for the obituaries.

A vagrant sat down in an easy chair a few feet away, emitting a foul odor. Stone skimmed the dog-eared newspapers all the more quickly for it.

By now, surely, the Parnassus office would know that Saul was dead. The place would be in chaos – and since Stone had been spotted, it was obviously unsafe for him there. Whoever was behind Saul’s murder would be watching Stone carefully.

Which meant he would not be able to move easily – if it came to that – under his own passport. He needed another, and it seemed somehow safer to obtain it outside of New York City.

After half an hour, he found what he was looking for: a death notice for a thirty-two-year-old man who had lived in Melrose, a town north of Boston. Anywhere from late twenties to early forties would have done well; thirty-two was perfect. The man’s name was Robert Gill; he had been a state worker who had been killed in an automobile accident six days earlier. Not, Stone was relieved to see, driving while intoxicated. That would have made things more difficult.

Robert Gill’s address and phone number were listed in the library’s badly torn phone directory for the northern suburbs. Fortunately, there was only one Robert Gill in Melrose.

In the next few hours. Stone drove, in his rented Chevrolet, from public agency to public agency. He followed a procedure that had once been explained to him by a friend, a fastidiously dressed, high-priced private detective named Peter Sawyer.

With the information provided in the obituary – Gill’s date of birth, parents’ names, and so on – Stone obtained, for three dollars, a copy of Gill’s birth certificate from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bureau of Vital Records and Statistics. Terrifically easy. Then an interminable wait at the Registry of Motor Vehicles for a copy of Robert Gill’s driver’s license, which he claimed he’d lost, and after an hour and a half Stone had a driver’s license with his own photograph on it.

Simple.

Next he went to the Cambridge Post Office in Central Square and filled out an application for a post-office box in his own name and that of Robert Gill.

“That’ll be six to eight weeks,” the postal clerk, a beefy, gray-haired man, said as he looked over Stone’s application, checking off various boxes. The clerk’s eye fell upon a paper clip at the top of the form, and he glanced around to be sure he wasn’t being seen removing the two twenty-dollar bills that Stone had attached. “I think there’s a few that might have opened up recently,” he said, coughingly self-consciously. “Let me check.”

Stone next stopped at a passport-photo shop in downtown Boston, in Government Center, and had two color passport shots made while he waited. Armed with the driver’s license and the birth certificate, he took the photographs to the passport office in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building across the street, where he filed for a replacement passport. His last one, he reported, had somehow gone missing in a recent move. You know how these things happen. Could you maybe expedite things? he asked: he was planning a trip abroad in a week.

Yes, he was told, that was possible. The passport would come in about a week or so.

Stone hoped he’d never have to use it.

As he got on the plane from Boston to Newark International Airport, he realized he had set himself on a course that had changed his life irrevocably. Now, on a hunt for the old woman who might reveal a decades-old secret – a secret that might explain Alfred Stone’s disgrace, Saul Ansbach’s murder, and perhaps even more – he knew that, whoever these elements were within the Agency, they’d never let him out of their grip.

Knowledge is power, Saul had told him.

Yes, but, as a member of Parnassus, surely Stone already had power – the knowledge he stored in his head of some of the CIA’s most closely held intelligence on the Soviet Union. Was that power enough? The answer came with a sickening certainty: No.

For all the secrets he knew, there was nothing he could use to blackmail the Agency. He couldn’t threaten to reveal anything; the Agency would merely shrug. He didn’t know anything about their sources: they had carefully protected the origins of their intelligence even from the Parnassus elite.

I’m on my own, Stone thought, fastening his seat belt and gazing out the window at the runway.

When he landed in New Jersey, he immediately called his own line at the Parnassus Foundation. Sherry answered.

“Charlie!” She sounded surprised to hear his voice. “Where are you?”

Stone ignored her question. “Did Saul come in today, Sherry?”

She hesitated, then replied through a muffled sob, “Charlie, Saul’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“He was killed last night, Charlie,” she managed to say, her British accent forgotten. “An accident. Langley is sending in someone to replace him, but we’re all just torn apart. I can’t – can’t – believe it.”

“You’re quite sure it was an accident. Sherry?”

“What are you talking about? They told us. I mean, they–”

They told us. The cover-up had begun. Stone hung up abruptly, inserted another quarter, and called Lenny Wexler’s number. The Foundation’s telephones were secure. Stone knew, but this unprotected incoming line was risky without a scrambler. Yet he had no choice now.

Lenny himself answered. He sounded curiously distant. “Where’ve you been, Charlie?” he said. “Did you hear?”

“Lenny, I saw. Saul was shot to death.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Wexler replied cautiously. “He got into a car accident. Charlie, I know you’re upset–”

“Damn it, Lenny. What kind of bullshit is this? Who are you cooperating with? Where the hell is your loyalty?”

Now Lenny spoke quickly, softly. “Charlie, stay the fuck away from here. They’ll get you next. Stay away from here, and me, and–”

And the line went dead. Lenny had been cut off.

The taste of fear was metallic in Stone’s mouth.

16

Moscow

The day after his late-night garage meeting with Fyodorov, Stefan learned from his father that they would be allowed to visit Avram, Stefan’s older brother, at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, in which he was imprisoned. Rarely are psikhushka patients permitted to see anyone from the outside world, but Stefan and his father did not question this unusual good luck.

Instead, they were, both of them, filled with a corrosive anger at the capriciousness of Soviet justice, which could place Avram, a healthy and happy man, into a mental hospital. The world believed that this sort of thing didn’t happen anymore in Moscow, in these days of glasnost and Gorbachev, but apparently they still could.

“Please,” Sonya said, standing at the doorway, watching Yakov and Stefan leave. “I want to see Avram.”

But Yakov insisted that she stay behind – that she not be too closely associated with the Kramer family – and he refused to relent.

So she bit her lower lip and nodded, and watched these two men she loved so fiercely make their way down the dank stairwell. She wanted to call after them, yet she caught herself just in time, and she listened as the echo from their footsteps grew softer and then disappeared.

They drove for a few minutes in silence, Stefan poking at a place in the old Volga’s door where the padding had spilled out from a tear in a seam. “I hope they shave off Avram’s stupid beard,” Stefan joked weakly. “It’s always looked awful.” Avram, older by twelve years, was a tall, handsome, strapping man, but Stefan had always teased him about his beard, which made him look like a Talmudic scholar.

Stefan looked over at his father, who was not laughing. Yakov’s sensitive eyes were filled with pain, accentuated by the horrible scarred flesh that surrounded them.

It had happened in the gulag. A handsome and vivacious boy, Yakov had joined the army during World War II, or the Great Patriotic War, as it was officially known; and, with millions of his peers, he had fought with great ardor to defend his homeland against the Nazis. He had been captured by the Germans and spent two years as a prisoner of war, until he was liberated by American troops and immediately returned to the Soviet Union – not to a joyous reception but to a labor camp. Stalin did not trust the Soviet POWs. He believed they had been brainwashed by the Nazis or by American intelligence and convinced to return to Russia as spies. So he imprisoned the lot of them.

Vikhorevka Prison Camp, near Irkutsk, was a hellhole, and Kramer had grown steadily more disillusioned with the system that could have done such a thing to him. Some of his friends had been broken by their years in the camps, but not Kramer; he had established a friendship with some others there, an Estonian and a Lithuanian who shared his hatred for the Kremlin. Still, the two Balts kept their mouths shut, while Yakov began to speak out. Some of the other prisoners – thugs whose fury at being jailed made them hate people like Yakov, who dared to speak out – began to resent him. Their reaction was twisted but not uncommon.

One day, a couple of his fellow prisoners, granted the soft chore of cleaning duty, stole a jar of potent muriatic acid. And, in the middle of the night, they tossed it into Kramer’s face.

Luckily, it had missed his eyes, but it brutally disfigured the right side of his face so badly that he would always resemble a monster more than a human being. There was no one in the camp trained in medicine, so he was treated with rags and alcohol, and his pain, which was unspeakable, grew worse. In time, the horrid red ropes of his facial skin blanched to a more tolerable white.

Even after he and the other prisoners were released by Khrushchev in 1956, Yakov Kramer was consigned to live with a hideous reminder of his stay in the gulag.

Many people found it impossible to look him in the face. He managed to get a job as a technical writer, and eventually was hired at Progress Publishers, where he indexed books. Kramer was given a cubicle far removed from the other workers, because his boss anticipated that the others would prefer not to have to look at him. His boss was right.

Stefan’s father was a man of tremendous, though banked, anger. Now he sat at the wheel of the car in dark fury.

“We’ll get him out,Papa,” Stefan said, although neither one of them believed it.

The doctor in charge, a prim middle-aged woman named Dr. Zinaida Osipovna Bogdanova, wore a white coat and regarded the visitors with contempt. Clearly, she felt she was far too busy to have to speak to relatives of crazy people.

“Your son is schizophrenic,” she was saying. Yakov and Stefan, knowing how futile it was to argue, watched her face with silent hostility. “Officially his diagnosis is criminal paranoid schizophrenia, and the course of treatment may be very long.”

Stefan could not stop himself from remarking, “I wasn’t aware that ‘criminal paranoid schizophrenia’ was a psychiatric diagnosis. Are you sure you aren’t confusing your medicine with your politics?”

The doctor ignored him and continued haughtily, “You have five minutes with him. No more. Don’t get him worked up.”

As she turned to leave, Stefan asked, “Is he on any medication?”

She responded as if Stefan, too, were crazy. “Of course.”

“What kind?”

She paused before saying, “Sedatives.”

A few minutes later, she escorted Avram out, then left the family alone in the visiting room.

Stefan and his father did not believe their eyes.

Avram was a wholly different person, stooped in his hospital gown, gaunt, and he looked at his father and brother as if he didn’t recognize them. Mucus dripped from his nose, saliva from his mouth. His tongue rolled and darted; his lips smacked and sucked.

“Oh, my God,” Yakov breathed.

Stefan could only stare, aghast.

“Avram,” Yakov said, coming up to him slowly. “It’s me, your father.”

Avram looked at his father, his face betraying no recognition, his tongue rolling.

“Oh, God,” Yakov said, embracing his son. “Oh, God. What have they done to you?” He held him for a long time, then let him go. Stefan embraced his brother tightly. All the time, Avram’s face remained impassive, his eyes heavy-lidded, his mouth smacking insanely.

“Talk to me,” Stefan said. “Can you talk to me?”

But Avram could not.

“Oh, God,” Stefan whispered. “I’ve heard of this sort of thing! One of the emergency doctors I work with told me these hospitals give patients terrible drugs.” He knew it had to be the antipsychotic drug haloperidol, which, administered in large doses, could cause Avram’s grotesque, degenerative condition. The doctor had said it was called “tardive dyskinesia.”

“Can he– can he be cured?” his father asked.

“I don’t think so. It’s – oh, Christ, it’s – irreversible,” he said, his voice breaking. Both Yakov and Stefan, watching this drugged hulk, could not stop the tears that sprang to their eyes.

Yakov embraced Avram again, and now the father was openly crying. “You never did anything. You were so – so careful, so innocent. How could they do this to you?”

Avram only stared and gaped. Somewhere deep down something registered, a tiny flash of anger beneath all the drugs, and now even his eyes brimmed with tears.

“We have to get him out of here,” Yakov said very quietly, very firmly, to Stefan.

Suddenly the doctor was beside them, her voice loud and firm. “I’m afraid time’s up.”

Very late that night, in a deserted garage in the far south of Moscow, two men spoke by the light of a kerosene lamp.

“I’ve decided to take you up on your offer,” Stefan told his old cellmate. “I hope it’s still available.”

17

East Neck, New Jersey

The old woman who had once been the personal secretary to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lived in a tiny but immaculate ranch-style house with a perfectly manicured hedge in front and a lawn that resembled Astro-Turf. East Neck, New Jersey, was all even, broad streets lined with neat little square houses of tan stone and precise squares of lawn, which residents doubtless found homey. Stone found it depressing.

An odd place for such a person to live. Russian émigrés of recent vintage mostly coalesced in large cities, congregating in their own bustling, colorful Little Russias or Little Odessas. After a generation or two, once assimilated, they tended to live in cities and new suburbs, where the population turns over with some frequency. Not in tidy, middle-American spots like this, where all the neighbors have known one another for decades. Clearly, Anna Zinoyeva had chosen to distance herself from her compatriots.

Stone had arrived the night before and spent the evening in a motel where the beds had Magic Fingers massage vibrators built into the box springs. Early the next morning, he took a cab and got out several blocks from Zinoyeva’s street. He walked slowly toward the house, watching carefully. Nothing. After what had happened to Ansbach, he’d take no chances.

Checking the street once more, he felt satisfied. In a quick motion he climbed the low porch and rang the bell.

Anna Zinoyeva, a diminutive woman whose wispy white hair barely covered her scalp, answered the door. She used a metal walker.

Behind her, easily visible from the doorway, was a tiny sitting room furnished with a few straight-back upholstered chairs and a brown-tweed sofa. Even from here, everything about the room seemed to have been frozen in the late 1950s.

Her eyes squinted, giving her a slightly Asiatic appearance. Stone thought of her old boss, Lenin, whose eyes were also somewhat Asian.

“Irene Potter?” Stone asked, using her deep-cover name.

“Yes?”

“Anna Zinoyeva,” Stone said calmly.

The old woman shook her head. “You are mistaken,” she said in broken English. “Please go away from here.”

“I’m not here to harm you,” Stone said as gently as he could. “I need to talk with you.” He handed her a letter he had typed earlier in the day, on Central Intelligence Agency stationery he had once gotten from Saul. It requested, in bland bureaucratic language, a routine update of her file, a perfectly normal, straightforward questioning. The letter, signed by a fictitious “Assistant Records Chief,” requested her to speak to one Charles Stone.

Surely it had been years, even decades, since anyone from the American intelligence community had bothered to talk to her; her guard would be down.

She held the letter a few inches from her eyes, gray with cataracts, scrutinizing the text, the signature. It was obvious that she was almost blind. In a few moments, she looked up.

“What do you want from me?”

“Just a few minutes of your time,” Stone said cheerily. “Didn’t you receive a call?”

“No,” she said warily. She shook her head again. “Go away from here.” She made a feeble attempt to raise her walker, to ward off this unwelcome intruder.

Stone pushed his way into the house. The woman cried out: “Go! Please!”

“It’s all right,” Stone said gently. “It won’t take more than a few minutes.”

“No,” Anna Zinoyeva said. “They promised me … They promised me no one would ever talk to me again! They said I would be left alone!”

“This won’t take long. A mere formality.”

She seemed to hesitate. “What do you want from me?” the old woman repeated unhappily, stepping aside to let Stone in.

In the end, it was Stone’s gentle manner that allayed her suspicions. Sitting on the plastic-slipcovered sofa, she smoothed her faded house dress with gnarled yet somehow delicate hands, and told her story, haltingly at first, then as fluently as her poor English would allow.

She had come to work for Lenin when she was just nineteen – her father had been a friend of Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, one of Lenin’s closest friends – and she had never been more than a secretary in its strictest definition. She typed copies of Lenin’s voluminous and seemingly endless correspondence and did other paperwork in Lenin’s office in the Kremlin, from 1918 on, when the headquarters of the Soviet government was moved from Petrograd to Moscow. In 1923 she moved from Lenin’s Kremlin office to Gorky, where Lenin was eventually to die.

Several years after Lenin’s death, she asked permission to emigrate to the United States, and since it was still the 1920s and it was still possible to emigrate – and since she had served her country so honorably – she was given an exit visa. As one of the youngest secretaries on Lenin’s staff, she had rarely been entrusted with anything of great importance or secrecy, she said. This was not to say that she didn’t hear or see things. She did.

After she had been talking for half an hour or so, the suspicious squint in the eyes was replaced by a gaze that was in turn gentle and defiant.

“Twenty-three years I hear nothing from the great American intelligence,” she said mischievously. She shook her head at the hopeless crudeness of her benefactors. “Nothing. Now you are so very interested in me.”

“As I said, it’s routine. We’re filling in the blank spaces in your file.”

For an instant, it looked as if she didn’t understand, until she said, “And we must not have blank spaces,” and smiled playfully. Fleetingly, the wizened face was transformed into that of a coquette of seventeen.

“It won’t take much more time.”

“I don’t have much time left,” she said equably, without a trace of self-pity. “Soon you will be able to stop sending me your enormous checks and draining treasury.”

“It’s not much,” Stone agreed. The Agency was notoriously cheap with defectors.

“In Russia, they would give me very big pension because of my work for Ilyich,” she scolded, frowning in mock-disgust. “Sometimes I wonder why I left.”

Stone gave a nod of rueful sympathy, and then began: “If you can help–”

“Listen,” she said, and leaned her head close to his, as if confiding a great secret. “I am old. More than sixty years ago, I come to this country. If the great American intelligence still did not get from me all what little I know, it can’t be important.” She lifted her head and cocked it to one side, then smiled. “Do not waste your time.”

“Even if it concerns the Lenin Testament?”

The old woman was suddenly alert, and it took her several seconds to regain her poise. Then she smiled slyly. “Are you here to talk over old history with me? There are books you can read. Everyone knows about the Lenin Testament.”

“The one I mean is another Lenin Testament.”

“Is there another?” she asked, feigning boredom and shrugging. She clutched an empty teacup on the table beside her as if preparing to sip, then set it back down on the saucer with a clatter.

“I think you know.”

“I think I do not,” she replied steadily.

Stone smiled and decided to call an end to the fencing. “It came up in the course of a routine check through the files,” he said.

He waited for her to respond, and when she didn’t, he asked casually, “They did poison him, didn’t they?”

For a long time, she did not reply. When she finally said something, it was almost inaudible. The refrigerator in the kitchen next door switched on with a hum and a gurgle.

“I think yes,” she said. Her brio had given way to solemnity.

“What makes you think it?”

“Because – because he wrote letter about this, and he gave it for me to type. He tells me to make two copies. One for Krupskaya, his wife. The other …” She broke off and looked down at the floor.

“But the other copy – who was the other for?”

She waved her hands hopelessly in small circles. “I don’t know.”

“You know,” Stone said.

There was a beat of silence, and he continued: “Your contract with us requires you to be cooperative. It’s entirely within my power to cut off all financial support. …”

She replied hurriedly, her words spilling out now in a torrent: “Oh, it’s so long ago. It’s not important. A foreigner … Lenin was afraid his house was filled with … intrigue. Oh, I think he was right. Everyone, every gardener and cook and chauffeur, was OGPU. The secret police.”

She was speaking faster now, and Stone didn’t understand fully what she meant to say. “Why?” he said. “Why did he give a copy to a foreigner?”

“He was afraid of Stalin – of what he might do to Krupskaya. He wanted make sure one copy is brought out of country.”

“Who was the foreigner?”

She shook her head.

“You know, don’t you?” Stone said tranquilly.

Her hesitation was unbearable. “Tall, handsome American. Businessman. An American he sees several times before his death. Is not important.”

“Winthrop Lehman.”

A pause, and then: “He saw Lenin many times,” she said ruminatively, squinting her eyes. “Lehman.”

“Did he see Lenin at Gorky?”

“Yes. Winthrop Lehman.”

“What did the letter say? It had to do with the poisoning, didn’t it?”

“No, not quite,” she said. Now she spoke very slowly again. “He writes a – a draft – before he went to Gorky. Already ill. Says many bad things about Soviet state. Said it was a terrible mistake, it is becoming a police state. He said he … like Dr. Frankenstein, is creating a terrible, terrible monster.”

Stone waited for more, but there was no more.

“That’s a complete condemnation of the Soviet Union by its founder,” Stone said quietly. The words sounded obvious and foolish. “Lehman has it.”

“Once he demand to return to Moscow. We tried stop him, but he insisting. ‘Hurry!’ he was shouting to the chauffeur. When he got to Moscow, he went to his office in the Kremlin.”

“Did you go with him?”

“No. I hear later. He look in his desk and find a secret drawer was opened. He is looking for a document. He is furious, is shouting at everyone. Never find it. But he … How do you say? He – re-create from memory.”

“Dictated it to you,” Stone said. “That’s the one you made two copies of.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a copy?”

“No, of course not. I think lost now.”

“What about Krupskaya’s copy?”

“They must take it from her.”

“And Lehman’s copy?”

“I don’t know.” The adjacent kitchen gave off the aroma of chicken soup, heavy with garlic.

Stone inhaled the comfortable yet forlorn smell of the house and looked around the room. How did she know they had poisoned Lenin? he wondered.

“Who did it?” he asked.

“Please don’t dig it up,” she pleaded. “Please don’t dig up the past. Let people believe Ilyich died peacefully.”

“They did an autopsy, didn’t they? I seem to remember–”

“Please.” She made a tiny gesture with her hands that signaled acquiescence. “Yes, they did. The day after he die, ten doctors examine the body. Open him up and look at organs and find nothing wrong. They open his skull.” She frowned, pursed her lips in distaste, and continued: “Brain is…” She grimaced, flashed a set of cheap dentures that were stained bright yellow. “Solid. Cal-calcified.” As she spoke the word, she gestured with her forefinger. “Metal instruments are ringing when they strike brain.”

“Arteriosclerosis. They didn’t look for poison?”

Stone had switched to Russian; the old woman would no doubt find it much more comfortable. Indeed, she looked up with relief.

“No, but why would they?” she said.

“They had no reason to believe he’d been poisoned.”

“Do you know that Lenin’s personal doctor. Dr. Guetier, refused to sign the autopsy report? He refused! He knew Lenin had been poisoned. This is a matter of the historical record!”

Stone stared.

She nodded slowly, significantly. “I think he knew.”

“But who? Who poisoned him?”

“One of the servants, I think. They were all working for the OGPU. Stalin wanted Lenin out of way so he could take over the country. Why are you asking me this again? Why do you ask again?”

“Again?”

“You asked me all about this in 1953.”

“Nineteen fifty-three?” A bus roared by on the interstate two blocks away. “Who asked you about this in 1953?” Stone asked.

Anna Zinoyeva regarded him for a long moment with her gray-clouded eyes as if she didn’t believe him. Then she got up, slowly, supporting herself with one hand on the aluminum walker, the other on the arm of the couch. “I used to read the newspapers,” she said defiantly. “I was always very good with faces. Ilyich always complimented me for this.” She made her way to a walnut-veneered sideboard and opened the cabinet, removing a heavy green-leather-bound scrap-book, which she set on top of the sideboard’s highly burnished surface. “Come,” she said.

Stone walked over to the sideboard. She was turning the pasteboard pages slowly, as if they were made of lead, until she found the page she wanted. “Here,” she said, her face almost touching the page.

She indicated a page on which was mounted an unevenly cut, brownish clipping from a Russian-émigré newspaper published in New York, the Novoye Russkoye Slovo. Only the year – 1965 – was visible; the month and day appeared to have been lost to a sloppy job of scissoring.

“I recognize the face, too,” Stone said, trying to conceal his shock. The photograph was of William Armitage, a career State Department employee who the article announced was being named an undersecretary. Armitage, Stone knew, was now the Deputy Secretary of State: a powerful and highly placed man in the administration.

Bill Armitage, whom Saul Ansbach had spoken with, perhaps only hours before his death.

“This is the man who talked to you?”

“Yes, him. This Armitage.”

Stone nodded. A renegade organization, Saul had believed. How high up did this thing reach? “What did he want to know from you? Why was he interested – in 1953 – in something that happened in 1924?”

The old woman scowled as if Stone had missed her point entirely, her expression asking how simple-minded he could be. “He was interested in what had just happened. The threats.”

“Threats?”

She raised her voice. “The threats! Yes, the threats.” Her eyes shone with fear.

“Who threatened you? Not our agents, I hope.”

“The Russians.” Tears had come to her eyes. “You know all this already! Don’t …”

“Why did they threaten you?” Stone asked softly.

“They …” She shook her head again, a slow motion that shifted the course of the tears running down her cheeks. “They were looking for Lenin’s Testament, and they were sure I had it. They tore my house apart, told me they would kill me. I told them I didn’t have it….”

“Who were they?”

“Chekists. Beria’s men.” She sounded as if she were speaking to a simple child. The forerunners to the KGB. Of course. “I was so frightened. They used the word ikonoborchestvo.”

“Iconoclasm,” Stone translated. The smashing of an icon.

“Yes. They said, ‘You and your bloody Lenin will be the first to go. Your bloody icon.’ ”

Stone nodded. Yes, anti-Leninists: an old and virulent underground strain in the Soviet Union. “And this American, this Armitage – what did he want, exactly?”

“He wanted to know what they told me. I told him that they just wanted some document from me that I didn’t have.”

“You didn’t tell him everything,” Stone said without accusation, understanding.

“For a long time, he didn’t believe me. Then he told me I must never say anything to anybody about what happened, about these Chekists. That very bad things might happen to me if I said anything. This is why I’m surprised you are asking me again about this.”

“He wanted to protect a secret,” said Stone.

“He wanted silence,” she agreed. “He wanted me not to say a word about these Russians. You’re nodding. You must understand.”

“But the Russians could have gotten this document from Winthrop Lehman, couldn’t they?”

The old woman’s mouth trembled open slightly as her eyes un-seeingly searched Stone’s face. “No,” she said. “I heard …”

“What?”

“I was told … they didn’t need to, because Stalin had a … a control over him. Or maybe they couldn’t, because they had some kind of – arrangement with him. I don’t know.” Her attention seemed to be fading. The woman was tired; her face had grown ashen.

“Arrangement?”

“Stalin– Stalin was so evil. He found a way to control this man, this Lehman.”

Cowering against the Frigidaire, my mother, her tears turning her eye makeup into blue streams, is shouting: “I didn’t make you go to prison! Be angry at him, don’t be angry at me!”

Yes.

If Stalin was controlling Lehman …, Stone thought, astonished. Could it be? The adviser to Roosevelt and Truman, the man who had sent Alfred Stone to prison – was this the secret Lehman went to such lengths to conceal? Was it conceivable that Lehman had been in the employ of the Soviet government? “What kind of control?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know! I have no great secrets. I was only a secretary. Surely you must understand far more than me.”

“Yes,” Stone admitted, tasting the fear again.

There was a shout from some children playing down the block, then the sudden acceleration of a car that badly needed a new muffler, and then quiet, in which Stone could hear his heart thudding.

He thought: I don’t think these Americans wanted anyone to know that they – whoever they are or were – were trying to overthrow the Soviet government.

He looked around at the gloomy little room, then at the old woman, whose deep-set eyes – eyes that had once gazed upon a man of history – had clouded with age and now were heavy with weariness. He thought: And now they’re trying once again. The car with the bad muffler started up another time, raced by, and then there was nothing but silence.

18

Maryland

Very early in the morning, the limousines and sedans arrived at the secluded Maryland estate one after another, at precise five-minute intervals. At twenty minutes before seven, the last car, a gray Cadillac limousine, proceeded down the private, tree-lined roadway, through the scrolled iron gates that opened automatically.

It stopped a few hundred feet short of the main house, a sprawling Victorian mansion, and then maneuvered slowly into the wooden structure that appeared, from the outside, to be a large shed. When the limousine was inside and the doors had closed behind it, the steel platform that was the floor immediately hummed to life, dropping slowly and evenly. Within a minute, the floor had lowered seventy-five feet, into the pitch-dark chasm beneath the ground. Then the limousine pulled straight ahead to the oblong alcove whose walls were constructed of concrete finished in some sort of clear resin, joining the four other cars parked there, pulling up neatly alongside a black Saab turbo.

Fletcher Lansing, the last to arrive, got slowly out of the car with a nimbleness that belied his age. He was one of the great figures of the foreign-policy establishment, a close adviser to John Kennedy, one of what a journalist had once called “the best and the brightest.” Lansing, his creased mouth firmly set beneath his prominent, thin nose, passed through an arch into the conference room, where the others were already seated, sipping coffee.

“Good morning, sir.” This came from the Director of Central Intelligence, Ted Templeton. Like William Casey before him, Templeton was a veteran of the OSS, but, unlike Casey, he was career CIA, a large, rangy man with a thick head of gray hair, large ears, pouches under his eyes. He owed his job, the directorship, to Lansing, who had lobbied for him over more than one supper with the President in the White House residential quarters.

But Lansing, whose face was grim, gave only a curt nod to Templeton, and then to the others at the round black-marble-topped table. There was Ronald Sanders, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence: forty-six, a former Notre Dame football quarterback, and a career CIA man as well. To his right was Evan Wainwright Reynolds, considered the chief architect of the National Security Agency and, though long retired, one of its founders, a vigorous, slender man in his early seventies who rarely spoke.

And to his left, finally, was the youngest man present, Roger Bayliss of the National Security Council. Bayliss, in his late thirties, wore a charcoal-gray Italian sharkskin suit. His career – his very position in the White House – had been maneuvered by the other men in this room. He owed everything to them. As the youngest, he was the secretary, and he took notes on a yellow legal pad, writing with a Montblanc ballpoint pen. Bayliss would have much preferred to use his Compaq laptop, but no outside electronic equipment was permitted in this ultrasecret enclave.

Bayliss watched pensively. He jiggled his right knee up and down, a nervous tic that afflicted him at times of great tension. He inspected a chipped thumbnail. It was time for one of his several extravagances of vanity, a manicure. He thought fleetingly of the woman with whom he’d spent last night, a blonde named Caryn. She was a congressional staffer, of course, and she’d been a firebrand in bed, and Bayliss was still a bit sore. She was naturally impressed that he was on the National Security Council – most women were – but if she had any idea of what was about to happen in Moscow, and of Bayliss’s role in it all …

He glanced around at the room as Fletcher Lansing examined his notes. Everyone waited apprehensively for him to begin.

What bad news could there possibly be?

The extreme security precautions – this subterranean, electronically secure conference room beneath a private estate whose existence was unknown even to the most senior members of the American intelligence community – were deemed by the five men a necessity. They were known (the term had been coined by Fletcher Lansing, whose affection for Latinisms was legendary) as the Sanctum Sanctorum, an ultrasecret group of past and present intelligence officials that met infrequently – perhaps once in two or three years – to make decisions that, they were convinced, would soon alter the world’s fate.

Bayliss’s knee kept jiggling, up and down, up and down, with the rapidity of a hummingbird’s wings. He studied Fletcher Lansing, the old spymaster who had created the Sanctum, with surreptitious intensity.

What was wrong?

Bayliss, an only child who had grown up watching his parents closely, unnervingly, prided himself on his unusual perceptiveness. He had come to realize that there was often some kind of benign pathology in those who were drawn to intelligence work. Part of the lure, of course, was nothing more than insider-itis, that old Washington disease that makes a person ravenous with a desire to be inside the nucleus of power. Once you get to the office early in the morning, and you’re the first one to pore over the overnight cable traffic, you’re hooked, you’re infected.

But Lansing, Harvard and Harvard Law School (Law Review, of course), Supreme Court clerk, Secretary of the Navy, then one of the founders of the CIA – had forsaken the overt insider world of diplomacy and politics and statesmanship for the secret world, and that was because of another chromosome in his character genome, Bayliss believed.

Men like Lansing – and usually they were men – relished the secret exercise of power, out of the daylight, away from public scrutiny. Where else but in the world of intelligence could you plot against an opponent you had never met? They were the éminences grises, power-players with an abnormal attraction to secrecy, who never got credit because they never wanted any. And Bayliss, who was not without a measure of self-knowledge, recognized this same streak in himself.

Lansing belonged to a whole generation of aristocratic leaders, like Dean Acheson or Winthrop Lehman or Henry Stimson or Henry Cabot Lodge, whose time had passed. The crafty old pterodactyl, an illustrious servitor of presidents who were not as well born as he, considered himself, by now, one of the wise men, in an age when American foreign policy was like a fine old Bentley being driven ruinously, with a new, inexperienced president taking the wheel every few years, destroying the clutch while he learned to drive. A clutch could be replaced; world peace was far more fragile.

Yes. Bayliss knew that the Sanctum’s operation was, in a sense, the last spasm of an old order never to be witnessed again, and he was proud to be part of it.

For the time had come. Never before in the history of the Soviet Union had such an opportunity presented itself. It would never come again.

The intelligence out of Moscow was clear: Gorbachev was about to be ousted. Talk of a coup was everywhere.

Fletcher Lansing had put it well at the Sanctum’s last meeting, a mere two weeks ago. “The world we created is no more,” he had said. “Nothing looks the same. Everyone seems to think that the Russians have overnight turned into teddy bears. But even if a snake sheds its skin, it’s still a snake.” Lansing was no crazy right-winger, Bayliss knew, but he was a veteran of the Cold War. He’d been present at the creation of the postwar order, and he knew how easily America, childlike and optimistic in many ways, could have its head turned by changes that were only ephemeral. “So, while we Americans are dazzled and mesmerized by the changes in Moscow, we all forget the long view. Fail to realize that Gorbachev can’t last, and that when he’s gone it will be too late.” Seven decades of hard-line Soviet elements will be just waiting in the wings to reclaim what they believe is rightly theirs. They’ll not give up their power without a fight.

The Soviet empire was on the verge of collapse, spinning out of control. Its republics were seceding; its economy was crumbling. Now that the Berlin Wall had toppled, Moscow had lost its satellites forever.

The question was, when?

Because everyone knew what would happen when it did. When the shit hit the fan, as Ted Templeton so colorfully put it. The intelligence from the Kremlin was clear: Gorbachev’s days were numbered. It was only a matter of time before he was out.

And then, a new, undoubtedly neo-Stalinist leadership would wrest control, put the lid on all of Gorbachev’s feeble attempts at reform. Throughout the Soviet empire, there would be a crackdown that would make Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 seem like a playground. The leadership – which would need a way to unify the Soviet peoples – would require an enemy once again. An outside threat.

Their old archenemy: the West.

And what was the White House doing? Standing by idly, passively. America, the headless horseman.

Decades of superpower struggle, countless billions of dollars, thousands of lives, had been squandered on containing Communism, and now the White House stood by, blindly fatuous, shuffling their feet, not knowing what to do. We were, as usual, backing the wrong horse.

The Sanctum had the only solution, the only thing that would bring the world, once and for all, the peace it so desperately thirsted for.

And it would happen in a matter of weeks.

For they were about to catapult an American agent-in-place – a “mole,” as the British novelist John Le Garre had termed it – to the top of the Kremlin. The leadership of the Soviet Union. For years, such a thing had been a subject of fanciful speculation in the government and out, a pipe dream, the stuff of spy thrillers, but now it was indeed about to happen. Only now, in fact, could it happen.

And only the men in this room knew it.

The existence of this mole was utterly secret to the American government, to the intelligence community at large, even to the White House: a secret to everyone but the few men in this chamber.

For, Bayliss knew, thus it had to be. The Sanctum group had first met in the early 1950s, convened by Lansing and Reynolds, to run the mole, M-3. The task required inviolable secrecy, and Lansing and his colleagues – who were, of course, in a position to know – realized that the intelligence and foreign-policy establishments were no longer reliable.

With the rise of the Soviet mole Harold “Kim” Philby virtually to the top of the British spy network, and the increasingly frequent leaks since that time, followed by the Senate investigations of the CIA during the seventies – and so on and so on – the group’s secrecy became imperative. They could trust no one. Presidents and Secretaries of State came and went, and none of them had ever been informed of the Sanctum’s – or M-3’s – existence.

At last, after decades of planning, the time was at hand. So what, Bayliss wondered with growing alarm, was the hitch?

Fletcher Lansing cleared his throat and began with some preliminaries. Whatever the bad news was, Lansing was holding off. Bayliss, who had developed the fine art of listening while thinking of something else entirely, began to think of the mind-boggling operation that was now about to change the world.

He knew that, over the years, the United States had cultivated several deep-penetration agents in Moscow, generally Soviet citizens sympathetic to the American side. One of the earliest, in the 1950s, had been code-named “Major B.” There had been others, from Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU, to Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Popov of Soviet military intelligence, to the weapons expert A. G. Tolkachev at the Moscow Aeronautical Institute. Each was discovered by the Soviets, each arrested.

Yes, there were others still in place, but each of these was small-fry compared with the asset the Sanctum group had run all these years.

To preserve and promote M-3, the Bay of Pigs operation had been scrubbed – and not even John Kennedy was told why. Likewise, data that American intelligence had on Nikita Khrushchev’s unstable power base, right down to the hour he’d be thrown out of the Politburo, were information that not even Lyndon Johnson had had.

There were jokes in Washington, of course, that America couldn’t wish for a “mole” that could do any more than Mikhail Gorbachev already had. But what these pundits didn’t know was that Gorbachev had made M-3’s rise to power virtually inevitable. Only amid such turmoil in the Kremlin would M-3 be able to seize power.

Bayliss felt he knew the importance of M-3 almost better than anyone in the Sanctum.

After all, he had been chosen as the Sanctum’s contact with M-3’s intermediaries. This contact had begun only a few weeks earlier, when the channel had been activated after decades of dormancy. The postcard that was slipped into his car by Aleksandr Malarek, the Soviet Embassy’s first secretary, contained a microdot, an entire document reduced to the size of a typewriter’s period.

Malarek was known to be KGB, but none of his KGB colleagues knew of his work in behalf of M-3. For M-3 would have nothing to do with KGB channels.

Bayliss remembered the last meeting of the Sanctum, when Lansing and Templeton had told him he was to coordinate arrangements with Malarek.

“You’re aware of how careful you must be,” Lansing admonished.

“Certainly, sir.” Can they see me swallowing? Can they see how terrified I am?

“If you be somehow connected to this – if you be caught – you’ll undoubtedly be put on trial for treason.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On the other hand,” Lansing continued, “if we are, all of us, successful …” His voice trailed off as he looked around the table at the rest of the Sanctum group. “If we succeed, you’ll have been instrumental in changing history forever.”

Yes, Bayliss had thought. Forever.

Lansing, finished with his introductory remarks, now spoke in a voice that trembled with anger.

“The situation,” he rasped, “is unforgivable.” He struck the black marble table with a tight, liver-spotted fist, looked around at the bunker-like walls of the chamber, and then continued. “We have had our moles before. But nothing compared with M-3.”

Now the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Ronald Sanders, interrupted softly. “Little damage has been done. Nothing irrevocable.”

“Blood has been shed!” Lansing shouted, his voice cracking. Bayliss had never seen him so angry, never seen him shed his facade of patrician reserve. “The blood of innocent men. The blood of men who have served this country loyally.”

“Only that which was necessary,” CIA Director Ted Templeton objected. Their voices were curiously dead in the soundproof, surveillance-proof chamber. “Saul Ansbach all but did himself in, raising alarms. We couldn’t know how much he knew. I hated to allow it – Saul was once a friend of mine.”

“But the others!”

“All of the sanctions have been carried out with scrupulous care. That was our agreement with Malarek’s people.” Templeton sighed noisily. “Nothing traceable.”

Sanders, who had been nervously shifting in his chair, put in, a touch defensively: “Only one section of the Agency was involved in looking into this HEDGEHOG business. Parnassus. But Ted put a halt to it.” He unconsciously addressed his remarks to the grand old men, Lansing and Reynolds.

Templeton nodded. “It’s a good thing we were able to blow that chauffeur’s cover. Jesus, I didn’t know he was–”

“Gentlemen,” Lansing interjected, “we are in a profession where blood is shed all the time to protect the blood of the greater masses. But I am disturbed by the extent of this, by the elimination of innocent men. Frankly, it violates everything I’ve ever stood for. But, morality apart, these sanctions strike me as highly dangerous. If any of them were ever traced, by KGB, by any other interested party–”

“Impossible,” Templeton said. “The Sekretariat are highly trained. Extremely sophisticated. As long as we keep hands off, they’ll do the job invisibly.”

“But will they finish the job?” Evan Reynolds’s remark was little more than a whisper, but instantly everyone at the table turned his way. He had voiced, if crudely, exactly what was on the mind of every man in the room.

There was a beat of silence before Bayliss mustered the courage to speak up. “Can we be absolutely sure this is the right person?”

“Roger,” Templeton said with a dismissive shake of the head, “my people have voice prints that match precisely the voice on the tape taken from Lehman’s basement telephone. That, plus the tap on his phone, confirms that he’s the one who’s been stirring matters up. There’s no question.”

“But I thought you were assured Parnassus was–” Reynolds objected.

“All but one,” Templeton said. “This one has kept prodding, for personal reasons that we couldn’t have foreseen.”

“I should think the subject must be dealt with delicately,” Lansing said.

“Why?” Reynolds asked sharply. “If he has possession of the document, of the – the file, he may compromise the entire operation. Decades of cultivation. My life’s work, for God’s sake. We have no choice. But if he has copies concealed, then what?”

Templeton explained his plan, and when he was done, he could see the shock on the faces of the men around the table. There was a long silence, broken only by the most senior man at the table.

“Jesus God,” Lansing breathed. “Jesus God, help us.”

Washington is a city of foundations. Any number of organizations, from the most venal lobbying organizations to the most selfless nonprofit consumer groups, like to call themselves “foundations,” because the name is at once neutral and dignified.

The American Flag Foundation, located on K Street in central Northwest Washington, occupies one floor of a modern complex that also houses law offices and the lobbying outposts of several Midwestern corporations. From its exterior, the building looks like every other office building in that part of town, an impression confirmed by the drab entrance and inefficient elevators.

But, were a visitor mistakenly to get off at the sixth floor, he would be amazed by the opulence before him. He would see a single secretary sitting at a large mahogany desk in an anteroom furnished with Persian rugs, marble tables, highly burnished paneling on the walls. He would notice, too, that the secretary’s telephone rarely seems to ring.

Most who pay it any attention mistakenly believe the American Flag Foundation to be some kind of conservative think-tank. In reality, it is an organization of retired officers of several American intelligence organizations, chiefly the CIA, the NSA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These officers maintain close links to the agencies from which they are retired, and in fact many continue on their payrolls. But the links, and even the means of payment, are so byzantine that not even the most dogged congressional investigator would be able to establish for certain that the Foundation is in any way linked to American intelligence.

Which is the way the intelligence community wants it. By a presidential executive order, the CIA is forbidden to conduct espionage operations domestically, and indeed, since the Church Committee investigations of the mid-1970s, the CIA has in fact been scrupulous about this. It is a commonplace within certain elements of this and other intelligence agencies, however, that such proscriptions are foolish vestiges of noble democratic sentiment. Intelligence cannot function when it is handicapped by such rules, by having to depend upon domestic forces such as the FBI, or any other law-enforcement agency that does not operate abroad.

And so, long before the days of Colonel Oliver North and the National Security Council’s secret dealings with Israel, Iran, and Nicaragua, the American Flag Foundation was set up to serve as a domestic-intelligence arm of the various agencies, a coordinating base for covert operations.

The phone rang, startling the secretary/receptionist, who was reading the Style section of The Washington Post. She answered it, then depressed a key on her intercom switchboard.

“General Knowlton,” she said, “it’s the Director of Central Intelligence.”

Several minutes later, the phone rang in a small farmhouse outside of Alexandria, Virginia. The house was located on a rural road, miles from any other building; its electrified fence was concealed in high thickets of bushes and trees. The roof of the house was dotted with gray, conical microwave antennas.

“McManus,” said the man who answered the phone. He was Major Leslie McManus, a retired officer of armed-forces intelligence. He listened for a minute, jotted down a few notes on a white pad. “Done.”

19

Boston

After a tedious nine-hour drive during which he stopped only once, Stone was back in Boston.

Alfred Stone was in his hospital room, fully dressed, sitting up in a chair. The bed was made.

“You,” he said, startled, when Charlie entered. “I called you in New York, even at – at your place of work. Where the hell have you been?”

“Sorry.”

“I was just about to call a taxi. This morning they decided to let me check out. Would you mind taking me home?” He glanced around the hospital room with distaste. “We had enough of this place.”

It was just after nine o’clock at night.

Several hours earlier, a neatly dressed middle-aged couple had mounted the stairs of a small, squarish tan house and rung the doorbell. They waited a minute, two minutes; it seemed an eternity, but they knew the woman was home. Everything had been prepared meticulously; that was simply how their employers did things. The couple knew for certain that the old woman was asleep in her small, pathetically furnished bedroom upstairs. It would take her some time to answer the door.

The couple appeared to be husband and wife. The husband was in his early forties, balding, somewhat pudgy, but obviously quite strong. What little hair he had was dark, flecked with gray, and cropped close. He wore a camel’s-hair overcoat over a blue pinstriped suit, a blue shirt, and a paisley tie. The woman who seemed to be his wife was a year or two younger, compact and poised; she was a rather plain woman who groomed herself fastidiously. She wore a touch too much eyeshadow above her large brown eyes, and her straight brown hair was cut in neat, straight bangs. She wore a prim-looking floral-patterned dress with a Peter Pan collar.

There was a faint noise from behind the door, and the couple exchanged a brief glance.

The two spoke flawless English with a Midwestern twang. They made their rather modest living from the graphic-design firm they jointly owned and ran; they had very few customers. The woman, in fact, had actually been trained as a designer at the State Institute of Art in Leningrad for a few months, after she had completed her training in Moscow.

The door opened, and the small elderly woman peered out. “Yes?” she inquired.

She was even frailer than the couple had expected.

“Irene?” the younger woman asked, smiling gently, her eyes wide.

“Yes?” Suspicious now, the old woman tightened her small fingers around the grip of the aluminum walker.

“Irene, I’m Helen Stevens, and this is Bob. We’re volunteers with County Social and Family Services.” The dark-haired woman smiled again, almost apologetically, and added, “Ruth Bower gave us your name.” Ruth Bower, the couple had been instructed, was the name of a neighbor of the old woman’s who came by from time to time to help out around the house.

The old woman’s cloudy, puzzled eyes relaxed now. “Oh, come in.”

The younger woman chattered as she and her husband entered. “I don’t know if Ruth mentioned that the agency sends us to help people do little things – shop, move boxes, whatever you need.” She closed the door behind them.

The woman whose name was Anna Zinoyeva made her way slowly to the plastic-covered brown-tweed sofa in the small front room. “Oh, thank you very much,” she said.

“Irene, listen,” the man said, speaking for the first time, taking a seat next to the couch in a plastic-covered chair. “Did you meet with someone earlier today? It’s very, very important that we know.” He watched her expression, watching for a telltale flicker of fear, admission.

“Nobody,” Anna Zinoyeva said, biting her lip.

Yes. She had spoken to somebody.

“What did he want from you?” the wife asked.

“I never saw anyone,” the old woman protested, terrified now. “Please. No. I never saw–”

The young woman continued now, switching to Russian, using the old woman’s real name.

“No,” Anna Zinoyeva gasped. Again! They had come for her again! For a moment, she did not believe her ears. They knew her name, a name that, until this morning, had not been spoken in decades.

“Please leave me alone,” she said, whimpering. Her body shook violently. She could not contain her terror. “What do you want to know from me? Please, what do you want to know?”

“All we want to know,” the man said in a gentle, singsong voice, “is what the man asked you.”

The old woman finally talked.

The young woman turned the old woman’s body over, pulling the house dress up as far as the thigh, and made a deep incision with a knife. Moments earlier, they had broken her fragile neck, but the arterial blood still spurted upward, then slowed to a steady red flow. She waited until the flow had stopped, which did not take long.

“Ready,” she said.

Her husband had donned surgical gloves. He removed a round glass vial and a long swab from the case he had brought.

“Is that dangerous?” she asked, indicating the liquid he was plunging, repeatedly, into the incision.

“I wouldn’t touch it,” he said. “Clostridium welchii. It’s terrible stuff, but it does the job.”

The organism hastened natural decomposition. When the body was discovered, it would appear that the old lady had died weeks ago: perhaps slipped and fell, hit her head. Such things can happen to old people who live alone.

If the couple had had the time, they could have waited around to watch it work. In a matter of days, there would be nothing left of the body except the skeleton and a few tendons and a pile of mush, nothing left to identify. Nothing at all except a heap of bubbling tissue.

The man removed the swab from the wound and stood up. “There,” he said.

Stone drove up the blacktopped driveway of his father’s house, glancing warily from side to side with such subtlety that his father, sitting beside him in the front seat, did not seem to notice. But no one was here, it seemed. He got out and carried his suitcase and his father’s small overnight bag up to the front door. Alfred Stone walked gingerly alongside.

Charlie switched off the house alarm with one key, then opened the front door with two others. The house was dark, the heavy furniture gleaming and lemon-smelling, the Persian rugs vacuumed, their fringes perfectly straight.

“Well,” Alfred Stone announced. “I trust there are sheets on your bed upstairs.”

“Can you get up the stairs all right?” Charlie asked.

“I’m a lot stronger than I look.”

“Let me carry your suitcase to your room; then I’ll go next door and get the dog. You’ll probably want to go to bed early.”

He took both bags up the stairs, and a few minutes later he heard his father’s voice calling.

“Charlie?”

Stone set down the bag in his father’s room and walked quickly to the top of the stairs. “Yes?”

He looked down and saw his father holding in one hand Saul Ansbach’s envelope, which Stone had left in the pocket of his overcoat. In his father’s other hand was the eight-by-ten glossy photograph.

Charlie could feel his pulse quicken.

“I was hanging up your coat,” Alfred Stone said. “This fell out.”

His eyes were wide, and the blood, quite literally, had drained from his face. “How did you get this? Why?”

A few miles to the south, in the seedy part of Boston known as the Combat Zone, the several-block-wide area that is home to pornographic movie houses, sexual-aid shops, prostitution, and drugs, a man in a black leather jacket was sitting in a darkened movie theater watching a bosomy blonde fellate an especially well-endowed black man. It was early evening, and the theater was uncrowded: perhaps twenty viewers, who sat as far apart from one another as possible. A few old men masturbated openly.

“Dobriy vecher.”

Another man now sat beside the man in the leather jacket. This one was bearded and wore a dark-blue windbreaker.

“Dobriy vecher, tovarishch,” the man in the leather jacket replied. Good evening, comrade.

The two Russian émigrés sat in silence for a moment, until both were satisfied they were unnoticed. The man in the leather jacket left the theater, followed a few minutes later by the other man.

“It’s the woman you met with, isn’t it?” Charlie asked. “Sonya Kunetskaya.”

His father looked shaken. “Yes.”

“Is she alive?”

Alfred Stone shrugged as if he didn’t care, but his eyes indicated otherwise.

“What do you really know about her?” Stone asked impassionedly. “Could she have been a link to someone, an agent, in Russia that Lehman was controlling?”

“Why are you asking me these things, Charlie?”

“We shouldn’t talk now. I’m sorry. You’re tired; you should go to sleep. It can wait a few days.”

“No, Charlie. I think we should talk now. I want to know what you’ve been finding out.”

“Please, let’s talk another time.”

“Now, Charlie,” Alfred Stone demanded.

Gently, Stone told his father some of what he had learned, from Saul’s allegations to the tale told by the old woman in New Jersey. He softened the story, leaving out Saul’s murder; it would not do to shock his father now.

Alfred Stone listened, his mouth slightly agape. “Keep going,” he said. “There are things I have to tell you, too.”

A white van proceeded up Washington Street, out of the Combat Zone, toward Cambridge. The two men sat inside, the bearded man at the wheel. In the back seat was another, a large man with unfashionably long sideburns who had come up from Baltimore.

The van was a 1985 Dodge, specially adapted by an expert craftsman in Pennsylvania who had served a ten-year jail term for participating in an armed robbery. He had thought he was adapting the van for ordinary criminals, but he knew enough to be discreet: his livelihood, as well as his life, depended upon it. He had constructed a veritable tank. Steel plates had been welded to the inside, with a pulldown steel visor to protect the driver from gunfire, with slits at eye level. There were holes for gun ports. The van could withstand virtually any gunfire. It would take nothing short of a bazooka to interfere with its progress.

The van was equipped with several .44-caliber magnum handguns and a number of Thompson submachine guns. But the two men did not expect to use any firepower at all on this mission. The assignment would be, as the Americans said, a piece of cake.

The man at the wheel was a part-time taxi driver, as so many Russian émigrés seemed to be. He had lived in Boston for three years, having been selected for the ultrasecret organization six months before he left Moscow. He lived alone in an impoverished Boston suburb and kept to himself, just another anonymous émigré in a city full of them. In reality, he, like the man in the leather jacket, whom he did not know, had been sent to this country and supported handsomely because they were men of unusual talents, men who could follow orders perfectly and kill efficiently if required.

They drove up Massachusetts Avenue, through Harvard Square, and then found the street off Brattle.

“Ne plokho,” the man in the leather jacket said admiringly of the large residential houses on Hilliard Street. Not bad at all.

“But how would I know about things like covert operations?” Alfred Stone protested later, after Charlie had retrieved Peary, and father and son were sitting at the kitchen table. “I was never involved in such things.” He moved the salt and pepper shakers around the Formica kitchen table, making ellipses around a glass of water and a brown plastic pharmacist’s pill bottle, as if they were all chess pieces.

“You were Lehman’s assistant. You were the assistant to Truman’s national-security adviser.”

“Oh, God. We were involved in things like Inchon, the troubles with MacArthur, and the Chinese communists. The recapture of Seoul. That kind of thing.”

“You never heard anything about an attempt to pull off a coup in Moscow?”

“A coup?” Alfred Stone laughed. “John Foster Dulles’s fondest wish. The enemy you know is better than the one you don’t. Hamlet, I think: ‘Rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.’ ”

“You heard nothing about a coup? Nothing? Not gossip, not passing references in documents?”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t attempted.” He twisted open the pill bottle and shook an Inderal into his palm. Then he put it in his mouth and washed it down with a long draught of tap water.

“Yes, I know,” Charlie said. “We – the U.S., I mean – tried a couple of times to have Stalin knocked off. Tried to work on getting rid of Khrushchev after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sure.”

“Charlie,” his father said exasperatedly, “if you’re claiming that Winthrop Lehman, a fixture in the White House since the Roosevelt administration, was secretly involved in a coup against Stalin, I must say I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. I don’t even see anything wrong with it – Stalin was a dangerous tyrant; everyone knew that.”

“Exactly,” Charlie said. “What’s wrong with a plot to unseat one of the twentieth century’s two greatest dictators?”

“Right.”

“If that’s all it was. But that can’t be the full story.”

“Why not?”

“Because there’d be no need to cover up such an operation. There’d be no reason to. For one thing, most of the principals would be dead.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“I’m suggesting that something is alive today, something so serious and so secret that people’s lives can be extinguished simply for knowing a tiny piece of the puzzle.” He stared straight ahead for a moment, wondering how much to tell his father. “Now I need to know something from you. You’ve said you went to Moscow because Lehman asked you to go. But what else is there? Why did you really go? There’s more to it, isn’t there?”

Alfred Stone sat silently at the kitchen table, his fingers moving oddly back and forth on the Formica as if by their own volition. He did not speak.

“Why did you ruin your life for Winthrop Lehman?”

His father gave an odd smile.

“We all have our secrets, Charlie. I want you to do me a favor. You’re investigating all this for me. I can’t tell you what that means to me.” His eyes shone with something Charlie took to be gratitude. “But now I want you to stop.”

“I can’t.”

“The game isn’t worth the candle.”

“It’s not a game.”

“No, damn it. It’s not a game. But why do you persist? Why are you doing this?”

“Initially, because I was assigned to. I was asked to find out about the Lenin Testament. I can’t really tell you why.”

“Well, there’s someone you can talk to, if you insist on pursuing this. One of my former students might be able to help you. If anyone would know, he would – and if you needed an ally, he’d be there for you. He’s on the National Security Council – he’s got roughly the same job I had.”

“Thanks.”

“Former students, even those who’ve grasped their way to the top the way he has, tend to enjoy doing favors for their old mentors. Massages their egos.” He folded his fingers into a tent, interlaced them, then bent them backward until a few of the knuckles cracked. Suddenly he said, “Charlie, let’s go to Maine this weekend. I don’t think it will be too much for me, and I could use a chance to convalesce somewhere pleasant.”

“Maine?” His father meant the lodge in southern Maine they used to take for a month every summer, during most of the years of his boyhood. The place – “lodge” was almost too grand a word for the rambling old farmhouse – had been one of Charlie’s favorite places. He remembered the smell of burning wood that permeated all the blankets in the house. The two of them would have long, lazy chats. They’d go out fishing, or duck-hunting. In the afternoons, Charlie would take the outboard motorboat and circle the lake, bombing over the water, while his father snoozed in a hammock. Sometimes Charlie would go out climbing, solo, on the nearby range. During the year, his father tended to be uncommunicative; at the lodge, he unwound.

“I’d love to,” Charlie said. “You have something to tell me.”

“Yes.”

“About all this?”

“Right.”

“Don’t hold back–”

“I won’t. Just give me a few days. I’ve held out for years; I can hold out another few days.”

“A hint, then.”

“Just that it involves me and you. The past. I’ll tell you everything. Charlie, you know about the fox and the hounds, right?”

“Another metaphor?”

“Haven’t I told you that one before? The hounds run for their lunch, but the fox runs for his life. Right now you’re a hound. Don’t become a fox. Will you do that for me?”

“I can’t, Dad.”

“You can. Don’t be a fox. You’ve got information now; you can threaten to use it, if need be. For me, Charlie. Give it up for me, all right? You’ll see why.”

Charlie was silent for five seconds, ten, twenty. He sighed. “I hate to do it,” he said slowly. “But I will.”

“Thank you. Now, I do need your help. Help me find that damned dog.” He walked to the kitchen door that gave onto the yard and opened it. Craning his neck, he called to Peary. “He likes staying outside at night. It’s curious. Most dogs prefer it inside.”

The two men, father and son, stood at the back door. “What I was doing,” Charlie said at length, “I did for you.”

Peary came up to the back door, his collar jingling musically.

“I know,” Alfred Stone said as he massaged the dog’s ears. “It – don’t make me–” He fought back tears, bowing his head, obviously ashamed. After a minute, he could speak again. “I appreciate it.”

At one-fifteen, the Russian in the leather jacket, who had been walking down Hilliard Street at ten-minute intervals, saw that all the lights in Alfred Stone’s house had been extinguished.

“Speshi,” he told his comrade, returning to the armored van. “Pora.” Hurry; it’s time.

The bearded one went to the back of the van and located a shoulder bag that contained, among other tools, a pair of heavy-gauge wire-cutters, heavy black leather gloves, and a glass-cutter. They made their way around to the back of the house with the determined stride of two Cambridge residents returning home from a dinner party.

The power box was exactly where they were told it would be, at the side of the house. The bearded man, wearing the rubber gloves, loosened three bolts and was then able to pull out the power cable, thereby shutting off the electricity in the house. With the wire-cutters he severed the telephone cable.

At the same time, his comrade had tried the kitchen window and found it locked. He affixed a suction cup to the glass and, with the glass-cutter, scored a large circle. Then he rapped it quickly but quietly, which loosened the circle; the suction cup kept the glass from shattering on the kitchen floor. He reached his hand in, unlocked the window from the inside, and slid it open.

Within three minutes, the two men were, almost noiselessly, inside the house.

Stone slept uneasily. He had uncovered too much simply to give it up; there were too many unanswered questions.

He lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, tracing with his eyes the web of cracks he had watched for so many nights as a child. Suddenly he heard a soft, muffled thump. Downstairs? Someone passing by outside the house? At night one’s ears were easily deceived. A shutter closing?

Then, inside, Peary started barking, which was strange, because he almost never barked at night.

Stone turned in bed to glance at his digital clock. For a moment he thought it wasn’t there; then he realized that it was on the table, but it was dark. Could he have accidentally unplugged it? He sat up, and reached over to switch on the lamp. Dead. The power must have gone off.

There was a phone in the hallway. He walked out of his bedroom to the old beige phone, to call the power company. A line was obviously down somewhere. Sometimes a car would hit a pole, knocking down a power line. He picked up the phone. No dial tone.

Then there was a high-pitched yelp, a sound that wasn’t quite human, and Stone knew it was the dog.

Someone was down there.

He turned slowly toward his bedroom to get a pair of shoes, to go downstairs and investigate, and–

There was someone in the hallway, a large bearded man, and he was coming at him. And something about the man looked terrifyingly familiar….

Stone whirled fully around to face the intruder. “What the fuck–” he shouted. Stone leaped at him, grabbed his arm, forced it upward at an angle. The interloper slammed his fist into Stone’s abdomen; Stone, who was taller, threw him to the floor, relying on the element of surprise. But the man was more powerful, and he lunged forward, cracking a fist into Stone’s face as he propelled himself forward. Stone reeled backward, suddenly seeing, as he hit the wall, that the man had a gun, in a holster concealed beneath his windbreaker. Stone threw himself at the attacker again. He was on home turf, protecting himself and his father inside their home, and the adrenaline surge he felt was enormous. With the flat of his hand he cracked into the man’s chin, forcing it upward. Then he shoved him hard, hard enough to throw him into a long mirror that hung in the hallway. It shattered, the shards of glass cascading noisily to the floor. Stone reached again, and now he felt a sharp jab from behind. Something had pierced his skin.

There was another man behind him now; he was outnumbered. As he turned, he saw what had jabbed into his flesh, his backside: a hypodermic needle.

A shout came from the end of the hallway. His father had opened his bedroom door and was hoarsely calling out in terror.

“Get back,” Stone shouted. “Stay back!” He turned to the first man, and as he threw his fist he felt dizzy, uncoordinated, and his fist loosened as he lost his balance. He seemed to be falling headlong, falling incredibly far, and then everything went dark.

A bell. A steadily penetrating bell was the first thing he would remember hearing. The sound was unbearably sharp. His head was hurt; it felt swollen. There was something coarse and abrasive rubbing his cheek. Carpeting. Stone was lying on the floor of his father’s study, his head on the Oriental rug. Everything was incredibly bright – daylight.

The ringing was the doorbell, which was buzzing angrily. He tried to lift himself from the floor, but he was dizzy, nauseated, sick. It was painful, but he had to stop the noise.

He grasped the edge of his father’s oak desk as a brace, and pulled himself up slowly.

He stared in horror, incredulity. He felt his blood freeze, his heart explode.

It was his father.

It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be. It had to be some horrible delusion. I’m asleep still, Stone told himself, I’m dreaming something unspeakable, this isn’t real.

The blood was everywhere – on the desk, on the blotter, dark, sticky, congealed puddles of human blood. Blood covering his father’s pajamas, like a spill of crimson dye. The deep gashes crisscrossed the body, bloody lines, cuts, stab marks, extending upward from his chest, his heart, to his throat, which gaped open.

“No, no, no,” Stone moaned. “Oh, Jesus Christ, no, my God, no.” He stood, paralyzed with horror.

His father had been stabbed to death. His body was sprawled in the desk chair, his defaced head tilted all the way back. He was covered with deep, violent stab wounds, the mangled victim of a psychotic attacker.

Protruding from one of the wounds in his father’s side. Stone now saw, was a long, black-handled knife. A Sabatier knife, one of those from his father’s set in the kitchen, one of the ones Stone had sharpened so recently.

He stumbled crazily toward the body of his father, a low, keening cry escaping his throat. He would bring him to life, he would resuscitate him. It was possible. Surely he wasn’t so far gone. It was possible. He would save his life, he would fix him. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he screamed. He gasped, clawing at the body.

The doorbell had stopped, and then something hurtled against the door. He heard a tremendously loud crash.

There was no time to see what the noise was. He had to save his father’s life. He would save him.

Somewhere in the house were voices, men’s voices, people shouting. He could hear someone calling his name, but he would not answer now. No time. There was no time.

He put his hands on his father’s torn cheeks, held up the lifeless head, screaming with vocal cords that no longer could make a sound. No, no, he tried to say, leave me alone.

He caught a glimpse of blue through the drapes. Police. They wanted to come in, but there was no time.

No time. Stone tried to shout out at them. I have to save his life.

“Open up,” a loud voice said.

They had not come to help, some part of Stone’s brain told him. Leave. They are not here to save your father. Leave.

He would have to escape. For his father’s sake, he would have to escape.

20

Moscow

Finally, it was the visit to the Serbsky Institute that turned Stefan Kramer and his father into terrorists.

The mental deterioration of his brother, Avram Kramer, was, however, only the last straw. Sometimes Stefan believed that his family had been singled out by fate for a miserable existence. Driving home that night from Serbsky, Stefan’s father told him the full tale of his own private nightmare, his own imprisonment, for the first time.

He’d been captured by the Germans while fighting in the Great Patriotic War. In another country, in another time, he would have become a war hero; in Russia he was a traitor for having been so valorous and so foolhardy as to be captured.

In the camp he saw horrors that hardened him for the rest of his life.

One of his campmates, who’d been arrested for unspecified “anti-Soviet agitation,” refused to sign a confession, and so the authorities had inflicted on him one of the most famous cruelties. They had removed his pants and undershorts and seated him on the floor, while two sergeants sat on his legs, and the interrogator had placed the toe of his boot atop the poor man’s penis and testicles and had begun to press, slowly.

The man confessed within five seconds, just before he would have passed out.

Another prisoner had been wounded as seriously when an iron ramrod had been heated red-hot and placed against his anus, and had he not shouted out his guilt they would have plunged it in as far as it would go; even so, his anal membrane hemorrhaged and bled for days.

But Yakov Kramer had been spared – until the two zeks, political prisoners, had splashed acid in his face.

Yet not until later did his loathing for the Soviet system harden. It was the day when he’d first learned, some weeks after the fact, that Stalin had died. All the prisoners had been roused, as usual, at four o’clock, trundled off to the mess hall for “black cabbage soup,” which was made of nettles and was utterly unpalatable, and then sent off to the clay pit, where they dug clay to be made into bricks. On this shift they had more or less been left alone: the supervising guard stood idly by some distance away.

As he dug, Kramer looked at his fellow inmates. Their shaven heads were gray, and their miserable darting eyes had sunk into their heads, surrounded by a brownish discoloration. They looked like walking cadavers, and Kramer knew that he was so ugly no one could even bear to look at him.

Kramer struck up a conversation with a man who had recently come in from Moscow. What was it like there now? Yakov wanted to know. Was it worse, even, than before the war?

And the Muscovite had told him a story that had made the rounds in Moscow. It seemed that a Moscow district Party conference had taken place, at the end of which the secretary of the Party had called for a tribute to the late great man, Comrade Stalin, and of course everyone had stood and applauded. They beamed and stretched out their hands in the Russian manner and clapped loudly. And the ovation went on, and on. Five minutes, then ten minutes had gone by, and the members of the audience were so weakened they feared they would drop. Yet they could not stop clapping. The KGB was in attendance, and they were watching the audience carefully for signs of slackening enthusiasm. The audience continued to clap, weak and in pain, desperately. Finally, a local factory manager, who was standing at the front of the room with the Party leaders, took it upon himself to sit down, and with tremendous relief the rest of the room followed. And that night the factory manager was arrested. Well, this story was so widely told in Moscow, the man said, that it had to be true.

Kramer, listening aghast, threw his shovel deep into the earth and waited for a moment while the guard passed. “Stalin’s dead,” he muttered, “but his wardens live.”

That day, he vowed that, if ever he got out of there alive, he would never forget what had been done to him and to his brethren who had died in the prisons and the camps, and he would see to it that Russia never forgot, either….

In 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous “secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin, millions of zeks were suddenly released, Yakov among them. He later became friendly with a small group of zeks who had also survived what he’d been through. They helped one another adjust to life outside the camps, watching one another grow and raise children and still sustain within themselves a deep hatred for the system that had done to them what it had done.

The others seemed to get more and more embittered. They talked, increasingly, of terrorism – of stirring things up, venting their hostility, blowing something up.

One day in the early 1960s, a member of his group – Kramer wanted no part of it – decided to set off a bomb. Through a friend at the scientific-instruments factory where he worked, the man was able to get the components for a crude TNT bomb, and left it in a valise on Gorky Street. The bomb was even more powerful than they’d expected, and several innocent bystanders were badly hurt. He had slipped a letter to an American wire-service reporter, who published the barely literate broadside against the Soviet government.

This had happened decades ago. The amazing thing was that the man had never gotten caught.

“But sometimes,” Yakov said, concluding his story, “things can go right.”

“Yes,” his son replied. His eyes seemed vacant. “Sometimes they can.”

That night, Stefan decided to become a terrorist, and, late into the evening, father and son devised a campaign of terror designed to free Avram.

Stefan came over to his father’s apartment and sat at the kitchen table. Sonya was out for the evening, visiting a friend, which was fortunate: Yakov insisted that she not be involved.

“Nothing else will free Avram,” Stefan said. He was tall and lanky and wore a sweatshirt whose frayed sleeves were too short. He pulled at them nervously.

“But we can’t demand Avram’s release,” his father objected. “The authorities will know immediately who’s behind the terror. They’ll connect it right away to us–”

“No. That’s the beauty of my plan. We’ll demand the release of all political prisoners held in the Serbsky Institute. There are dozens of them – no one will suspect us.”

“Yes,” Yakov said, thinking aloud. “And we make the appeal private – a letter directly addressed to Gorbachev only. Yes. Release these people, and the violence stops. If you don’t, we threaten to go public with our demands. And the Kremlin will have to give in to protect themselves – it’s a matter of pure self-interest.”

“But why should the letter be private?”

“So the Kremlin can agree to our demands without losing face. Without appearing to be weak. Without fearing they’d be encouraging other acts of terrorism.”

“I see,” Stefan said, pulling again at his sleeves.

“But do you know anything about making bombs?”

After a moment’s pause, Stefan replied, “Yes. I do. I mean, not a tremendous amount – but I learned a bit in prison–”

Yakov gave a short, bitter laugh. “Your time there wasn’t altogether wasted. But without the equipment–”

“I can get it.”

Yakov shook his head.

“The question is,” Stefan said, “where do we do it?”

“We’ve got to attract maximum attention,” his father said. “Our government is skilled at covering things up, making them disappear, denying they ever happened. It’s got to be in public. A symbolic target.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Red Square, or the metro, or Central Telegraph.” he replied. “Such as one particular Kremlin leader with a particularly odious reputation.”

“Borisov,” Stefan suddenly exclaimed.

Borisov, the Central Committee’s head of the Administrative Agencies Department, was known as one of the most notorious apparatchiks in the immense Soviet nomenklatura, the privileged class. More than anyone else in the Soviet power structure, he had urged the widespread use of psychiatric hospitals to quell dissent. And now, after most of the psychiatric prisoners had been released, Borisov was agitating to restore this insidious form of punishment. People believed he was as close to a fiend as anyone alive, now that Stalin was dead.

“Borisov,” his father agreed. “Takoi khui!” he added. The prick.

“We’ll find out where he lives,” Stefan said. “That shouldn’t be hard to do.”

“Stefan,” Yakov said, involuntarily placing a hand up to the striated mass of scar tissue that disfigured his nose, his lips, and part of his eye. “What are we doing? I’m too old for this.”

Stefan compressed his lips. He suddenly went cold; he felt goose-flesh on the back of his neck. “It’s my job,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

Suddenly the door to the apartment opened, startling the two men.

It was Sonya. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m interrupting you two.”

“No, my dear,” Kramer said gently. “We were just finishing up.”

21

The militiaman in the narrow booth at 26 Kutuzov Prospekt was instructed to report any suspicious loiterers – he was, after all, protecting a building that housed members of the Central Committee – but rarely if ever did he have to pick up the phone. He sat in his booth, checking the identity of the drivers of cars entering the lot, nodding brusquely, and doing very little else. It wasn’t a very interesting job; in the winters it was cold, and he would wear two pairs of military-issue gloves.

The guard didn’t much like to read, but the loneliness of the post provided little other escape. So he read the newspapers – Pravda and Izvestiya and Evening Moscow and so on – and nodded officiously at the cars that passed the booth. In the middle of the night, not too many cars passed into the lot.

At three o’clock, he was relieved by the guard on the second night shift. The two guards chatted for ten minutes or so, scarcely watching the parking lot. Which was virtually silent, anyway.

But at that moment, a man entered the parking lot.

Dressed in the gray-quilted work coat of a laborer, Stefan Kramer walked by with the bored, lagging stride of a worker who would much rather be home asleep.

If the guards happened to see him slipping in, they would undoubtedly question him. Stefan would say that one of the damned elevators was broken, and he’d been rudely summoned from bed by the building’s superintendent. There was some sort of problem, either with the hoist cables or the sling or the landing-zone detector – the guy didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Hadn’t the guards gotten phoned orders from the superintendent to admit him? And the guards, whose primary instincts were to preserve their own jobs, would admit the guy who knew so much about elevators rather than suffer the wrath of a Central Committee pansy who had to, God forbid, walk down three flights of stairs.

But no one stopped Stefan.

The black Volga was at the far end of the large parking lot, just as he expected it to be. A few days earlier, Stefan had once again contacted his old cellmate from Lefortovo, Fyodorov, and asked him to find someone who knew something about the residents of this particular Central Committee apartment building. Fyodorov managed to turn up a car mechanic who’d done some work here, and who knew where Sergei Borisov parked his car.

Good; the car was out of sight of the sentry booth. No one could see him.

He set to work immediately, sliding himself underneath the car. The asphalt pavement was cold.

As he worked, his breath rose in clouds around him.

He’d molded the white plastic explosive, which Fyodorov had provided, into two sausages, then put them into plastic bags. Connected to each of these sausages was a blasting cap connected in turn to an electrically operated detonator, and both of these detonators were connected to a radio receiver – a pocket pager of the sort that Western physicians use on call. The pager’s speaker, which normally emits the beeping noise, had been removed and replaced with an electrical relay. When the unit received a signal from the transmitter – which would transmit up to several kilometers away – the relay would close a switch, completing a circuit, and the car would blow up.

Stefan placed one of the sausages under the gas tank and another at the front of the car, checked to make sure there were no wires showing; the first part of the job was done.

He inched his way, on his back, under Borisov’s car, then under another car, until he could get up without being seen from either the building or the guard booth. Leaving was a problem: better not to risk being questioned. So he spent what remained of the night in a janitor’s closet underneath a stairwell, as his old cellmate had suggested.

By dint of careful study, Stefan had learned quite a bit about Borisov’s habits. Fyodorov was most helpful in this. Stefan was able to learn when Borisov’s driver arrived; when Borisov customarily emerged from his apartment; which of the many black Volgas in the parking lot at 26 Kutuzov Prospekt was Borisov’s; and when the guard changed at the parking-lot booth.

At six-thirty in the morning, when the night staff left and the day staff arrived, Stefan emerged with a small group of floor guards.

For the next hour, he waited in his father’s old car, just down the block, from which he could see all the comings and goings at 26 Kutuzov Prospekt. At exactly seven-thirty, Borisov’s chauffeur arrived.

Stefan began to have second thoughts.

The chauffeur, a young, plain-looking Russian, looked like the sort of guy who had a wife and maybe a kid or two at home. Stefan disliked seeing him die; the chauffeur was no monster. But he’d have to go with Borisov; there was nothing to be done.

Stefan had accepted the very difficult idea of taking innocent human life.

At seven-forty, Borisov came out of the building with the chauffeur, five minutes later than Fyodorov had predicted. Stefan recognized him instantly from his photographs. He was a pudgy, self-contented man in an expensive suit that might have fitted him five or six years ago. He had evidently put on weight since.

The chauffeur escorted Borisov to the Volga and then knelt down to inspect the underside of the car, in a gesture that appeared nothing more than habit. It was virtually unthinkable that a car belonging to a member of the Central Committee would be tampered with in any way. Such things rarely if ever happened in Russia.

Finding nothing, the chauffeur got into the driver’s seat.

Stefan watched the Volga pull out of the lot in front of a silver Mercedes-Benz, watched the chauffeur nod at the guard in the booth and pull into the traffic on Kutuzov Prospekt. Stefan followed a good distance behind: no reason to arouse suspicion, since he knew the route Borisov always took.

The thought of the act he was about to commit – the enormity of it – sickened Stefan, but he also knew that, if they didn’t go through with it this time, he risked the discovery of the bomb, and the failure of their entire mission.

Borisov’s car traveled down Kutuzov Prospekt, turned onto the adjoining Kalinin Prospekt, a major thoroughfare, then stopped at a traffic light. Borisov appeared to be concentrating on a sheaf of papers.

Quickly Stefan screwed the seven-inch-long antenna into the transmitter and put his forefinger on the button.

He closed his eyes for an instant and could see the face of his brother before him. He whispered, “For you, Avram,” and pressed the button.

The sound was deafening, even hundreds of feet away. The Volga exploded into a ball of dark-orange fire as the car split in two and pieces of it sprayed the street, still afire. An enormous column of smoke rose; pedestrians gaped in amazement. The job was done.

One of the pieces of the explosion landed on the sidewalk very near Andrew Langen, a second secretary in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, who was in truth employed by the Soviet Russian Division of the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. Langen knew very little about explosives, but he had recently attended an Agency seminar on terrorism, and he was quick-thinking enough to pick up this peculiar bit of detritus and take it to work with him. In the process, he gave himself quite a painful burn on his left hand.

The Borisov bombing rated front-page treatment around the world, from London’s lurid News of the World and assorted other British tabloids to Le Monde of Paris and Bild Zeitung of Hamburg. The New York Post ran a full-page headline: “Red Boss Slain.” On the front page of The Wall Street Journal, under the heading “What’s News,” the news appeared with typical journal restraint: “A prominent Soviet official, Sergei I. Borisov, was killed in Moscow when a bomb planted in his automobile was detonated on one of the city’s main boulevards. No group claimed responsibility.” The New York Times featured an analysis on its Op-Ed page by a Soviet expert at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute who dilated on domestic opposition to the Kremlin. Ted Koppel devoted an episode of “Nightline” to the assassination. TASS, the Soviet news service that had become so much more open in recent years, did not mention it.

22

The President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, does not have an official residence – no White House or Buckingham Palace. He maintains a residence in Moscow, a dacha near Moscow, and a dacha by the Black Sea. Unlike his predecessors, who most often lived in the building at 26 Kutuzov Prospekt, Mikhail Gorbachev preferred to stay at a dacha just west of the city, on Rublyovskoye Shosse.

Gorbachev had summoned his guests late at night, after midnight. Normally, he did not keep nocturnal hours; he was usually in bed by eleven.

And rarely, if ever, did Gorbachev hold meetings in his dacha. His three guests trembled with anticipation, knowing that the matter was of the utmost urgency.

The three Zil limousines pulled past the do-not-enter sign in front of the dacha, where each was stopped by a pair of armed guards, who inspected the passengers and then waved them by. As they disembarked, the three men were inspected by another set of guards, who searched them for concealed weapons.

The three – the KGB’s Andrei Pavlichenko; Anatoly Lukyanov, who was one of Gorbachev’s most trusted aides; and Aleksandr Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s closest ally on the Politburo – entered the dacha quietly. They passed through the front sitting room, which was decorated by Raisa Gorbacheva in rich English fabrics, to the President’s study.

Gorbachev was sitting behind his desk, his bald pate illuminated by a round circle of light from a desk lamp. He was dressed casually, in gray slacks and a blue pullover sweater. The man radiated confidence and strength, but he also looked tired. The smudges of gray under his eyes were darker than usual.

“Please, come in,” Gorbachev said. “Sit.” He indicated several chairs.

When they were seated, he began. He seemed to be under considerable strain. “I’m sorry to disturb you – take you away from your wives or your mistresses.” He gave a brief smile. “But you are men I know I can trust. And I need your advice.”

Each of his visitors nodded.

“We are faced with a problem of great consequence. This is the second act of terrorism in Moscow in two weeks,” Gorbachev continued, knowing that his visitors had heard the news about Borisov. “Of the members of the Politburo, you are the only ones I trust fully. I need your help.” He turned to his newly appointed KGB chief. “Andrei Dmitrovich. Sergei Borisov was your friend.”

Pavlichenko flushed with anger, biting his lower lip. He bowed his head, then looked up. “That’s right.”

Aleksandr Yakovlev, a balding man whose tinted glasses set off a pudgy nose, interjected: “Is it possible that these acts are being perpetrated by mere dissidents? Is it possible?”

“Yes,” said Lukyanov. “These terrorists have somehow managed to gain access to equipment made in the West, perhaps Europe, perhaps America. They must be working with anti-Soviet elements–”

“No.” The KGB chairman interrupted, almost timidly at first.

“What makes you say that?” Gorbachev asked.

Pavlichenko bit his lower lip again, and then spoke, as if combating a powerful resolve not to say a word. “I mentioned at the Politburo meeting that the explosive used in one of the bombs was Composition C-4, which is made in the United States.”

“Yes,” Lukyanov said impatiently, “but what–”

“I didn’t say everything.” He let out a long, measured breath, rubbed the flat of his palm against his jaw. “I’ve got my people hard at work on this. And they’ve come up with some results even I didn’t want to hear. The stuff isn’t just any C-4. It’s a particular, unique formulation.” He looked around the room, then squarely at Gorbachev, and shrugged. “Made only for the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The shock did not register immediately on Gorbachev’s face, and when it did, the barest flicker of fear showed in his eyes. He spoke steadily. “What are you suggesting?”

“Look, the Americans would be crazy to do anything to undermine you, right? But that assumes the conventional logic of power politics,” the KGB chairman said gravely.

“I don’t follow,” Yakovlev said.

“Tensions between Moscow and Washington are at an all-time low,” Pavlichenko said. “Since the war, anyway. So who in Washington in their right minds would want us out of power?”

Gorbachev shrugged. “A lot of people would like to see me pushing papers back in Stavropol.”

“No doubt,” Pavlichenko said. “But they’re not in Washington.”

“There, too, I’d imagine,” Gorbachev said.

“The military-industrial complex,” suggested Lukyanov, whose understanding of America was not terribly sophisticated.

“All right,” Pavlichenko said. “We can assume anything. No doubt there are reactionary forces everywhere, who would benefit from the old, vintage Cold War. Such as the entire Communist Party apparat. Members of the Politburo, who are about to lose their jobs. Yes. No doubt.”

“But–?” Gorbachev said.

“I’m suggesting that the terrorism may well be coordinated directly by American intelligence. And I am suggesting that the Americans may – may – be working with forces within the Soviet Union. Perhaps within our ranks. I am saying that there may be forces within our country that are trying to unseat us.”