The Moscow Club

23

Moscow

If it’s not easy being an American woman in Moscow, Charlotte Harper had decided, it’s just about impossible being a married American woman separated from your husband. Moscow, as everyone knew, was hardly bustling with eligible males.

On arriving in Moscow a year and a half ago, she had kept to herself, avoiding any romantic entanglements, protected by the simple lack of opportunities. She was determined to consider her separation from Charlie merely temporary – they’d work things out, he’d learn to respect her need to work, and all that psychobabble stuff.

But it did not take long for her to grow terribly lonely. Two months ago, she had briefly become romantically involved – if “romantically” was the right word – with the press attaché at the U.S. Embassy, a middle-aged man named Frank Paradiso, who was no doubt a CIA official.

She was torn about it, knowing in her heart that fear and loneliness were the wrong reasons to become attached to someone, that her marriage was far more important than any dalliance. When she had first met Frank, at a press briefing at the embassy, she had been attracted by his energy and his sarcastic humor. He seemed intelligent and sensitive, and he came without cargo: he was divorced. He had asked her out to lunch first, at the National Hotel, and then to dinner at the Praga, and one thing had led to another. It had lasted fully a month. Since then she’d spent her nights alone – often lonely, but at the same time feeling a bit better about herself than she had with Paradiso.

Though on depressed days she thought she might have passed her peak, Charlotte knew that she was attractive, or, as she preferred to think of it, telegenic. Her blond hair and radiant smile projected well against a backdrop of the Kremlin. But, of course, the reporting was what was important, or so she told herself.

She had the reputation for being the best-connected American journalist in Moscow, one unpleasant result of which was that some of her colleagues looked upon her with envy. The prevailing notion was that TV reporters were useless here anyway – all they really had time to do, in the two or three minutes they had on the nightly newscast, was to read off an item that had appeared in Pravda, show a clip of an interview with some Soviet apparatchik, and do a stand-up in front of the Kremlin or Saint Basil’s Cathedral.

All those ink-stained wretches from the world of print journalism – The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal – fancied themselves serious observers of the Soviet scene. Everyone else, they were sure, was just window-dressing. The wire-service reporters were little more than court stenographers, they felt, and the worst of the bunch were the TV reporters, who got all the fame and recognition and didn’t know shit about Russia. Didn’t even speak Russian. And to some extent the snobs were right; but Charlotte was an exception.

In a few years, she had become one of the stars of the evening news. Her editor seemed to think she could shoot up the ranks, maybe even make weekend anchor, within a year or two. As they put it, the big thing at the networks these days was “glamorizing” the Moscow beat.

But she’d had it with Moscow. Had it with the gray skies and the huge puddles of grimy slush, the fierce crowds, the pushing and shoving in the metro, the empty stores. Paradoxically, as much as she’d grown to despise this forlorn city, she was fed up, too, with the isolation that being a correspondent here forced upon you.

After a year and a half – despite her fascination with the language, the history, the culture – she was aching for home. She wanted, maybe, to get assigned to the State Department, to get back on the fast track. To return home. And she wanted to repair what she had with Charlie Stone, regain that old happiness, have a family.

She was sick of Moscow. And yet, every once in a while, something exciting happened and she was glad she was there.

Only a few days ago, a high Soviet official had been assassinated when a bomb in his car went off on Kalinin Prospekt. It was an extraordinary story: the first time in her memory that such an act of terrorism had taken place in public in the Soviet Union. But virtually nothing was known about it.

If anyone could ferret out anything about the story, Charlotte knew, she could.

She arrived at the ABC office, spent a few minutes chatting idly with Vera, the sweet, tiny Russian woman who cleaned, did various errands, and made tea, and Ivan, the middle-aged, bearded man who looked like a peasant of old and who read through the Soviet press for her. Both of them, no doubt, had to report on her to the KGB, but they were kindly, benevolent people nonetheless, who simply liked to do their jobs well.

Both of them had opinions about who might have assassinated Borisov – the Estonians, Vera believed; plain old dissidents, Ivan maintained. But there was nothing in the newspapers, and not even a mention of it on the Soviet evening news program “Vremya,” which Vera had videotaped for Charlotte, as she always did.

Every once in a while, Charlotte got ideas from just sitting around talking with Ivan and Vera. They liked her; she spoke to them in Russian. And she liked them. But they knew no more than anyone else in Russia did about this, not a damn thing.

A telex had come in from the head of the network news division in New York, who wanted to come to Moscow and wanted her to arrange a meeting with … Gorbachev. Of course. The big guys in the network always thought they could just issue orders like that to their employees in Moscow. She shook her head and smiled.

Then she went through the coils of paper that had spewed forth during the night from the teletype, glancing through news dispatches from around the world, where of course the Borisov story figured prominently.

She settled back in her desk chair and thought. Somehow she had to crack the story. A few minutes later, she made a brief, cryptic phone call, then went out to her car.

In an hour, she was sitting in the dining room of a new cooperative restaurant that served hearty Georgian food, speaking with the editor of a prominent Soviet journal. He was a good, reliable source; often he “leaked” things to her, information he had picked up from friends in the new Congress of People’s Deputies. For his part, he trusted her discretion, knowing she would take care to disguise where she’d received her information and would treat whatever he gave her with sensitivity.

“No,” the editor said, shaking his head, his mouth full of chicken tabaka. “We hear nothing of this.” He preferred speaking in English, and he spoke it well. “But you’re aware that the man who was assassinated – this Borisov – was known to be a good friend of the chairman of the KGB.”

“I’ve heard it,” Charlotte said.

The editor shrugged and gave her a significant glance. “What does that tell you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, preferring to hear his interpretation. “You tell me.”

He shrugged again. “It tells me that there may be some very serious power struggle within our own government. Gorbachev depends upon Pavlichenko, the man he appointed to KGB. He needs Pavlichenko’s support, right?”

“Right. The guy needs the KGB to keep him in power – so he can carry out his reforms.”

“Yes. Well, then, maybe there are some people – is it not possible? – who are not sympathetic with Gorbachev’s people.”

“Obviously, but – people who’d resort to terrorism? You mean people within the government?”

The editor shrugged again.

After lunch, she went over to the old U.S. Embassy building on Tschaikovsky Street, where she had a quick cup of coffee with her friend Josh Litten of The New York Times, then stopped by her mailbox in the press section upstairs. There were the usual assortment of magazines, a couple of personal letters, a statement from her New York bank. Nothing much.

She returned to the office and glanced at the news coming over the teletype from the Associated Press wire service. Nothing.

Then she looked again.

It was the name “Stone” that caught her attention. She looked again. The first words that assembled themselves were “slaying” and “Alfred Stone” and then, aghast, she leaned over the coiled teletype printout and read in disbelief.

Alfred Stone, the Harvard historian jailed in the 1950s for allegedly spying for the Soviet Union, had been found murdered.

She all but stopped breathing.

Alfred Stone. That dear, sweet man. No.

And, the story continued, the murderer was believed to be the man’s own son, Charles Stone.

Charlie. It wasn’t possible.

Reeling, she tore off the length of printout, staggered backward into her office, and collapsed onto the couch. She felt as if she were about to faint.

An hour later, she was still rereading the story, still in shock.

Charlie Stone.

He was innocent. He had to be.

That document he had stolen from Lehman’s archives – could this all have to do with that? Something about a code, a number. Something about Lehman and Alfred Stone and … what was it, now? He had mentioned this woman in Moscow with whom Alfred Stone had met – Sonya? Yes. Sonya Kunetskaya. Charlie had wanted her to track Sonya down. Somehow he thought Sonya would lead them to the truth about what had happened to Alfred Stone. But that had all been years and years ago.

Hadn’t it?

Surely this was no coincidence.

Charlie could not have murdered his father. It was absolutely unthinkable.

He needed her help now. There was no time to lose.

24

Saugus, Massachusetts

The motel bed was littered with Styrofoam cartons, plastic soft-drink bottles, empty Quarter Pounder boxes. Stone awoke, rolled over, and heard the crunch of Styrofoam.

He looked around the motel room, glimpsed the empty vodka bottles, remembered at once where he was.

Saugus. He was in a motel in Saugus, eight miles or so north of Boston.

He was a wreck. His eyes were bleary; he hadn’t shaved for five days, since his father’s murder. He had left the motel room only to get food and drink.

How had he gotten here? It amazed him that he had found the strength to get to this godforsaken motel on the main drag in Saugus, a tawdry succession of strip joints, cheap steak places, and several bad Chinese restaurants.

He had suffered some sort of breakdown, he was quite sure, yet he had been marginally able to function, as if in suspended animation.

He had, after all, escaped.

He flashed back to awakening on the floor of his father’s study, discovering his father brutally murdered. Something had snapped in him. He remembered holding his father’s bloodied head, staring at it, willing the eyes to open.

And then there had been a crash at the door, and three policemen had burst in, and, as crazed as he was, he knew what they were there for: to arrest him. He had heard them say it, and some powerful part of his brain had told him not to stand there any longer, but to run.

He had vaulted through the back door, through yard after yard. He had run out in the middle of Garden Street, narrowly avoiding being hit, and waved down a cab, and told the driver to just drive. Made no fucking difference where, he had said. Just drive! I just want to get out of the city. The driver had pulled over and demanded to see his money; Stone had waved his wallet at him. Stone had gotten lucky: the driver had actually driven him to Saugus, where he instructed him to stop at this cheap motel, then got out, throwing far too much money at the driver for his trouble.

For days thereafter, while he waited for the shock to ebb, he existed on pizzas and Chinese food delivered to his room, vodka and Scotch and beer and McDonald’s burgers he picked up on the rare ventures he allowed himself. So disreputable was the motel’s usual clientele that the owner said nothing. Some guy on a bender, he told his wife one afternoon, when she was unable to get into Stone’s room to clean. They knew the oddball as Smith, but that was hardly unusual: half of their guests were named Smith.

Now, this morning, the shock had finally worn off, leaving only grief, anger, and puzzlement. He remembered, after his mother had died, he had been overwhelmed with deep, unfathomable sadness, the sort of sadness only a young boy can feel, a belief that the world might as well end. And then something had happened: his sadness had metamorphosed into anger, a hard fist of rage – at his father, at his friends, his schoolmates. For a while, he was a holy terror, but it had gotten him through the worst of the pain. And now the unspeakable terror of seeing his father murdered had mutated into a vast reserve of fury.

It would get him through again.

For the first time in five days, he knew he was strong and capable enough to leave the motel. He had put a few things together. Whoever had killed his father had also killed Saul Ansbach – and who else?

But why hadn’t they killed him, too? Surely they could have. The fact that they hadn’t done so made it clear this was a grotesque setup. The logic, however, eluded him.

Perhaps Saul really had been right. Maybe this all had something to do with a rogue operation. What if someone, or some group of people, with tremendous resources believed he was on the trail of secrets of great importance – and now they wanted the secrets to stay buried?

But who could know what the truth was? James Angleton, the legendary CIA chief of counterintelligence, had once borrowed a phrase from T. S. Eliot to describe the business of espionage and counterintelligence as a “wilderness of mirrors.” That it was: the truth was often concealed behind a reflection of a reflection of a reflection….

A few things he knew for certain: that he was being watched, that he had somehow to establish his innocence, and that he could no longer trust anybody. He could not work within the system, because the system, down to the local police force, had been infiltrated.

Parnassus, too, had been compromised; Lenny Wexler had made that clear. Stone could no longer trust anyone there.

Yet he had to return to Boston.

He needed to get to his safe-deposit box at the bank, to get his money, his passport, and the false passport, which by now had to be waiting for him at the post office.

And the dossier. He had to get the dossier he’d left in his father’s house, the dossier and the photographs, if they were still there. If they hadn’t been taken.

He had to return to the scene of the nightmare.

There was only one way out, and that was to discover who was involved in this thing, this rogue operation or whatever it was. Find them and confront them, threaten to reveal their existence.

Only with such incontrovertible data would Stone be able to defend himself, protect himself. No longer was it a question of clearing his father’s name. Now it was a matter of survival.

Charlie Stone, however, could not return to Cambridge. He would have to return as someone else.

He got up from the bed and walked over to the mirror. He stared at himself for the first time in days, and was shocked. He looked twenty or thirty years older. Partly it was the growth of beard, partly the large bluish circles under his red eyes.

For an instant. Stone was quite sure he could smell smoke, sulfuric and acrid. The smell of gunshot.

He was no longer in a motel room. No. He was sitting in a marsh, on the shores of the small lake in Maine where he and his father used to go duck-hunting, twenty miles north of the lodge. His hands, his feet were numb from the cold.

He’d been sitting in the cramped blind for hours, that camouflage structure of wire and leaves that looks, to a duck, like shrubbery. Next to him was his father, hearty and fit, whispering to him. The two of them had been sitting there so long they had begun to feel like part of the forest, the dark of the early morning and the quiet making them oddly reflective.

Charlie was eleven, and this was his first time hunting. He didn’t want to kill the ducks, pretty creatures. He didn’t want to do it.

Sitting there, Charlie got colder and colder. It always happened that way: you sweated mightily while you set up, feeling ridiculously overdressed, and then, suddenly, having burned up so much energy, you’d shiver with the cold, sitting. Sitting and waiting.

“Listen, Charlie,” Alfred Stone now said, gently. “Don’t even think of them as living beings. They’re targets. All right? They’re part of nature. Just like the chicken your mother makes. That’s all.”

Shivering, Charlie shook his head and did not reply. He watched the decoys bobbing at the lake’s edge, a few feet away. Watched the steam rise from the thermos of hot coffee. Watched the sun rise in streaks of orange and red.

“Crouch down,” Alfred Stone said, so quietly. “There. Look.”

And then – the glorious, unforgettable sight of the birds suddenly appearing over the treetops, their wings flapping furiously, four or five of them. As Alfred Stone gave the duck call to signal them in, Charlie steeled his resolve. His hand was so cold he hesitated to touch the shotgun’s trigger guard.

Then he saw the birds freeze, setting their wings, locking rigid, and zooming in from downwind, like miniature 747s coming in for a landing.

“Come on, now, Charlie,” his father whispered.

Charlie stiffened his shoulders and clicked off the safety, just as he’d been taught to do, and then, just as the birds flared their wings to land, he did it. He fired.

The first shot missed.

But the second: a dream shot. The feathers flew. The bird dropped like a bag of pennies, and it was over. A matter of seconds.

Charlie looked up, beaming, and caught the pride in his father’s eyes.

Now, looking at himself in the smudged motel mirror, thinking of the guns and the death, Charlie thought of Alfred Stone, dead, his eyes staring, and he shuddered.

It was time to re-enter the world. Stone opened the motel-room door, momentarily stunned by the bracing fresh air. It was morning, surprisingly bright and warm, a perfect October day. At the discount drugstore across Route 1, he found what he wanted: shaving cream, some disposable razors, some shampoo, a tube of tanning lotion. At the cash register he saw a stack of Boston Globes.

His picture was on the front page.

PORTRAIT OF A KILLER, the headline read. There it was, a photograph, taken from his CIA file, its coat-and-tie respectability clashing with the luridness of the headline. No one was in line; Stone picked up the newspaper and scanned the story. The whole article had been faked up, supplied by someone intent on portraying him as dangerous and crazed, a brilliant and unbalanced employee of the Central Intelligence Agency who had suddenly and without reason lost his grip on sanity. The reporter had seized upon the information supplied both by the Boston police and unnamed “government sources” and created out of it a persuasive mosaic that was the stuff of tabloids. A large quantity of heroin and PCP, “angel dust,” had been found in Stone’s bedroom at the house, the article said, which indicated to police that the son might well have been in a violent altered state. There was a reference to the grotesque murder of Saul Ansbach, and an allegation that Stone might be a suspect in that case as well. There were baffled remarks from several of Stone’s former colleagues at Georgetown and M.I.T., then a recitation of Alfred Stone’s tortured past, which gave the story an even more peculiar twist.

“Can I help you?”

The clerk was a teenage girl, chewing bubble gum.

Stone looked at the shampoo and the shaving supplies. “Just– just the paper, the tanning stuff, and the shampoo, please,” he said. “I’ll put this other stuff back.” He had an idea: better not to shave. “And where do you have hair products?”

Half a mile away, at a Salvation Army store, he found a grotesque yellowish-brown woolen overcoat that was too long, tattered pants, a pair of old leather boots that almost fit, and a few other bedraggled changes of clothing. A black-and-orange display in a toy-and-novelty store down the block gave him an idea. It was mid-October, almost Halloween. He bought some spirit gum and a bag of black stage-makeup hair.

When he got back to the motel, he settled his bill, then returned to the room. He shampooed his hair and applied the black hair dye, which, according to the instructions, would disappear after six washings. Half an hour later, he toweled his hair dry and saw, to his satisfaction, that his hair was now several shades darker than his usual brown. Then he doused his hair with a quantity of Vitalis. It looked as if he had not washed it in months. Slowly and carefully he daubed the instant-tanning lotion on his face, neck, and hands, and worked it in carefully. Within a few hours, his skin had taken on the deep color of someone who has spent a great deal of time in the sun.

He applied the spirit gum to his beard and carefully worked on the costume hair. After ten minutes of steady labor, he inspected the results in the mirror. His beard was a long, wispy, dreadful-looking thing. But the overall result was dramatic.

With his filthy, ragged clothes, his beard, and his stringy hair – added to his sunburned, dissolute face – he looked like a vagrant, a mendicant Rasputin. A close inspection would give him away. But from ten feet he looked like an entirely different person, the sort of person that most people don’t look at very closely at all.

25

Silver Spring, Maryland

The man from the Soviet Embassy and his friend from the White House met for breakfast at a small diner in Silver Spring. They both agreed that, though it was impossible realistically for them to meet in absolute secrecy, it was nevertheless a good idea to attract as little attention as possible. Anyone who observed them – and in this place it was unlikely anyone would – would think they were social acquaintances of the sort Washington seems to breed.

The diner was an old-fashioned place with Formica tables and booths with jukeboxes. A large sign in front said simply EAT, a throwback touch that had attracted Bayliss’s attention on his morning drive to work one day several weeks earlier.

Each of them ordered coffee, which was served in sturdy white ceramic mugs, and Malarek had two eggs over easy, a rasher of bacon, and wheat toast. Bayliss was impressed with Malarek’s familiarity with American greasy-spoon menus.

The tension was palpable. “It was goddamned foolproof,” Bayliss told his Soviet friend. “Everything, down to the arrest, the charges brought against him. Damn it! So what the hell happened?”

“Apparently our people administered an insufficient dose of the chemical. Stone awoke too early. They wanted to be cautious about administering the dosage. I can’t entirely fault them for it.” His English, Bayliss noticed, was just about perfect, his accent minimal. “But had your people arrived sooner than they did–”

“It was far too complex, too elaborate,” Bayliss said, shaking his head.

“The plan was a good one, I have no doubt of that,” Malarek answered, with what struck Bayliss as defensiveness. “I’m sure you reahze the advantages of this approach: as soon as the interrogation was completed, he’d have been found to have killed himself in prison, deeply contrite over his wasted life, and so forth and so on.”

Bayliss looked up sharply. He had lost his appetite now. He bowed his head, then covered his eyes with one hand. “I’d never have imagined,” he said in a low voice, “that I’d ever be involved in sanctioning a murder.”

“We’re doing the right thing,” Malarek told him soothingly.

Bayliss rubbed his eyes. “This is difficult for me.” He raised his head and resumed thickly: “All right. Nothing is lost. The local police forces are using the NCIC, the National Crime Information Computer, out of the fugitive bureau at FBI headquarters here in Washington. The Massachusetts State Police fugitive squad have unmarked cars throughout the state; security on public transit has been notified. The guy’s name’s been posted everywhere. He’s not going to be able to go anywhere. We’ve got court orders, fugitive-flight warrants, search warrants, you name it. They’ve gone through his phone bills, address books, his Rolodex – the works. Every place he turns will be covered. He’s bound to realize that he’s got no choice but to turn himself in. And then we’ve got him.”

“If you know where he is,” Malarek pointed out, spreading butter on a slice of wheat toast. “Otherwise …” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged.

“He’s wanted not only for murder but for a rather serious, though unspecified, violation of U.S. treason laws. After all, he is an employee of the CIA. He’s a wanted man. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Malarek shrugged again, his expression unreadable.

“But there has to be a way to talk the guy down,” Bayliss insisted. “Lure him in, keep him alive. Alive he’d be more useful to us, help plug the leaks.”

“I think this plan will prove quite adequate,” Malarek said, knowing that it would not do at all, that more, much more, would have to be done.

26

Saugus, Massachusetts

Stone found a pay phone a few blocks away from the motel. It was open to the elements, and with the traffic noise it was hard to hear.

Who could he call?

He wondered whether he could rely on his old friend from his Boston days. Chip Rosen, now a metropolitan reporter for the Boston Globe. Perhaps.

Then he remembered Peter Sawyer, the private detective in Boston who’d taught him how to pick locks. He had lived upstairs from the apartment Charlotte and Stone had shared when Stone was teaching at M.I.T. They’d gotten to be good friends, and although they barely kept in touch, Stone trusted Sawyer implicitly.

He dialed Sawyer’s number, got an answering machine, and was leaving a brief message without giving a name, knowing that Sawyer would recognize the voice, when all of a sudden Sawyer himself picked up the phone.

“Christ, where the fuck are you?”

“Peter, you know I can’t–”

“The phone. Right. Listen, man, are you in some kind of mess.”

“I didn’t do it. You know that.”

“Come on! Of course I know it. Jesus, what a fucking disaster! As soon as I heard about it, I asked around. It’s got to be a setup.”

“Peter, I need your help.”

“What’s all that noise in the background? Where’re you calling from, the middle of the Mass. Turnpike?”

“I’ve been framed, Peter. I need help.”

“You’re telling me. They’re all over the place, looking for you.”

“Who?”

“Who? Who do you think? The cops, probably Uncle, the Fee-bees, too.”

“Uncle?”

“Uncle Sam. The FBI. It’s a big thing. Whoever did this wants your ass. Don’t even think about turning yourself in, Charlie. Listen. In about a minute, I want you to terminate this call.”

“Trace?”

“Right. Keep calling back; no call should last longer than two minutes. All right? And don’t bother calling the cops.”

“But you’ve got friends, don’t you? You were a cop once.”

“Forget it. They’ve been asking me questions – they’re talking to anyone who knows you.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know the whole thing’s a frame, and a brilliant one. Believe me, I asked my share of questions when I heard it was you, buddy.”

“I was drugged.”

“So I hear.”

“The Globe said they found heroin in my bedroom and in my apartment.”

“I’m sure they did. Whoever murdered your father planted the shit, too. Had to be. Hang up, Charlie.”

Stone found another pay phone across the street. He noticed as he walked that people were going out of their way to avoid him. The disguise was working.

He dialed Sawyer’s number again, and this time Sawyer answered on the first ring.

“You believe me, Peter, don’t you?” Stone said quietly. “I mean, you don’t even have any doubt, right?”

“Your prints are on the knife, you won’t be surprised to know.”

“Jesus! Of course they are. I sharpened the whole set, Peter. I used them a number of times.” A middle-aged woman walked toward him as if she wanted to use the phone, then turned away in disgust.

“My point exactly. But the thing is, some of the prints were smudged, and not by human skin oil. By something like rubber gloves. Not something like, but precisely that. Disposable rubber gloves, the kind that have talcum powder on the inside and the outside. So there’s also traces of talc on the knife.”

“How the hell do you know all this?”

“I got a friend of mine on the job to get me a copy of the police report. Before they locked it up.”

“Let me call you back.”

Five minutes later, Stone found a phone inside a newsstand, and as he picked it up the vendor began to yell at him: “Get out of here unless you’re going to buy something.”

Silently, Stone left. After a long walk, he found another phone, several blocks away.

“So what do I do?”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Hide out for a bit, until the search blows over. After a while, you know, they’ll give up. Business goes on as usual, police resources are limited. Get yourself a lawyer, maybe. I don’t know what the fuck you should do.”

“I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“I wish I could hide you here. But this is one of the first places they’d look. They’ll be looking at your friends’ houses, anyplace you might be likely to go in Boston – and especially New York. Plain-clothesmen, unannounced visits, the works. I’ve already had a couple of visits. Don’t come near me, Charlie. I hate to say it. Promise me you’ll stay out of town.”

“I’ll see.”

“Jesus!” Sawyer exploded. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Your name is being read off at police roll calls at all stations. They’ve got flyers in all the patrol cars. And your father’s house – forget about it.”

“Why?”

“That’s the numero uno place they’ll be watching. You go back to Boston, it’s suicide.”

“I can’t talk anymore. Listen, Peter, I appreciate it. Everything. I mean it.”

“Forget about it, Charlie.”

“I’ll call you later on. Peter, I need your help. Badly.”

“I’m sorry–”

“What do you mean, sorry?”

“There’s rumors.”

“About me.”

“I don’t want to lose my license. That’s what I’m hearing. I wish I could help you, Charlie, but I can’t. Stay away from me. For you and for me.”

Stone hung up the phone and hailed a taxi. None would stop; none would even slow down for the vagrant with the long beard and the greasy hair. Finally, he set off for Boston on foot.

27

Cambridge

A little over four hours later, Stone was standing in front of the granite steps of the Cambridge Post Office, Central Square branch. Along the way he had acquired a shopping cart, which he had stolen from in front of a supermarket, and in it some trash bags filled with garbage.

He had the advantage of surprise. His adversaries, whether they were police or intelligence or a private group of fanatics, could not reasonably expect him to return to Boston. No one but a crazy person would do it. But how closely could they really be watching, how far-reaching was their surveillance? They could be anywhere, or nowhere.

In front of the post office three cars were idling: a police car, an old Dodge, a fairly new Chrysler. Stone stood behind his shopping cart, watching them. All three of the drivers were waiting. After a few minutes, the Dodge left. The driver of the Chrysler seemed to be consulting a map.

It was a risk, but everything was a risk now. Yet it was unlikely that the police car was staking out the post office – no one knew he had rented a box. There was only a key, and Stone had it in his pocket.

Two other vagrants were sitting on the post-office steps, and both of them watched him silently as he rolled his cart by. Now what? You didn’t just abandon the cart if it contained all your earthly possessions.

Stone began pulling the cart up the stairs, a step at a time, then rolled it through the doors. Nothing happened; no one followed. Completely safe.

His post-office box was off to the left, against the far wall. Would it seem strange for a shopping-bag man to have a post-office box? But no one was watching.

In the box was a supermarket circular and a yellow slip of paper that informed him that Mr. Robert Gill had a registered and certified envelope. To get it he would have to go to the registry window.

He walked across the post-office lobby to the line, in the slow gait he had perfected on the long walk from Saugus. The woman in front of him, who looked as if she might be some city bureaucrat on her lunch hour, stared at him.

The Boston Globe. His picture had been printed for several days running, in the Globe and certainly in the Herald, the tabloid for the common man. Did she recognize him? Stone studied the floor. She turned around and glared at the slow-moving clerk. People never actually expected to see a killer themselves. Charles Manson could be standing in the express line at the supermarket and no one would give him a second thought unless he had more than twelve items in his cart.

Finally, it was his turn. Silently, he shoved the yellow slip at the clerk.

The clerk gazed at him with unveiled amusement. “You have any identification?”

Identification!

Ah, the driver’s license! He remembered that he had Robert Gill’s driver’s license in his wallet; he removed it and pushed it across the metal counter through the window.

The clerk stared at it and then at Stone. “This isn’t you.” Indeed, the picture bore almost no resemblance to him.

Stone looked up at the clerk plaintively. “I grew a beard,” he said in a low growl.

The clerk looked again, then shrugged. Two minutes later. Stone had Robert Gill’s brand-new passport.

He got the cart down the stairs more easily than he had gotten it up, and wheeled it down Mass. Ave. Next stop: the bank. But the police station was two blocks away, and there were too many police cruisers in the area. Any one of them might contain an especially sharp-eyed cop. Stone took a left and wheeled the cart down a steep hill.

Within fifteen minutes, he was in Harvard Square, in front of the Adams Trust Bank. His father had a safe-deposit box here, on which Charlie was the “cotenant,” as the bank called it: he had filled out a signature card and had a key to it. Cotenants have “right of survivorship” – everything in his father’s box now belonged to him.

He always kept the key in his wallet. The box held cash, and Stone needed it.

But the bank was dangerous. A vagrant was sure to arouse suspicion, especially in a bank that catered to Cambridge’s richest citizens.

As he approached the bank’s entrance with his shopping cart, he noticed a policeman watching him. “Hey,” the policeman called out. “What are you doing?”

Stone looked down and kept going.

“I’m talking to you. Get the hell out of here. You can’t be here.”

There was nothing to do, short of revealing himself, so Stone wheeled the cart around without saying a word.

Half an hour later, he left the cart in an alley and approached the bank from another direction. The cop was gone. He pushed the revolving door and went in.

On the streets he was invisible; in commercial establishments he was the center of attention. Several tellers looked up as he entered. He walked over to the counter where he had rented the box. A dark-haired, well-scrubbed young man approached.

“Please leave at once,” the man said.

“I want to get into a safe-deposit box,” Stone said quickly.

The man looked at him uncomfortably for a moment. “Your name?”

“Look,” Stone said. “I really do have a box here. I realize what I look like. I’ve been through some hard times.” He spoke quickly, running his sentences together so that they would make more sense in the aggregate than they did separately. “I’ve been deinstitutionalized, but I’m okay now.”

“I’m sorry,” the man said, without sorrow.

Stone pulled out his key ring and removed the two safe-deposit-box keys, placing them on the counter. “Can we sit down?”

“Certainly,” the man said, relenting a bit. He led them over to a desk and sat down behind it. “I must say, I was a little taken aback. Most of our customers–”

“You don’t have to explain,” Stone said gently. “I’ll get cleaned up just as soon as I get my money.”

“You know how this procedure works,” the man said. He was obviously still suspicious.

“Of course. I sign an access slip. You compare my signature with the copy of it you’ve got on a card in your file.”

“Right. What’s your name?”

“Charles Stone.”

The man hesitated. Did he recognize the name? “Just a minute, Mr. Stone.”

Was there a button on the floor behind the desk, just as there was at the tellers’ counter?

The bank officer got up from the desk. “Let me get your records, Mr. Stone,” he said, and walked toward the rear of the tellers’ counter.

A minute later, the bank officer returned with the two signature cards. Clearly not recognizing the names on the card, he let Stone into the vault.

His father’s safe-deposit box was a shock. Jumbled in with the bills of sale and stock certificates and municipal bearer bonds and deeds was a small white envelope. And underneath that was cash. An enormous quantity of cash: well over a hundred thousand dollars in twenties and one hundreds, a pile of banknotes several inches high. He could scarcely believe his eyes.

He asked for a white canvas money bag, which the astonished bank officer got for him quickly. A minute later, he was out on the street, the bag of money concealed under his frayed coat.

He had made his way slowly out of Harvard Square, taking the smaller side streets. Around five o’clock, he found a small diner in Inman Square, parked the cart in an alley, and went in for a cheap dinner. As he ate the gray meat loaf and mashed potatoes and sipped hot coffee, he opened the envelope.

Inside was a letter, typed on his father’s old Underwood at least ten years ago. The paper had begun to yellow.

Stone sat, reading and rereading the note, until the waitress asked if he wanted a refill. That line from Pasternak – obviously it referred to Alfred Stone’s terrible public immolation.

Staroobriadtsy. The Russian term for the “Old Believers.” Stone knew the Old Believers were a seventeenth-century Russian faction of Orthodox faithful who had rejected the sudden, wholesale changes in the Church. There were bloody battles, and then they went underground. But who were the Staroobriadtsy today?

What was his father trying to tell him?

Night had fallen by the time Stone arrived at Hilliard Street. A blue-and-white police cruiser was parked in front of his father’s house, two policemen inside, drinking coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts cups. Stone passed by with his cart, careful not to look at them.

He could not enter the house from the front; that was obvious.

They had put routine surveillance here, which meant that anyone entering would be scrutinized. But the police clearly could not keep this up forever; they were not that well equipped. And cops, being human, have to take a piss sometime, get a cup of coffee. He could outwait them. Still, he couldn’t risk loitering in the neighborhood, either.

He drew a deep breath of the cold October air.

An image of his father, bloodied and mutilated, suddenly appeared in his mind. He was instantly filled with anger once again, and something new: a desire for vengeance.

He wheeled the cart around to the end of the block and, shivering from the cold, abandoned it. He remembered a pay phone nearby and dialed the Cambridge police.

“There’s a robbery in progress,” Stone shouted in a North Cambridge accent. “Guy was shot.”

The officer on duty answered quickly, “Where?”

“Here. Store 24 in Harvard Square. I’m the night manager. Jesus!” He hung up.

By the time Stone walked around to the rear of the house, the patrol car that had been parked in front was gone. His calculation had been right on the mark: a serious crime reported in the immediate area would be handled by several of the nearest cruisers. But how long would the ruse keep them away?

A telephone trunk cable entered the house at the side. Stone, balancing the sack of money, ran quickly to it. He did not have a knife, but he pulled up a stake from the small garden and used its sharp end, laboriously, to sever the telephone cable.

Then he ran, in a low crouch, over to the porch and pulled himself up to peer into the kitchen window. Through the kitchen he could see the front door just beyond it.

It was alarmed. A suitcase-sized piece of apparatus had been placed near the door, attached to a length of wire that plugged directly into the wall telephone jack. That had now been disabled, with the telephone wires cut. A similar device, he saw, had been placed just below the window at which he knelt.

He yanked the window up; it was locked. Raising his elbow, he jabbed it sharply against the pane, which shattered on contact. Suddenly he was inside his father’s house again.

It was eerily dark, and he knew he could not turn on any lights. Shapes were unfamiliar, menacing. He could smell the odor of antiseptic; someone had cleaned the place. He listened a minute. Not a sound, no one breathing, nothing. He had to move quickly. He walked silently through the kitchen, then through the dining room into the living room, which was partially lit by the streetlight below. He could not risk being seen from the street. Any shadows, any shapes would be noticed. He hoped the alarm would sound only by means of the phone lines. If not … But he didn’t want to think about that.

Any moment now, they would realize that the call from Store 24 was a hoax, and the police would return.

The house had been thoroughly torn apart. Everything had been stripped from the walls, every drawer opened. They had searched the entire place.

He loped up the stairs to his bedroom, where he had left the envelope containing the photographs and the copy of the dossier from Lehman’s archives.

Nothing.

It was gone. Somehow they had found it and removed it. One of his last hopes, and it was gone.

The gun.

He ran to his father’s bedroom. The Smith & Wesson 9 mm automatic he’d bought for his father was still there on the closet shelf, hidden in an empty paper box. Next to it was a full fourteen-round magazine. He slipped it into his coat pocket, along with the clip. He could not afford to stay here any longer.

One minute later, he leaped out of the kitchen window and hit the soft earth just as the police cruiser pulled up, its headlights blinding him.

28

He cursed aloud and ducked down behind the high wooden fence that separated his father’s yard from the adjoining one, then ran as fast as he could. There were footsteps behind him.

He ran unthinkingly, his adrenaline surging. A shout came: “Halt! Police!” One of them fired a gun, a warning shot, which exploded against the slat of a wooden fence. Stone threw himself to the ground, clutching the canvas bag of money, and then crawled along the narrow concrete alleyway between two buildings on Brattle Street.

A siren shrilled nearby.

A few hundred feet away was the back of a row of commercial buildings: a liquor store, a video-rental place, a cheap clothing shop. He remembered having once noticed a walkway between the liquor store and the video place, actually a crawlspace between two brick buildings put up twenty years apart.

His pursuers were at least a hundred feet behind him. In a few seconds, they would round the corner and see where he was headed. With an extra burst of speed, he threw himself into the crawlspace, cracking his skull against the brick. His body flooded with agonizing, unspeakable pain. But he had to keep going. He squeezed himself between the buildings, his feet moving through the accumulation of trash, and he was on the other side.

A car!

It was his only hope. A young black woman was sitting in her dented Honda, which was idling in front of the liquor store. Waiting for a friend or a husband, probably. Stone lunged for the passenger door and pulled it open. The woman screamed.

“Drive!” Stone ordered her. He reached over and clapped his hand over her mouth, stifling the scream. Any minute, the police would be here.

The woman thrashed around, her eyes wide.

Stone pulled the unloaded gun out of his pocket and pointed it at her. Damn it! he thought; why didn’t I take the time to load it?

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Stone said rapidly, “but I will if I have to. Drive me over to Brookline. You’ll be all right.”

The woman, terrified, swung into traffic.

A few minutes later, she had driven the car across the Boston University Bridge, to Commonwealth Avenue.

“Now what?” she whispered. Tears were streaming down her face.

“A left here.”

“Don’t kill me. Please.”

“Pull over here.”

Stone reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, which was crumpled and stained. “I know this doesn’t make up for the terror, but take it. I’m sorry.” He threw it onto the car seat and jumped out.

The apartment building was one street over. Just inside the glass doors was a large panel of buttons. He found the one he wanted and pressed the buzzer.

“Who is it?” the voice squawked tinnily through the speaker.

“Charlie Stone. Let me in.”

The inside door buzzed a few seconds later; Stone pushed it open and vaulted up the stairs two and three at a time.

“Jesus, what happened to you?” Chip Rosen said as he opened the door. He was a large man about Stone’s age. “My God. Jesus, Charlie.”

Rosen’s wife, Karen, a small brunette, stood behind him, her hand covering her mouth. Stone had met her once and knew only that she was a lawyer at a big firm downtown.

“Come in, Charlie.”

“You’ve heard,” Stone said as he came into the apartment.

“Of course we’ve heard. Everyone’s heard,” Karen said.

“I need your help.”

“Of course, Charlie,” Chip said. “You’ve got blood on the back of your head.”

“Thank God you two were home,” Stone said, exhaling slowly. For the first time, he was aware of how rapidly his heart was beating. He set down the canvas bag and slipped the coat off. “I really need some help.”

“You’ve got it,” Chip said. “First thing, though, you look like you need a good hot shower, then a good stiff drink.”

Stone sighed with relief. “I can’t tell you what a nightmare the last few days have been.”

“Take care of that nasty cut on the back of your head. There’s some Betadine in the medicine cabinet. You take a shower; I’ll bring you a set of clothes. Then we can talk.”

In the bathroom. Stone removed the clothes he’d purchased at the Salvation Army store in Saugus, then found a bottle of rubbing alcohol and some cotton balls and began to remove the false beard. He shaved with a can of Barbasol that was on top of the toilet and one of Rosen’s Bic disposable razors, lathering the foam, shaving slowly and luxuriously. He wanted – needed – to relax, but even now he couldn’t completely let his guard down.

He needed allies, friends, a safe harbor. He needed a place to hide while he figured out what to do. Maybe Rosen could use some of his contacts within the newspaper community to help get the story out. And maybe Karen could provide a legal way out of this nightmare.

He could hear Chip and Karen speaking in low voices in the kitchen. This was a tremendous imposition, he knew; he would repay them somehow.

He ran the shower, making it as hot as he could stand, and then got in. It felt wonderful. He washed his hair and the rest of his body, and stood there under the cascade, meditating to clear his head. He was in enormous danger, and this reprieve would not last. He had to have a plan.

He heard a clipped ring from somewhere in the apartment and wondered what it was, then recognized the sound. Chip or Karen was picking up the phone to make a call. He strained to hear what was being said, but the noise of the shower made eavesdropping impossible.

The door to the bathroom opened briefly, and Stone, his reflexes still taut, jolted to attention. It was only Chip, laying out some clothes on the back of a chair.

“Thanks, Chip,” Stone said.

“No problem. Take your time.”

When he had dressed in Chip’s suit, which was slightly too small but felt good nevertheless, he dabbed some Betadine on the gash at the back of his head and bandaged it.

Then he came out of the bathroom and saw that Chip and Karen had poured three martinis. Stone took his and sank into a comfortable chair. He would sleep easily tonight.

“I’m sorry about your father,” Karen said. “It’s horrible.”

Stone nodded.

Karen looked grave. “Charlie, aren’t you in some kind of intelligence work? I know it’s none of my business, but is this related to that?”

Stone shrugged.

“Then what do you think is going on?” Chip asked.

“I have no idea,” Stone said, unable to trust them with what little he knew of the truth.

“What do you plan to do next?” Karen asked. Neither one of them was looking at him. Was it possible they, too, didn’t trust him? Was it possible they thought he was lying?

“That’s partly up to you,” Stone said. “If I can stay just a few days–”

“We’d be glad to have you,” Chip said. “There’s a guest room we never use.”

“I–I don’t know how to thank you. I need to regain my bearings, make some calls.”

“I can find you a lawyer if you want,” Karen said.

“I appreciate it. But first I need to contact certain people. Chip, I need you to tell me something. All those Globe articles on me. Who gave the paper that information? The Boston police?”

“It wasn’t all police,” Chip said. “I asked the reporter who did the series, Ted Jankowitz, and he told me it was the FBI. Listen, aren’t you hungry? Let me get you something.”

Karen got up and went toward the kitchen.

“Who was it?” Stone asked. “What did this FBI guy say?”

“He was saying all this stuff about your being involved in some violation of government treason law or something. I’m sure it’s not true.”

“Of course it’s not true. Chip.”

“That’s what I told Jankowitz.”

Stone got up from the chair and put down his martini glass. He went to the window that looked out onto the street.

“What is it?” Chip asked.

“That car out there. It wasn’t there before.”

“What are you talking about? Take it easy, Charlie.”

But a car was there, directly in front of the building, a squarish new American-made car of the type favored by law-enforcement agencies for undercover surveillance. No one was in it; it was parked in a No Parking zone, with its flashers on.

Footsteps now echoed on the stairs outside. Someone had definitely entered the building.

“What the fuck have you done?” Stone shouted. “You called while I was in the shower. I heard it!”

Chip’s voice was muted and steely. “I’m sorry. You’ve got to understand.”

“You bastard.” Stone grabbed his canvas bag, his old clothes, checked wildly for the passports, the gun.

“You’ve got to understand,” Chip repeated. “We had no choice. Anyone who harbors a murder suspect or aids in any way can be charged with being an accessory. We had to cooperate.” He was speaking quietly, quickly. “Look, Charlie, just sit down. Give yourself up. Whatever the truth is, it’ll come out. Give yourself up. You can’t go anywhere. No one’s going to shelter you.”

The footsteps were now coming from the landing one flight below.

There was only one exit to the apartment, and it led directly into the path of the people coming up the stairs. Stone, holding the canvas bag, flung open the door and saw what he had noticed on the way in: a fire door off the landing that led to a back staircase. Once, leaving a party at Chip’s somewhat inebriated, he had accidentally taken that staircase, which led outside, to the back of the building.

His pursuers were yards away, within view, coming up the main stairs. Two of them, both dressed in suits. “That’s him!” one shouted, and both began running toward Stone.

He had maybe twenty yards on them. He raced down the stairs, taking them three and four at a time until he found himself on the street, the men close behind. He ran without direction, as fast as his legs would carry him, an enormous fear powering him. Behind him, he could hear shouts, the footsteps louder as they came nearer.

He plunged into the traffic of Commonwealth Avenue, heard the squeal of brakes, horns blasting, as the cars swerved around him and their drivers cursed.

Stone had no idea how close the men were – feet? yards? He did not dare look back.

In the center strip of Commonwealth Avenue run the trains of the Green Line subway, the cars aboveground before their descent below Kenmore Square into central Boston. He saw one coming, headed toward the city. It had just stopped, and now, proceeding at full speed, the train blocked his path. There was no way around it. His pursuers were just behind; if he turned around, they would have him.

It was adrenaline, coupled with tremendous fear, that propelled him toward the train rather than away from it. He leaped at it.

His feet landed on the jutting ledge of one of the car’s doors. He grabbed one of the protruding handles. He was on the moving car, his grip tight, every muscle in his body strained to the utmost to keep him flat against the train. Inside, passengers were shouting. He could not keep holding.

The Green Line stops frequently, an annoyance to its regular riders, but fortunate for Stone now. Less than a quarter-mile down the track, the train came to a halt, its hydraulic brakes whining. He jumped back to allow the doors to open, and then he propelled himself inside the crowded train.

He had lost the men in suits. They had not been able to outrun the train, although they had tried, and he could just see them back in the distance. He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of change, which he threw into the coin box to mollify the driver, and sank into a seat, heaving great sighs. His heart was hammering.

The car was abuzz, the passengers staring at him and talking loudly, many of them backing away. In Chip Rosen’s good suit, he didn’t exactly look like a common criminal, but it was clear he wasn’t your average commuter, either.

Of course they had gotten to Chip. They had gotten to all his friends, as Sawyer said they would, threatening each with substantial criminal prosecution if he or she harbored Stone.

So who was left to help?

Stone looked out the car’s window and saw, his heart sinking, that there was another train right behind him. God damn it, he almost said aloud. You wait and wait for a Green Line car, and then they come, all bunched up, two and three trains within two minutes.

The men were in the train immediately behind him.

The trains were underground now, in the dark tunnel beneath Kenmore Square. Stone had once memorized the stops, an idle exercise to occupy time when the train was stalled for an annoyingly long stretch between stations. He ran through them: one, two, three … five stops. At each one there was great danger. These men might well be equipped with radios, talking with others throughout the city. At any stop someone might come aboard, someone carefully briefed on his appearance.

He held his breath, tried his best to melt in with the crowd, yet knowing that it was useless if anyone was waiting for him. Auditorium, Copley, Arlington … He reeled off the stops in his head, trying to keep panic from overtaking him.

Auditorium seemed clear. Stone saw with great relief, and so was the next stop. At Arlington Station he got out, shoving passengers aside, then hurled himself at the revolving-door exit and ran up the stairs to Arlington Street.

There, just up ahead on the left, was the Ritz-Carlton. He slowed his pace in order not to arouse suspicion and entered the lobby of the hotel. On the right side of the lobby was the hotel’s bar, which was sparsely populated tonight – after the businessmen’s happy hour but before the postdinner crowd came in. At the bar he spotted a woman, sitting alone. She was in her forties, well dressed, smoking a cigarette as she drank some sort of highball. A divorcée, a widow, or just a single woman. Stone calculated, but she would not be sitting alone at the bar if she didn’t want company. She could always order drinks from room service if she wanted to drink alone.

Stone sat on the stool next to her and flashed a quick, pleasant smile. “How’re you doing?”

“I’ve been better,” the woman said. Her face was made up with too much powder, an orangish mask that cracked around the eyes and lips. Her mascara was a deep blue. “I’ve been worse.” She took a drag on her cigarette and flecked the ash as she exhaled. Her carefully plucked pencil-thin eyebrows arched into high inverted commas.

They wouldn’t be searching for a couple. Just as he was about to turn on his charm, he glimpsed something in his peripheral vision.

A man was at the entrance to the bar, looking around swiftly. At the side of his suit jacket was a slight, almost imperceptible bulge: the holster of a gun.

“Excuse me a minute, all right?” Stone slid slowly off the bar stool and edged backward, keeping his face out of sight.

With a sudden burst of speed, he lurched toward the swinging doors that gave onto the hotel’s kitchen.

Stone saw instantly that he was cornered; there wasn’t a single concealed place in the kitchen, and the only other exit led, he could see, into the restaurant.

There had to be a service entrance, the door that led out onto the loading dock, where the crates of fruits and vegetables were brought in. The door! He had to make it to the door.

A waiter crossed his path, holding aloft a tray of drinks. “What the hell are you doing here?” the waiter demanded.

Stone lunged for the door, knocking the waiter aside, the glasses shattering on the tiled floor behind him, and in an instant he was outside. A large green truck, labeled ROYAL INSTITUTIONAL FOOD SERVICE in white block letters, was idling at the loading dock. Stone jumped off the concrete platform, flung open the truck’s rear doors, and closed them, falling backward, painfully, onto large square cartons. The engine rumbled as the truck pulled away from the dock.

29

Moscow

The chairman of the KGB, Andrei Pavlichenko, walked tensely along the long corridor, down an expanse of Oriental carpeting, past sets of double doors. He was on the fifth floor of the building that houses the Central Committee, on Staraya Square, three blocks from the Kremlin, headed toward Mikhail Gorbachev’s hideaway office.

The call from the President had come an hour earlier. Pavlichenko was at home, in his apartment on Kutuzov Prospekt, where he had lived alone since the death of his wife four years earlier. He avoided going home whenever possible, trying not to leave himself pockets of free time into which his loneliness could seep.

When he arrived at the antechamber outside the President’s office, he nodded at the male secretaries, then continued through another antechamber, until he had reached Gorbachev’s small office.

Gorbachev’s two other offices, in the Kremlin and on the other side of the Central Committee building, were largely ceremonial, designated for receiving foreign visitors. The President did his real work, held his most important meetings here, in a small, spartan room dominated by a large, immaculate mahogany desk. On the walls of the room hung portraits of Lenin and Marx, exactly the same prints that are found in virtually every Soviet official’s office. In the center of the desk was a gray telephone with push buttons connected to twenty lines.

Well, this is it, Pavlichenko thought gloomily. The Politburo is clamoring for my head, and Gorbachev won’t be able to resist making me the fall guy.

He was admitted immediately, and was pleased to see that no one else was present. Just the President, who looked less tired than he had that night in his dacha, but still worn. He was dressed in a dove-gray suit, which Pavlichenko knew had been made in London by the Savile Row firm Gieves and Hawkes. Pavlichenko, too, favored Savile Row suits; he was glad that, at last, Western attire was politically correct. Gorbachev also wore a top-of-the-line gold Rolex; Pavlichenko wore a somewhat less expensive Rolex. Gorbachev, Pavlichenko knew, sent his shirts and underwear out to the elite laundry near the Hotel Ukraine that serviced the Kremlin; Pavlichenko – who knew that imitation really wasn’t a bad form of flattery at all – also had his laundry done there.

They sat around a mahogany coffee table, Gorbachev on a leather couch, Pavlichenko in an adjoining armchair.

“Well, Andrei Dmitrovich,” the President intoned, coming directly to the point as always, “what have you learned?” No fat in his conversations; no small talk. Gorbachev, who certainly could be charming, held his charm in check when there was work to be done.

Pavlichenko answered without hesitation. “I think these bombings are just the beginning.”

Gorbachev replied with poise. “Meaning?”

“I mean, a coup.”

“Yes,” Gorbachev began irritably, “we’ve already discussed–”

“I’m afraid,” Pavlichenko interrupted almost inaudibly, “that the evidence is beginning to point that way. All my people, all my number-crunchers and eggheads, seem to think that’s what’s going on.” He ran a hand over his face, feeling stubble; he hadn’t had time to shave.

“So,” Gorbachev said. His shoulders seemed to sag visibly, although his expression remained neutral.

Pavlichenko knew well that there is nothing the Soviet Politburo fears more than a coup d’etat.

This is almost certainly because the Soviet Union was established by a coup d’etat on November 7, 1917, a small but lightning-fast attack on the democratic provisional government. The Politburo, therefore, recognizes that such a threat exists at all times.

Gorbachev had reason to be fearful.

The Soviet Union was in turmoil, with nationalist uprisings – public demonstrations! – throughout the remaining Soviet republics, which, one after another, were calling openly for independence from Moscow. Even the Russian Republic was pulling away from the Kremlin. Only the Ukraine would never be permitted independence from Moscow. Never, that is, short of war. And the Soviet bloc was crumbling. The Berlin Wall had been dismantled, and with it went East Germany and Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria…. The Soviet Communist Party had lost its decades-long grip on power; the old-line leadership was steadily being replaced. The Soviet empire was, in the space of a few short years, almost gone, and Gorbachev was to blame.

Pavlichenko could almost see Gorbachev’s mental calculations. The President could count on perhaps three or four solid votes in the Politburo. At any time, there was the possibility of a coup, of his enemies on the Politburo’s ousting him as they had done Khrushchev in 1964. There was clamoring in the Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies for Gorbachev’s removal. Boris Yeltsin, as head of the Russian Republic, clearly wanted Gorbachev out, and Yeltsin had enormous support.

“There may be forces,” the KGB chairman said after Gorbachev had been silent for almost a full minute, “conspirators who no doubt have access to tremendous resources. At least, this is what my people are postulating.”

“Here in Moscow?” Gorbachev said, almost scoffing.

“Perhaps. Yet, as I’ve said before, there may be links to the West. I’m vague, because, frankly, we don’t know.”

“Meaning?”

Pavlichenko only shrugged.

“How high?”

“You mean, in the West?”

“I mean here.”

“Sir?”

“How highly placed? Do you think these … forces … are controlled from the Politburo level?”

“I think it’s likely,” Pavlichenko replied.

Gorbachev’s response was surprising under the circumstances. “I don’t want anything to interfere with the November summit,” he said, suddenly louder. He shook his head. “I don’t want anything to prevent it.” He got to his feet, signifying that the meeting was over. “If there’s a link to the West, whether it’s the White House or Langley or anyone, I must know. Is that clear? I want nothing to disrupt the summit, but I am not prepared to have the world view us as cowards.”

“Yes, sir.” Pavlichenko was inwardly relieved that Gorbachev was not out for his blood, although that could still come anytime.

“It’s one of us, isn’t it?” Gorbachev sighed.

“Look, I don’t have to tell you – you’ve got a list of enemies as long as–”

“Such as?”

Pavlichenko shrugged.

“Sherbanov?” Gorbachev asked. Vladimir V. Sherbanov, the defense minister, was an alternate member of the Politburo, which meant he didn’t vote. It was remarkable: the head of the Soviet military, for the first time in decades, wasn’t a voting member of the Soviet leadership! Gorbachev had maneuvered this arrangement, knowing how the Red Army opposed his slashing the military budget.

“That’s …” Pavlichenko furrowed his brow. “That’s completely impossible. He’s a pain in the ass, but he’s also one of the most loyal people around. He’s completely reliable.”

Gorbachev was silent for a long time before he spoke. “No one is anymore.”

30

Moscow

Charlotte Harper had been harassed by the Soviet authorities several times before during her tenure in Moscow, but never had she been arrested.

With the President coming to Moscow to meet with Gorbachev, she’d thought it might be interesting to do a story on an extreme-right-wing neofascist organization that had recently begun to meet in Moscow. They wore black shirts and swastikas and were calling for pogroms against all non-Russian nationalities. It was truly sensational stuff – explosive, really, since the Soviet authorities wanted to distract attention from such groups, which had begun to spring up in Moscow with disconcerting frequency.

She made a few calls, and several people seemed to be willing to talk on camera. So she and her cameraman, Randy, dashed to the office car, a red Volvo, and drove out to an apartment in the newly developed section of southwestern Moscow.

When she arrived, she saw that she wasn’t alone: there were several Moscow policemen, the militsiya, standing outside the apartment building, waiting. They were burly and red-faced and looked like taller versions of Nikita Khrushchev.

As soon as the police saw the American television reporter and her cameramen unload their equipment from the station wagon, one of them came up to her and said, in Russian, “No camera. No interview.”

Charlotte’s Russian was fluent. “We’re not breaking any laws.”

“I’ll break your camera.”

“Just try.” It wasn’t wise to provoke a Russian cop, but this had slipped out. “Randy, let’s go ahead.”

The cop followed them to the entrance of the building, where he and another one blocked their way. “Forbidden,” the second cop said.

“Switch on the camera, Randy,” Charlotte said in English, quickly and quietly. “At least we’ll get something.”

Randy turned it on. The footage of the militsiyoneri blocking their access would, by itself, tell part of the story of how sensitive the Soviets were, even with glasnost – well, no, especially with glasnost – to such issues.

At that moment, the cop, realizing what was going on, stuck his hand out and flattened it against the camera lens.

“Hey, watch it!” Randy said. “That’s an expensive piece of equipment, you bastard.”

The militsiyoneri were surrounding them now, and one of them shoved Randy harder.

“All right!” Charlotte shouted in Russian, fuming. “All right, we’ll turn it off.” In a lower voice, she added, “Goddamn you.”

The militsiya arrested Charlotte and Randy, threw them unceremoniously into a paddy wagon, and brought them to a tiny local police station, which was empty. The two Americans were locked in a bare room.

Randy looked at Charlotte and said, “Oh, great. Now what the hell are we going to do?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

Within an hour, another policeman, who appeared to be a senior officer, entered the room.

Even before he had a chance to speak, Charlotte said in Russian, “You realize we didn’t break any laws. I happen to have very close ties with the American Embassy” – this much was true – “and I think you should know that if you don’t release us at once you will single-handedly be precipitating an international incident.” She softened her demand with her warmest smile. You had to manage these things adeptly; it wouldn’t do to challenge the ego of a Soviet cop. “With the summit so near, would you want to risk that?” she asked sweetly.

She looked up and saw that there was another man standing in the doorway, listening: a gray-haired military man, in full uniform. He had, she saw, sad gray eyes.

He held out his hand to shake Charlotte’s. “My name is Colonel Vlasik,” he said. “Nikita Vlasik.” He spoke in excellent English.

Charlotte paused and then took his hand. “Charlotte Harper.”

“I know who you are, Miss Harper. I watch your broadcasts from time to time.”

“I’m flattered.” Probably he watched pirated videotapes of the stories she sent over the satellite. That meant he must be fairly influential within the military hierarchy.

He made a gesture with his hand, and the policeman left.

“You make a very good argument,” he said. “But that line of thinking rarely works on our policemen. They don’t think of political consequences. They think of, pardon my expression, covering their asses.”

Charlotte laughed. Where did this guy come from? she wondered.

He continued, “We need people like you on our side.”

“Thanks, but I’ve already got a side.” The colonel meant well, and so she responded gently.

“You remind me of my daughter,” the colonel said.

“Oh, really?” Russian men, Charlotte was once again reminded, were incorrigible – sexist, chauvinistic, laughably old-fashioned, and infuriating.

“Both of you have – how do you call it? – spunk.” He laughed. “If you are going to break our laws, Miss Harper, let me give you a few pointers on how to do it without getting into trouble. My men have much to do. Maybe you can save us all the trouble of arresting you next time.”

“Maybe you can tell your men not to bother a reporter when she’s doing her job.”

He flashed a winning smile. “I can’t argue. But let me give you a little advice.”

“All right,” she said dubiously.

“Get to know our Criminal Code. If anything happens to you, just – what is your expression? – give them hell. Don’t let your interrogators make you talk. Article 46 of the Soviet Criminal Code says you don’t have to answer questions. Article 142 says you never have to sign any documents. Any interrogator who hears you mention these will shit in his pants. Please forgive my language.”

Charlotte smiled. “You’re forgiven.”

She returned to the office and began to do some routine catchup work, rooting through Pravda and Izvestiya and Literaturnaya Gazeta and some of the other unspeakably dull Soviet publications. Then, glancing mindlessly through the AP newswire printouts, she glimpsed a small item about the Alfred Stone affair: Charles Stone was still at large, being sought in connection with the murder.

Days had gone by, and she had done nothing to find Sonya Kunetskaya, who Charlie believed was a key to the mystery he was trying to solve. He needed her help.

The first place to look, of course, was the phone book. Not such an easy proposition: telephone books are enormously scarce in Russia. The last one was published in 1973, and the Ministry of Communications had only put out fifty thousand copies for a city of eight million people.

The 1973 book did list an S. Kunetskaya, and she dialed the number.

The listing was out of date. The phone was answered by a gruff-voiced man who insisted he had never heard of this Kunetskaya.

It was certainly possible that the man was lying, but even if he weren’t, she had reached a dead end. There was nothing to do but go there, to the address listed in the book, and see for herself.

The address was on Krasnopresnenskaya Street, an area known, despite the Soviet Union’s “classless-society” claims, as a working-class neighborhood. The building was run-down and shabby.

The man who answered the bell was coldly hostile: he had no interest in talking to an American journalist.

“I don’t know of any Kunetskaya,” he barked at her. “Go away.”

Finally, after Charlotte had rung the bells of all of the man’s neighbors, she found what she’d been seeking.

“Of course I remember Sonya Kunetskaya,” said a plain-looking babushka abruptly. “Why do you want to know? She moved years ago.”

“Do you have her address?”

The woman fixed Charlotte with a suspicious glare. “Who are you?”

“I’m an old friend of hers,” Charlotte said. “From America. I haven’t seen her in years, and you know how hard it is to get phone numbers.”

The babushka shrugged. “I’ll see.”

A few minutes later, the babushka returned with a small, grimy address book. “Here it is,” the old woman said. “I knew I had it somewhere.”

31

Washington

The accommodations Stone found upon arriving in Washington were dismal but anonymous. From the Yellow Pages he’d selected a rooming house in Adams-Morgan. It was a seventy-five-year-old house badly in need of a paint job, with twelve rooms on three disheveled floors. Stone’s room, on the third floor, contained an infinitesimal kitchenette, a dreadfully soft bed covered with what looked and smelled like a horse blanket, and not much else. He paid, in advance and in cash, for two nights. The proprietor, an elderly woman who wore an ill-fitting green double-knit polyester pants suit, was annoyed at the short stay, and said so – she preferred guests who stayed at least two weeks – but she took his money anyway.

Hours earlier, back in Boston, the food-service truck had left the Ritz and immediately proceeded to its next stop, a luxury hotel in another part of town. Of course it would have done little good for Stone to try to hide in the truck, so he presented himself to the driver, who, when he recovered from his shock, appeared to believe Stone’s story that he was evading the irate husband of a woman with whom he had had a rendezvous at the Ritz. The driver was actually amused by the tale, and kindly offered to drop Stone off anywhere on the truck’s route. He also offered Stone a seat in the front of the cab, which proved a good deal more comfortable than the boxes in the back.

The driver let Stone off at a truck stop on the outskirts of Boston, where he hitched a ride in a truck that was delivering discount women’s clothing as far south as Philadelphia. In the early part of the morning, shortly after four o’clock, Stone found himself in a truck stop near Philadelphia, and, after a full breakfast and several cups of coffee, located a truck that was going directly to Washington.

By the middle of the afternoon, he had gotten himself organized enough to do the things necessary for survival. He could no longer risk carrying around such a great number of bills; he went to a bank and converted some of it into larger denominations. With some of the cash, he bought traveler’s checks, using Robert Gill’s passport. The rest he planned to hide later. He visited several clothing stores, bought a few changes of clothes, casual as well as business wear, and a small leather traveling case with a concealed pocket in the lining. There he placed his passport and driver’s license in the name of Robert Gill. Briefly, he returned to the rooming house and worked for a few hours with razor blade and glue, carefully inserting his real passport and the rest of the cash in the binding of two hardcover books, inside the liners of his shoes, and beneath the lining of his leather case.

He found a pay phone and called Directory Assistance for the Washington area. Unsurprisingly, Deputy Secretary of State William Armitage’s number was unlisted. Stone knew that he could not talk to Armitage at State, even if he could get in to see him; much better to reach him at home. And a surprise call could reveal a tremendous amount.

Armitage had interrogated Anna Zinoyeva in 1953; was he one of them? His immediate, uncensored reaction to Stone’s unexpected appearance might well reveal whether he was a vital link in this conspiracy.

Obviously Armitage was a risk, but Stone had little choice now.

He called the State Department and asked the operator for the office of Deputy Secretary of State William Armitage. A female receptionist in Armitage’s office answered.

“This is Ken Owens from The Washington Post,” Stone told the secretary. “Listen, I talked to one of Mr. Armitage’s assistants yesterday, and I’ve lost his name.”

“One of his assistants?”

“Yeah. A guy.”

“There’s a couple of people it might be,” the secretary said. “A fellow? Was it Paul Rigazio?”

“Right. That was it. Thanks.”

“Would you like to speak with him?”

“Later on. I needed to get his name. Thanks. Oh, and do you have his extension?” The secretary gave him Paul Rigazio’s telephone extension, and Stone hung up.

He next called the State Department’s personnel office. “This is Paul Rigazio in Bill Armitage’s office. Extension 7410. Bill left a message for me to call him at home, and he didn’t leave me his new number.”

“All right,” said the woman who answered the phone. “One moment.” She returned to the line half a minute later. “I don’t see any new number here, sir.”

“Which one do you have?” The woman read it back; Stone thanked her and hung up.

One more call to make, to be safe. He would need Armitage’s home address if there was no answer; if need be, he could surprise the Secretary, thereby eliminating the chance for Armitage to call anyone else.

The telephone business office is notoriously a wary place, stingy with information, fiercely protective of the privacy of its subscribers. Lower down the hierarchy, however, things get looser. He called the telephone company’s repair office, gave his name as William Armitage, and announced with vexation that his home phone was having problems. “Look, I’m at work now so I don’t have time to talk,” he told the man who took his call. “There’s some kind of rapid beeping noise on my line.”

“What’s the number, sir?”

Stone gave it. “Do I get billed for this repair?” he asked with annoyance.

“Not at all, sir. We’ll have someone check the line right away.”

“Listen, while I’ve got you here – I didn’t get my last bill.”

“You should probably contact the business office–”

“Listen, I moved recently and I sent in a change-of-address form to you folks a while back. Now, which address do you have on your screen there?”

“Seventy-nine Upper Hawthorne.”

“You got the right one,” Stone said, sounding genuinely puzzled. “Who knows. Thanks.”

Five days earlier, two powerfully built men in their early forties had paid a visit to the telephone security department of Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone in central Washington, D.C. The men, who claimed to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and carried identification cards to confirm it, were expected; the security agent in charge had received a call that morning from someone who had said he was a special agent at the FBI and two of his men would be coming by for some routine court-ordered monitoring.

The two men presented the necessary document: a court order signed by a federal judge. Although their identification was false, and the morning’s caller was not from the FBI but from an organization that called itself the American Flag Foundation, the court order was the real thing. The judge who had authorized the wiretaps was a longtime friend of the Director of Central Intelligence and a firm believer in the necessity of the occasional domestic covert operation.

The two men were ushered into a small room, given headsets, and shown how to work a console on which they could hear all conversations on a certain seven telephone lines in the Washington area.

“Mr. Armitage?”

The voice that answered was that of an older man, whose clipped tones and rounded vowels indicated someone of good breeding, as well as a man used to having his orders followed.

“Who’s calling?”

“Matt Kelley. I’m an associate of Winthrop Lehman’s.”

“I see.” Armitage’s patrician tone had suddenly changed; now he was more cautious. “Is that how you got my number?”

“That’s right. Winthrop wanted me to get in touch with you.”

Everything depended upon Armitage’s response. Would there be that telltale pause, some evidence that he was surprised, proof that he was no longer in contact with Lehman? If not, Stone would hang up at once, safe in assuming that Armitage was poison – one of them.

“He did?” Armitage said. “What on earth for?”

Stone’s brain was spinning, doing hundreds of calculations. Armitage sounded sincere.

“He didn’t tell you to expect my call?”

“I haven’t talked to Winthrop in twelve or thirteen years.”

“It has to do with the death of Alfred Stone. Do you know the name?”

“Hell, yes. I knew the man, or at least met him. Grisly thing, what happened. What do you want from me?”

Armitage had to be on the level.

“I need to talk to you.”

“You’re being very mysterious.”

“I’m afraid I have to be.”

“Call me at the office tomorrow afternoon. I’m kind of raked, but I’ll try to squeeze in–”

“No. Not at the State Department.”

“Who are you?”

“It’s too sensitive to discuss there. Can we meet somewhere else? At your home, perhaps.”

“I’ve got some people coming over for dinner, Mr. – what did you say your name was?”

“Kelley.”

“Kelley. Let me get back to you in a couple of minutes, and I’ll try to work something out.”

“I’ll call you back.”

“Any reason you can’t give me your number?” Armitage asked, his voice rising in suspicion.

“No,” Stone said at once. “None at all.” He looked at the pay phone and read off the number.

“I’ll get back to you in ten minutes.”

Stone fished a scrap of paper from his pocket, scrawled on it “out of order,” and tucked it into the phone’s coin slot. He stood by the phone until a young black woman came by to use it, noticed the sign, and walked off.

The call came five minutes later. The voice wasn’t Armitage’s.

“Mr. Kelley? This is Morton Bloom. I’m Bill Armitage’s assistant. Bill asked me to call you while he talks to some of his dinner guests and tries to reschedule.”

“Why couldn’t he call me himself? I thought I made that clear – I don’t want to involve anyone else.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I guess he thought it wouldn’t make a difference. I’m his aide-de-camp, sort of a chief factotum, bodyguard, that sort of thing.”

“I see.”

“The point is, he does want to meet with you, and he appreciates your desire to keep sort of a low profile.”

“I’m glad he does. How soon can he see me?”

“Are you free tonight?”

“Certainly.”

“Tonight, then. Where are you?”

“In Washington.”

“Bill feels pretty strongly that it’s best not to meet at his house. He said you’d understand.”

“Yes,” Stone acknowledged.

“He wants you to meet him at an out-of-the-way place we can watch, to make sure you weren’t tailed.”

“I understand. Where does he suggest?”

“Do you know Arlington at all?”

“No.”

“There’s a shopping mall right near the Metro stop where there’s a coffee shop. Mr. Armitage can be there at, say, nine o’clock, if that’s convenient.”

Bloom described the precise booth in the coffee shop where he, Armitage, and Stone would meet. “If we’re a few minutes late, don’t panic,” Bloom added. “It’s my job to be careful, and I like to do my job well. You understand.”

When he hung up, he tried Armitage’s number, received a busy signal, and then called State Department Personnel. Was there a Morton Bloom employed in the State Department? There was, he was told: in Armitage’s office.

Relieved, Stone hung up.

Several hours later, carrying his Smith & Wesson in the pocket of his jacket, he left the Arlington Metro station and walked to the mall. He found the coffee shop, the Panorama, easily. It was a small place, well lighted; Stone saw through the front plate-glass window that there were about eight customers. He was reassured. If this was a setup, it was a lousy place. Too public.

Ten minutes before nine. No one was sitting in the booth, which was marked with a table tent marked “reserved.” The sign looked foolish: a reserved table in an uncrowded coffee shop. Probably Armitage or Bloom had called and asked them to do that. But why would someone as dignified as Armitage want to meet in such a tacky place?

He crossed the street and watched the entrance, standing in the doorway of a travel agency.

Ten minutes went by. It was nine o’clock, and still no one was there. They expected him to arrive first, but he would surprise them.

Soon he looked at his watch again; it was exactly nine-fifteen, and still no sign of them. Something seemed off about the whole business.

He left the travel-agency doorway and walked down the street toward the Metro, and then he heard the explosion.

He jumped, terrified. It was a deep, booming noise, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass, and it came from the end of the coffee shop. The small building was now afire. Stone saw the flames shooting out of the windows and heard a fire alarm clamoring. He began to run.

32

Moscow

The Prospekt Mira metro station is adorned with some of the most beautiful architecture in perhaps the world’s most beautiful subway system. The floors are granite tile; the corridors are colonnaded with rococo arches and illuminated by elegant chandeliers. The corridor into which the escalator deposits throngs of pedestrians is lined with marble benches. During rush hour – which, in Moscow, is hours long – the benches are crowded with weary travelers, babushkas with string bags, henna-haired women with squirming children, irritable factory workers resting briefcases full of tangerines on their laps.

A tall, lanky man in an ill-fitting suit had been sitting on a bench for five minutes, attracting no attention. He looked insignificant, distracted. To a casual observer he would have seemed to be an office worker in one of Moscow’s thousands of vestigial state offices. He looked like the kind of man you always ended up sitting next to in the metro.

No one would remember seeing Stefan Kramer, and no one would recall that he opened the cheap, scuffed briefcase on the ground before him, reached a hand in among the sheaves of papers, and did something. Of course, no one could observe that he had squeezed the chemical pencil, just as the train arrived and hundreds of people rushed on and off the train.

Then, just as he was about to insert himself into the heaving crowd in the subway car, having left his briefcase in the station beside a crowd of Red Army soldiers, he turned around.

The soldiers – a platoon, most likely – were slowly, cumbersomely assembling, and Stefan knew from experience that they would be there, obeying their commander’s order not to move, for five minutes more or so.

Jesus, Stefan thought. No one was supposed to be standing around on the platform.

The soldiers would die.

Stefan’s head was spinning. They were soldiers of the very government that had destroyed his brother’s mind, yet they were very likely decent, innocent young men, even younger than himself.

He glanced quickly at these soldiers, seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys, gangly and ruddy-cheeked, who knew nothing of politics and gulags and torture, and thought only of the great honor of serving the state.

Stefan could not kill them.

He drew back from the crowded subway car just as it pulled away from the platform. Then he retrieved his briefcase, which stood abandoned near the soldiers, strolled with it to the end of the platform, and found a deserted area.

His heart was pounding; the thing could go off at any second.

He placed the briefcase against the marble wall, a long distance away from anyone, and opened his newspaper as if reading. No one seemed to be paying him any attention. When another train came again, he got on it, nervous but at the same time relieved, and listened for the explosion.f

A few days earlier, his father had typed a letter on an electric typewriter in the offices of Progress Publishers. The typewriter had no distinguishing features; the letter was typed on blank paper; and it had been sent to the office of President Gorbachev in care of one of Gorbachev’s assistants, whose name Yakov had selected from a photograph on the front page of Izvestiya.

In the letter, Yakov had demanded, simply and clearly, the release without delay of all the inmates of the Serbsky Institute being held for political reasons. If there was no response within one week, Yakov had written, the terror would continue.

With the American President coming to Moscow, this threat would undoubtedly be quite real to the Politburo.

Yakov and Stefan knew that the assassination of the Central Committee member Sergei Borisov had received worldwide attention. The Kremlin would not want another such incident, and the price that the Kramers were demanding was, after all, quite small.

They met, father and son, once more at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Sonya had gone out again. Stefan often thought about her, wondering why his father was so adamant that she not be told. Surely she would disapprove of so dangerous an action. But was there something else, some other reason Yakov wanted to protect his lover?

“I don’t want innocent people killed if we can avoid it,” Yakov had said. His face registered a deep sadness.

Stefan nodded his head in agreement. “The thought of it makes me sick. I still can’t think about Borisov. As horrible a man as he was, I can’t do such things.”

“All right,” Yakov said. “If you select the metro, make sure you are careful not to hurt innocent people.”

“I will.”

“The bomb – how powerful will this one be?”

“A wad of plastic explosive of this size will create a very large explosion.”

“And what’s this?” Yakov asked, holding up a section of brass tube five inches long that resembled a pen but had a screw-and-nut assembly at one end. “Is it dangerous?” He set it down gently.

“No,” Stefan laughed, “not by itself. It’s a mechanical firing device. Very simple, actually.”

After a moment, Yakov looked up from the bomb components. “For Avram,” he said.

The device did its work in a few minutes, by which time Stefan was long gone.

The platform was suddenly illuminated by a blinding, bluish light; then, a fraction of a second later, it was rocked by an immense explosion, thunderous and ear-splitting. No one was nearby, and so no one was badly hurt, but people who had just entered the platform began screaming in terror as rubble from the detonation showered hundreds of feet away.

The explosion was the subject of rumors that spread throughout Moscow at lightning speed: another attack by the terrorists. People gossiping at their offices the next day had any number of theories; none of them might have suspected that the perpetrators were a few very ordinary men, acting out of love for a brother and son.

Had Andrew Langen not happened to be walking down Kalinin Prospekt when Sergei Borisov’s car blew up, the CIA would have had no idea that the explosion had involved KGB technology. Had the CIA not learned that, it wouldn’t have instructed Langen as a matter of highest priority to follow all similar acts of terrorism very closely.

So it was that, as soon as word of the metro incident got around – and it got around quickly – Langen was at pains to obtain evidence of the quality he had quite fortuitously found just a few weeks earlier. As soon as the bomb went off, killing no one but injuring more than twenty bystanders, the area was sealed by the combined forces of the Soviet militia and the KGB. There seemed no way to procure shrapnel from the explosion this time.

Until, as it happened, the old Russian muzhik who did repair and maintenance work in the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy chanced to mention to Langen that, yes, he had heard all about the terrible thing that happened in the metro: he had a friend, a custodial worker in the employ of the militsiya, who was called in to clean, repair, and restore the site.

The muzhik was cleared by the KGB – all Soviet nationals who worked in the embassy were – but he was no Chekist, and for a healthy bribe he agreed to see what he could do. The next morning he produced a chocolate box full of oddments taken from the damaged portion of the Prospekt Mira corridor. He had wrapped each fragment of detritus for Langen in tissue paper and fondled them as if they were moon rocks. Which, in a sense, they were.

33

Arlington, Virginia

Stone ran up the street toward the Arlington Metro entrance, then stopped when he spotted a gas station whose parking lot held a half-dozen or so cars.

The station was closed and dark. He took out his Swiss Army knife and, with the screwdriver blade, pried open the front-vent window of a rusty yellow 1970 Volkswagen Beetle. When he reached his hand in, he managed to crank down the larger side window and open the door. Inside, he slid the front seat back and twisted himself around so he could peer under the dashboard. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the dark, the only light a street-lamp down the block.

He located the ignition switch on the dashboard, reached behind to the tangle of four wires that came out of it, and yanked them out of the switch. One of them, the red wire, touched the metal of the dashboard and gave off a spark of electricity. It was the “hot” lead. He bent it away from the others.

Ah, he thought. Being a “gearhead,” a car buff, had to come in handy someday.

Now he had to find the right sequence of two connections. He raised himself up off the floor of the car and sat. With the largest blade he stripped the remaining three wires, and then connected the green wire to the hot wire. Nothing happened.

“Shit.” Since he’d found the Beetle in a gas-station lot, it was entirely possible that the car was defunct. Next he tried the blue wire, and the starter motor cranked, a short cough, before it died. Victory, phase one. Then he touched the white wire to the connection, and the starter motor cranked again, but again the car wouldn’t start.

The wiring was wrong. He disconnected the green wire, connected the blue to the red, and let out a whoop as the radio came on, along with the speedometer lights.

“Got it,” he said as he touched the white wire briefly to the connection and the car roared to life.

An hour later, he had arrived in Falls Church; after asking street directions of a cabbie cruising for a fare, he found Armitage’s house.

Estate, more properly: it was an immense colonial structure of red brick on hundreds of acres of wooded land. All the lights in the house were out, which was not surprising, since it was almost midnight. Stone parked the VW on the street, within view of the house, and kept the car running while he thought.

His escape had been close; the terrifying events of the past hour had left him still shaking, literally.

Was Armitage one of them, as he’d begun to think of his faceless pursuers? Or, quite the reverse, were these people trying to keep him away from Armitage, having somehow obtained access to Armitage’s telephone lines? Anything was possible. There was only one way to find out.

He had the advantage of surprise. If Armitage was one of the conspirators, he would expect that Stone had been killed in the explosion. He would not expect him at his front door. And yet …

Suspicion had saved him a few hours ago. Was he being suspicious, careful enough now?

The Armitage home was set on a slight knoll, and therefore it was possible to see three sides of the house from the road. The place looked completely clear.

He shut off the ignition and walked carefully to the front door. He rang the doorbell.

A minute later, he rang again. Two minutes after that, the door opened.

It was Armitage; Stone recognized him from his news photos. He was wearing a crimson silk dressing gown that had been hastily thrown over white silk pajamas, and he had clearly been awakened. Even in such a state, he looked dignified, his white hair set off starkly by his deep suntan.

Armitage did not appear to recognize him; his expression was one of annoyance and distrust.

“What the hell is this?”

“I didn’t see you at our little rendezvous,” Stone said darkly.

“Who are you? Do you know what time it is?”

“We spoke earlier this evening. I’m Lehman’s assistant, Matt Kelley.”

“I told you not to come here!”

“Now I see why,” Stone replied.

The white-haired man squinted in puzzlement. “I canceled my goddamn dinner plans and then I called that number you gave me,” he sputtered. “It was a goddamn pay phone! Some passerby answered it. I waited to hear from you, and nothing. You’re lucky I only canceled on my brother. What do you think this is? I resent your–”

A woman’s voice called from the interior of the house: “Who is it, Bill?”

“Nothing,” Armitage replied. “I’ll get rid of him. Go back to sleep, honey.”

Was this man telling the truth? “I tried your line,” Stone said slowly, watching him carefully, “and it was busy, so I–”

“Busy? I sat by the phone for ten minutes, waiting.”

“Morton Bloom called me–” Stone began.

“Morton Bloom! That’s impossible. He isn’t even in the country. He’s been assigned to Geneva. He hasn’t been in Washington for seven months!”

Stone felt his pulse quicken. “I wanted to know about an old woman named Anna Zinoyeva,” he said levelly. “A secretary to Lenin. A frightened little woman you paid a threatening visit to in 1953.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Armitage said, stepping back to close the door. “Now, I want you out of here–”

“Please don’t waste my time,” Stone said. He had pulled out the Smith & Wesson and pointed it, which was something he had hoped wouldn’t be necessary.

“Put that goddamned thing away! My wife is already calling the police.” Armitage was frightened, and he was lying.

“I only want to talk with you for a little while,” Stone said calmly. “That’s all. We talk, and everything will be fine.”

“Who the hell are you?” the statesman rasped, terrified.

Armitage listened to Stone with undisguised astonishment. They had been sitting in the large, book-lined library of Armitage’s house for a quarter of an hour while Stone talked, Armitage interrupting only to pose questions and clarify points.

Stone kept the gun at his side, ready to pick it up if needed, but Armitage now seemed willing to cooperate, especially when he learned that Stone was an employee of Parnassus – and an employee and a friend of Armitage’s friend Saul Ansbach.

“Saul called me, you know,” Armitage said when Stone had finished. “He mentioned your name. And he was quite agitated. He mentioned this report from the asset in Moscow and his suspicions that American renegades might be involved.” He shook his head. “Frankly, I dismissed his suspicions as alarmist.”

Stone, listening, looked around at the floor-to-ceiling walnut shelves, the framed and signed photographs of Armitage with Lyndon Johnson, John Foster Dulles, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan. Armitage’s rise to the penultimate position in the State Department had not been a matter of party loyalties; his friends were both Republicans and Democrats. He evidently had quite a few influential friends.

“And when I heard about Saul, and then read about your father – absolutely ghastly–”

“Yes,” Stone said hastily, cutting Armitage off, not wanting to relive the pain of his father’s death. “And Saul was right, wasn’t he?”

“Right about what?” Armitage asked with undisguised hostility.

“There is some kind of organization deep within the government that has been trying to overturn the Kremlin for decades – outside of Langley, outside of the CIA or the DIA or the White House. And it’s going on right now.”

“Oh, that’s nonsense.”

“Nonsense? Saul Ansbach died, damn it! He was murdered to cover this up.” Stone continued in a whisper: “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

“No!” Armitage shouted with surprising vehemence.

“Then you know – you know much more than you’re saying.”

Armitage’s eyes roamed the room frantically. He clasped his hands tensely, then got up, retied the silk belt around his dressing gown, and walked to his desk drawer.

Stone released the safety on the gun. “Don’t surprise me with anything,” he said.

Armitage’s eyes widened briefly; then he shook his head, smiling uncertainly. “I wasn’t planning to. I want to get my pipe. Anyway, I have every reason to be uncertain about you, storming into my house at midnight with your crazy tales.”

“You’re right,” Stone said, still pointing the gun.

Armitage shrugged again and pulled from the desk drawer a pipe and a tobacco pouch.

“Sorry.”

“Quite all right,” Armitage said as he filled the pipe’s bowl and tamped it down. “I suppose I’d do the same thing if I were in your position. Assume you can’t trust anyone, catch them by surprise as you did me.” When he had the pipe going, he returned to his chair.

“If you’re not one of these people, then answer me this,” Stone said. “Let’s go back to 1953. You knew Beria’s people had strong-armed this woman, Anna Zinoyeva, looking for a document – the Lenin Testament – which would throw Russia into such turmoil that, in the confusion, a coup could take place.”

Armitage nodded.

“And you were sent to make sure she kept her silence,” Stone resumed. “Contain things. See if she had this document and make sure it only fell into the right hands.”

“That’s right.”

“Then who sent you to see her?”

Armitage now shook his head slowly. “My reputation–” he began.

Stone lifted the gun again. “I want to tell you something,” he said with a terrible intensity. “My father was murdered. I have been set up for the crime of murdering my own father. And I’m prepared to do anything now to survive. If that includes committing murder myself, please understand that I wouldn’t hesitate for a second.”

Tears welled up in Armitage’s eyes. When he spoke, it was after a silence that seemed endless. “Winthrop.”

“Lehman? But why was Lehman–”

“Oh, God.” He put down his pipe and then began to speak. “During … You see, during the war I was lucky enough to secure a position with army intelligence. I got involved in the War Department’s investigation of military intelligence during Pearl Harbor. My boss was none other than the chief of staff of the army. General George C. Marshall. So I was in the right place in the right time.” He waved his hand tremulously around the room, indicating the antiques, the rugs, the books. “Obviously my family’s wealth and connections didn’t hurt. After the war, I moved to State, and at some social affair or other, I don’t remember when exactly, I met the famous Winthrop Lehman, the President’s national-security assistant. We got to be friends, Winthrop and I. The sort of friends endemic to Washington, I mean – more a partnership of mutual respect for achievement, coupled with a ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ sort of thing.”

“How were you able to scratch his back?”

“I wondered the same thing at the time, since Lehman knew most of official Washington. But it turned out that he needed a good, reliable contact at State – a Fifth Columnist, as it were – in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.”

“To do what?”

“Keep watch. Keep things in line. Little of any substance.”

“Be specific.”

Armitage sighed. “He was concerned about the hemorrhaging of classified information in those days. With McCarthy on the rampage, secrets were being spilled everywhere. That’s the irony. McCarthy, ostensibly the great enemy of communism, was helping the communists more than anyone else ever could. So Winthrop wanted me to keep watch for any revelation that had to do with a top-secret designation, M-3, which I was only told referred to a mole.”

“And what did you get in return for helping Lehman?”

“In return, Mr. Stone, I got something very valuable. Those were difficult days for the State Department. Tail gunner Joe McCarthy, that bastard, called us ‘the striped-pants boys,’ and he was gunning for quite a few of us. Lehman saw to it that I was left alone. But one day a good piece of intelligence came our way, the result of a black-bag job, the sort of thing that was a lot more common then than now. One of our contract agents managed to gain access to the Soviet diplomatic pouch. In those days, it actually was a large leather pouch, filled with coded documents and memoranda and letters and whatnot. Among the many rather useful things we microfilmed was a cream-colored envelope addressed to my friend Winthrop Lehman on blank stationery. No letterhead, no signature, and the message was so banal it was obviously encoded.”

“From whom?”

“We got the answer from the paper. It was private-stock paper used exclusively by the MGB, as the KGB was then called.”

“And?”

“And then I knew I had something rather important, that my friend Winthrop was in secret contact with the Soviet secret police. And so I was involved, though not by choice, you see. Once I knew that, and Lehman knew I knew, I was part of his game.”

“But why were you involved? Why you?”

“They needed me. They needed the rather considerable resources of the State Department. Lehman was coordinating a scheme to fund a coup by Lavrentii Beria. And I used my connections within the State Department to channel money that Winthrop Lehman provided, three-quarters of a million dollars, to the Swiss bank account that Beria had set up for himself.”

“Lehman! Lehman personally funded the coup attempt?”

Armitage nodded pensively. “I believed in the cause, too.”

“Putting that crazy man Beria into power?”

“No. Destabilizing the Soviet government. Now, of course, I realize that instability in the Kremlin is the most dangerous thing of all.”

“What was the name of Beria’s assistant, this ‘M-3’ I mentioned?”

“I never knew it. Believe me, I was kept in the dark. I never knew who else was involved.”

“But there are ways to find out. You must have files, records of this operation. Some way to prove, establish beyond doubt, what was being done.”

“None.”

“But records on Lehman?” Stone suggested. “There must be records you can get access to.”

The Secretary looked shaken as he replied. “When I heard about Saul, I got scared. I thought I might be next, and I went about collecting what I could, in order to have some kind of protection. But they’re missing! The FBI files on Lehman are missing – and so are State Department consular records in Suidand, Maryland, decimal files at the National Archives. Everything on Lehman is gone!”

“There must be records of who removed them.”

“Nothing. They’re stolen, all of them.”

“Stolen? Well, what solid, irrefutable proof do you have?”

“Proof? Absolutely none.”

Stone was pensive a moment. “Even without it … Perhaps, with your reputation, your connections, you can speak the right word to the right people.”

“And say what? Without any sort of proof whatsoever? I’d be a laughingstock. No one would believe me. You don’t understand – a lot of people are frightened. Files are being combed. Something is going on today, some kind of power struggle.”

“Yes,” Stone said. How much did this man know? “You mean a power struggle in American intelligence? Be specific.”

“I can’t. It’s just – intuition. The way a very good internal-medicine specialist just knows when something is wrong with the body. After all these years in government, I know. There’s talk. Talk in the corridors, whispered things, casual asides.”

“Who’s involved in it?”

“Renegades, perhaps. Ollie North types. I don’t know. I’m sorry; I can’t be more substantive than that.”

“I need specifics – someone who knows for certain and is willing to go public.” He thought: My father knew someone on the NSC, a former student of his. I could contact him. And there was that FBI agent who interviewed Cushing – Warren Pogue, wasn’t that his name?

“Do you understand,” Stone said, “that the CIA itself has been penetrated? That it’s rotten?” “Rotten” – that was the term Saul had used. “That what’s about to happen in Moscow may well be worse than a return of Stalinism? It may be the beginning of a world war.”

“What?” Armitage whispered.

“How can you afford,” Stone asked, “not to do anything?”

At six o’clock in the morning, after a fitful four hours of sleep, Deputy Secretary of State William Armitage awoke, put on a pot of coffee, and then made a telephone call to his aide Paul Rigazio. He directed Rigazio to conduct a thorough search of all records on State Department premises that contained any reference to Winthrop Lehman and a certain decades-old conspiracy.

As was his custom, in the morning he worked at home, doing paperwork and making calls. At nine o’clock, his wife, Catherine, kissed him goodbye and left the house for her unpaid volunteer job at the Audubon Society in Washington, at which she worked in fund-raising from ten until one in the afternoon.

At nine-twenty, the doorbell rang, and Armitage went to answer it.

He smiled in recognition. It was one of the State Department’s messenger boys. He wasn’t expecting any delivery, but sometimes they failed to notify him.

“Morning, Larry,” he said.

At four-thirty that afternoon, Catherine Armitage returned to their Falls Church home.

In the closet off the bedroom she found her husband, completely nude, hanging by a length of electrical cord that had been wrapped in a soft cotton dishrag, apparently to ensure that the wire did not cut into his neck. The cord hung from a fixture on the closet’s ceiling. On the floor beside the stool that her husband had evidently been standing on when it slipped was a pornographic magazine, open to its centerfold.

The death was ascribed, by the county coroner, to something called “autoerotic asphyxia,” an unintentional hanging that results from a bizarre practice whereby the victim masturbates and intensifies the orgasm by cutting off the supply of oxygen to the brain, almost – but not quite – hanging himself. It is a deviant practice far more common among teenagers than distinguished elder statesmen.

In keeping with the discretion that many families of social standing require at such times, Secretary Armitage’s death was kept strictly quiet. The public announcement mentioned a heart condition. Only the immediate family knew better.

34

Moscow

Far more secretive than the KGB, and far less well known, is the Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Union, or the GRU. This agency, which is entirely independent of – and has a long history of fierce rivalry with – the KGB, is located in a nine-story glass tower outside Moscow known as the Aquarium. It is surrounded on three sides by the Khodinka military airfield, and on the other side by a building simply labeled institute of cosmic biology; the entire compound is protected by electrified barbed wire and patrol dogs.

Early in the morning, a young man was entering the office of his superior, the first deputy chief of the GRU. His face was epicene, with high arching eyebrows, a small nose, large ears, and freckles everywhere. Yet in his eyes were traces of a spirit prematurely aged, a cynicism too deep for his thirty-some years. He had served in Afghanistan, where he had directed the blowing up of bridges and certain buildings in Kabul.

He wore the uniform of the GRU’s Third Department, or Spetsnaz. The Spetsnaz are the GRU’s elite espionage-and-terrorist brigade, trained to infiltrate behind enemy lines in wartime, to locate and destroy nuclear facilities, lines of communication, and other strategic targets, and to assassinate enemy leaders. They also provide support, training, and equipment for numerous terrorist groups. In general, the Spetsnaz troops are the Soviet Union’s most skilled saboteurs.

This young man was the Spetsnaz’s leading specialist in explosive and incendiary devices. He saluted as his superior nodded hello from behind a large desk, in back of which was an expanse of floor-to-ceiling window.

The older man, a colonel general, was a white-haired man who carried himself with the aristocratic bearing of an old White Russian, his uniform a fruit salad of medals.

No sooner had the explosives expert seated himself than the older man slid a small square note across the highly burnished surface.

The Spetsnaz man took it and felt the blood rush to his head.

There was only one word: “Sekretariat.”

The younger man had been secretly recruited to the Sekretariat two years before, after his impressive tour of duty in Afghanistan.

He nodded.

Then he watched the colonel general bend down and dial a knob in front of his desk: a safe. When it was open, his superior withdrew a manila folder and then slid that across the desk.

“Your most important assignment,” the chief murmured.

The explosives expert picked up the folder, opened it, and saw that it contained blueprints. He glanced at them, and then paled.

“No,” he gasped.

“This is a historic moment,” the colonel general said. “For all of us. I am pleased you will be a part of it.”

35

Washington

At shortly after ten o’clock in the morning, Roger Bayliss entered the lobby of one of Washington’s finest old hotels, the Hope-Stanford and strode across the sumptuous Oriental carpet, past marble Corinthian columns and eighteenth-century silk tapestries, to the registration desk. He spoke briefly to the clerk, then walked over to the elevator bank.

He looked around the lobby impatiently, visibly the sort of man who did not like to be kept waiting, and when the first elevator came, he took it to the fifth floor. There he turned left until he found Room 547. Taped to the door was an envelope with his name on it. Wrinkling his brow in annoyance, he turned and returned to the elevators, where he pressed the “down” button.

Watching him from the stairwell at the end of the corridor was Charlie Stone.

Everything was going well so far, Stone reflected. He was alone: Good, perhaps I’m being overly suspicious.

An hour and a half earlier, Stone had called Bayliss. Roger Bayliss had been one of Alfred Stone’s prize students, and even though the NSC official hardly knew the son of his old graduate-school mentor, Alfred Stone had obviously trusted him. Trusted him enough to have asked for his help.

“Of course I heard what happened to you,” Bayliss had exclaimed over the phone. “Jesus Christ. And your father …” There was a long silence for a moment, as if Bayliss had had difficulty gaining control of his emotions, and then he continued. “Charlie, I’ve heard quite a bit about your situation. More than you’d probably believe. I think it’s important we talk.”

“Good. As soon as possible.”

“Look, Charlie. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want to be seen with you. You understand, being on the NSC, I can hardly risk–”

“All right,” Stone cut him off. “I’ll call you soon with a place to meet.”

Of course. Stone had figured it out already. Conventional logic dictated that they meet in a public place; public places, the theory went, are the safest harbor. But Stone was a fugitive from the law. For him, nowhere was safe. And Bayliss – Bayliss was a question mark. Who knew if he could really be trusted?

At quarter of ten. Stone had called Bayliss back and told him to come to the Hope-Stanford and ask for his room number at the registration desk.

The front-desk clerk had been, with a little financial suasion, quite compliant. As requested, he gave Bayliss a room number – of an unoccupied room. After watching Bayliss walk toward the elevators, and waiting a minute to make sure no one had followed him, the clerk called up to the room of the man he knew as Mr. Taylor and left a message that Bayliss had arrived in the hotel unaccompanied.

The clerk, a recent college graduate who was trying to make it as an actor, enjoyed the intrigue of it all: Mr. Taylor had explained only that he was a mergers-and-acquisitions attorney in town to conduct some sensitive negotiations in absolute secrecy. One couldn’t be too careful, Taylor had said. Greed, the attorney had explained to the clerk while invisibly slipping him a fifty-dollar bill, knows no bounds.

The envelope Bayliss had taken from the door of room 547 had contained another room number, 320, two floors below, along with Stone’s apologies for the inconvenience. A necessary inconvenience, Stone had decided: it gave him more time to observe Bayliss, make sure he was neither followed nor accompanied.

Naturally, Bayliss had taken the elevator, not the stairs, down two flights; most hotel guests tend to avoid the stairs. Stone made it to 320 more than thirty seconds before Bayliss did.

As soon as he entered the suite, Stone saw the red message light on the phone glowing. He picked it up, got the message, and hung up, relieved. A double-check: Bayliss didn’t have anyone waiting for him in the lobby.

The coast was clear.

Relax.

He glanced around the room, taking in the surroundings, glad to be enjoying this brief luxury after the rooming house, the desperate running of the last few days. It was pleasant to be in a place with antique oak furnishings, mahogany walls, plush monogrammed towels.

There was a knock, and Stone opened the door, tense once again.

“Hello, Roger.”

“Charlie,” Bayliss said, extending two hands and grasping Stone’s hand in both of his. “Good to meet you, and I’m so sorry it’s in such awful circumstances. I was surprised to see that note in there telling me to go to 320.” He laughed briefly. “Very thorough of you. Don’t worry; I probably outdid you. I made damn sure no one saw me coming here. Last thing I need.”

“Come on in.”

Stone led Bayliss to a cluster of overstuffed chairs, feeling the cold, hard revolver he had placed under his waistband at the small of his back. A gun would protect him. Stone knew, but in many ways he would be even safer not revealing he had one. He watched Bayliss, taking in the NSC official’s expensive, perhaps bespoke, charcoal-gray suit and highly polished shoes.

“You’re not a murderer,” Bayliss said, exhaling, settling into an armchair. “I know it. The question is, what can I do to help you?”

Stone took the chair opposite his. “Let’s start this way: what did you mean when you said you’d heard more about my situation than I’d believe?”

Bayliss nodded, then exhaled slowly. “I may be violating the National Security Act by telling you this,” he began. “I know I’m violating a lot of other secrets. I think you know your father’s death wasn’t the result of a random act of violence.”

Stone nodded.

“There’s something going on. A convulsion. Something very big.”

Something going on: Armitage’s words. “What do you mean exactly, Roger?”

“This is difficult for me, Charlie. I don’t know where to start.” He paused a long time. “You’re one of the stars of Parnassus. So you’ve heard, of course, of the Big Mole theory?”

What the hell was he talking about? Stone replied slowly, “It’s been wholly discredited, Roger.”

Bayliss was. Stone knew, referring to the theory that for the last several decades an agent – a Soviet agent – has slowly and methodically worked his way up the CIA’s hierarchy, performing well but not too well, making friends but not too many. Probably, the theory went, married to an American woman, with American children, an all-American kind of PTA-and-Kiwanis Club dad, who has been siphoning the most classified American intelligence back to Moscow. It was the great suspicion of the late James Jesus Angleton, the longtime CIA counterintelligence chief, who nearly tore the Central Intelligence Agency apart in the 1970s in his crusade to find the mole, until Angleton was fired by William Colby in 1974.

Bayliss shrugged.

“The confection of a paranoid genius,” Stone said.

Bayliss leaned forward, speaking with great intensity. “To all outward appearances, the ravings of a man who’d been in the sick world of counterintelligence so long his mind bent. When in reality the most inviolable stronghold of American intelligence is rotten to the core.”

Stone felt as if his stomach had turned suddenly to ice. “You’re saying it’s for real,” he whispered, shaking his head. “What the hell does it have to do with my father?”

“Listen, Charlie – I told you before I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, and I meant it. I need your word on this.”

“You have it.”

“If you so much as breathe a word, I’ll deny it. We believe your father may have been killed to protect this asset’s identity–”

“By Russians?” Stone shot back.

“Not so simple. Certain Russians. People who are intent on seeing that the identity of this mole remain absolutely secret.”

“But my father couldn’t possibly have known anything,” Stone whispered.

“Your father knew some things he wasn’t supposed to. Things that were clearly dangerous to these people.”

“Oh, come on,” Stone snapped, getting to his feet. He began pacing around the room, trying to think, trying to make sense of everything he’d learned in the last several days, things that no longer seemed to make any sense at all. “Why you? Why do you happen to know so much about this?”

“Why?” Bayliss said, turning in his chair to face Stone. “I don’t know. Maybe because I happened to be at a certain party one night. Maybe because I happen to know a certain Russian diplomat.”

“I don’t understand.” Stone sat on the edge of a writing table, suddenly too tired to stand.

“That I can’t go into. But I need you to think for me. Think, Charlie. They weren’t just after your father. They were after you as well. What do you know? What did you find out that might have anything to do with your father’s 1953 trip to Moscow? For that matter, anything, no matter how inconsequential it might seem to you.”

Stone shook his head, his lips tight, as he tried to think.

Bayliss now spoke with a gentleness that surprised Stone. “Your father would have wanted you to help me,” he said. “Alfred Stone loved his country deeply. Served in the White House, suffered smears on his loyalty, and loved this country, goddamn it. And I think he would have wanted his son to do everything in his power to help. Our national security may be jeopardized. Hundreds may die, Charlie. Perhaps thousands. I don’t exaggerate when I tell you that peace between the superpowers may well be at stake.”

Stone got up from the writing desk and walked toward the far corner of the room, folding his arms contemplatively. It made sense, everything Bayliss said; it fit.

“If I could go into more detail, Charlie, I would. It’s not just the U.S. that’s threatened. It’s Moscow as well. There must be something, some shred of information you garnered, perhaps some document, some phone call,” Bayliss insisted. “Anything.”

Stone simply sighed, furrowing his brow. He shook his head.

“I need you to come in, talk to some of our people. Tell them what you know, everything. It’s vital, Charlie.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Roger,” Stone said, watching Bayliss from across the room. “I need your help, your protection. But you yourself don’t know who’s involved in this and who isn’t. You could be betrayed the way I’ve been betrayed. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not safe out here, on the run, hiding.”

“I’ve survived so far. With your help, I won’t have to hide much longer.”

“It would be a good idea for you to come in. Let our people take care of you. Protect you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For your own good, Charlie. I’m going to have to insist on it.”

Stone gave a quick, derisory laugh. “Insist on it?” he repeated.

“It’s too dangerous for you, knowing whatever you know, exposed like this. You’ve got to come with me.”

Stone massaged the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes wearily. “I don’t know who to trust anymore.”

“You can trust me, Charlie. You know that. Your father knew that.”

“I’ll contact you in a few days, Roger,” Stone said.

“Don’t leave this room, Charlie,” Bayliss said, a peculiar edge to his voice. “You don’t have a lot of choice in the matter, really.” He got to his feet and moved slowly to the door; he seemed to block it. “We’re going to take you in.”

“I didn’t agree to that,” Stone said levelly, maneuvering toward where Bayliss was standing, toward the door.

“I don’t think you understand,” Bayliss said coldly. “You’re endangering things you have no idea about. Our goddamned national security. I was hoping we wouldn’t have to resort to compulsion. You’re not walking out that door. Let’s do this quietly. Stone.”

“Why are you treading so softly, Roger? You could have stormed this hotel, had me surrounded.”

“I’d much rather have had you come along voluntarily. And besides–” Bayliss reached his left hand around under his suit jacket.

Stone instinctively reached for his gun, then saw what Bayliss had produced: a small square metal object. Stone smiled, his composure unruffled. “A transmitter.”

“Our entire conversation,” Bayliss said, “has been broadcast on a hundred and forty megahertz. Our people are right outside the door, waiting for my signal.

“You’re an impressive, clever man, but an amateur, Stone.” All pretense at civility had vanished. “Give it up. You’re in way over your head. I’m sorry you preferred not to cooperate.” He spoke mournfully now. “I wish it hadn’t come to this.”

From behind the hotel-room door came a whisper-quiet scrape of metal against metal, and then the door swung open. The three men from the American Flag Foundation entered, their pistols drawn.

“Jesus,” one of them began.

The room was empty. Utterly silent, except for a low, almost inaudible groaning.

They’d waited for Bayliss’s signal to enter, but then the signal unaccountably went dead. Perhaps Bayliss had shut it off. Ten minutes later, the men had taken it upon themselves to move in.

They split up professionally, one of the men heading toward the closed bathroom door. The sounds seemed to be coming from inside. He sidled up to the door jamb and flung the door open with a sudden motion.

There, in the bathtub, bound with strips of toweling, was Roger Bayliss, unconscious or semiconscious, gagged with a monogrammed washcloth. He was restrained by the long snakelike cord of the handheld shower looped around his neck.

Stone could hear the sounds of traffic from the street below. He stood now on the broad granite ledge, which was protected by a parapet, outside the hotel’s fourth floor. For a few seconds – there was no time to spare – he inspected the window of a hotel room that appeared to be empty. Then he figured out how to force the window, and he was inside. Within two minutes, he got to the hotel’s parking garage and was home free.

Escaping Bayliss had not been especially difficult. He had disabled the transmitter, knocked Bayliss unconscious, then tied him up; Stone was far stronger. But he could not leave the hotel room by the door, behind which were Bayliss’s backups. There was no choice: he had to leave through the window. Since it was the third floor, he would have to climb – up, which was easier and safer than down.

There was an instant’s apprehension, and then he felt a calm wash over him, the same wonderful calm he felt when he began a particularly tricky climb. This was nothing, a ledge that had to be three feet wide, and a parapet. A snap.

He spotted a section of the edifice where the ornamentation – the gargoyles and gingerbread, stained dark with automobile exhaust – seemed sturdy enough. And then he hoisted himself up to the floor above, gripping on to the granite protrusions.

A little over an hour later. Stone pulled his stolen yellow VW into a parking space at Washington’s National Airport, his head still reeling. He glanced apprehensively in the rearview mirror, satisfied that he looked presentable. He did not appear to be a man on the run for his life, with the exception of his abraded hands.

Now, carrying his small valise, he heard the final boarding call for a Pan Am flight to Chicago echoing in the terminal building. If he hurried, he could just make this one; no sense in waiting. He strode urgently, eyes watchful, trying to make sense of the lies Bayliss had told. A convulsion in the American government to cover up a highly placed mole in the CIA. Was Bayliss telling the truth, even a small part of it? Something is going on, Armitage had told him.

Could it be true?

Quickly Stone removed a small bag from his carry-on bag and placed it in a locker. It contained only his gun, and, as much as he disliked being without it, there was no way to get it through the metal detectors. There were ways to get some guns through, Stone knew, but not this one. He could always pick one up if he needed it.

And, he reflected as he put down the cash for a ticket under an assumed name, he would probably need one soon.

36

Moscow

Charlotte Harper eased herself into an almost unbearably hot bath. The steam gave off the pungent smell of eucalyptus, from mineral bath-salts that were supposed to replicate the hot springs at European spas, relieve muscular tensions, reduce fatigue. At least the stuff cleared her head.

There were times when living alone was simply great, and this was one of them. A bath at two o’clock in the morning wasn’t possible when you were living with someone, at least not with music playing on the stereo, as it was now: a soothing Bach oboe sonata.

She’d worked late because she had to keep pace with the hours in the U.S., which was eight hours earlier. She was exhausted from doing the tedious and largely pointless stories that the network wanted about how Moscow was preparing for the summit. Especially when the real story was the wave of terrorism that had struck Moscow.

A bomb had gone off that day in the Moscow subway. That by itself would have been an important story, since terrorism occurred rarely in Moscow. Coming so soon after the Borisov assassination, however, it was even more significant.

But did it really indicate opposition to Gorbachev within the Soviet leadership? The first one, the Borisov assassination, yes, possibly. But a bomb in the metro? It just didn’t fit. Soaking, she began slowly to relax, and her mind floated free, until it seized upon an idea.

She got up, dried herself off, and wrapped herself in a thick purple terrycloth robe.

Twenty minutes later, she was unlocking the door to the ABC office, which was in the adjoining entryway in the same building.

It was half past two in the morning, and the office was dark and vacant. Good: she needed to think in solitude. She switched on the lights, glanced at the ever-chattering teletype, and sat down at her desk. The fluorescent lights buzzed. She thought, chair tipped back, as she examined the ceiling. Momentarily, she wondered, as she usually did in this position, where they planted the electronic bugs. Everyone knew that correspondents’ offices and homes were bugged. She remembered hearing a story about one of The New York Times reporters, years ago, sitting in his office alone on New Year’s Eve and remarking aloud that he wondered what the KGB did on such a night. Then the guy’s phone had rung, and he had picked it up and heard only the sound of a champagne cork popping.

She got up, walked over to the small reference library, and found a file she’d compiled for herself before leaving for Moscow.

In a few minutes, she found what she was looking for.

In her “terrorism/U.S.S.R.” file, she found a brief entry about the death of a man who had occupied the very same position as Sergei Borisov had, only decades earlier. He was named Mironov, and he’d perished in a suspicious airplane crash during the Khrushchev years. He’d been appointed by Khrushchev, and had been hated by certain important enemies of Khrushchev within the KGB.

So maybe the editor was right. Maybe there was intrigue within the Kremlin.

Then she found another item, about a wave of terrorist incidents in Moscow in 1977. On January 8, 1977, an explosion went off in the Moscow subway, killing seven people and wounding forty-four. The Soviet authorities charged and eventually executed three Armenian dissidents in the case, although there wasn’t any evidence linking them to the crime. A number of commentators that year believed that the whole thing was a setup, that the regime was just trying to discredit the dissident movement. Could that be what was going on now? Especially with the eruptions in virtually every republic of the Soviet Union?

Who would know?

There was someone who might know. She had a source – a valuable informant she protected carefully, because he worked for the KGB. A technician who secretly loathed his employers, he called himself only “Sergei.”

It wouldn’t be easy, but she could contact him. It would take a few days to reach him, probably. But maybe he’d know, or else he’d have a useful theory, or he’d know where to look.

In the meantime, though, she faced the dilemma of how to report what little she knew. How did you cover such a thing? Not one Soviet official was willing to be interviewed on camera about it; it was clear that they hadn’t decided what their public-relations strategy would be. There were rumors – there were always rumors – that the thing wouldn’t have happened had the new head of the KGB, Andrei Pavlichenko, not been suffering from heart trouble. She made a mental note to try to find one of Pavlichenko’s doctors and check on his prognosis.

Later that morning, she, her cameraman. Randy, and her producer, a young woman named Gail Howe, drove in the company Volvo to Charlotte’s favorite stand-up site, on an embankment of the Moscow River directly across from the Kremlin.

The air was cold, and there were a few flurries of snow that whipped across her face and stuck to her coat. She rehearsed her lines a few times, marking the words she wanted to emphasize with a pencil, and then the camera was rolling.

“For the first time, the official Soviet news agency, TASS, has acknowledged the acts of terrorism that have alarmed so much of Moscow,” she said. “By condemning the subway incident as ‘the work of a band of hooligans and lunatics,’ the Soviet authorities have sought to play down the importance of the bomb. This country fears most of all a breakdown of order, and with the summit fast approaching, these fears are higher than ever. One official here told me, ‘We in the Soviet Union are not free of violent crime, although I must say we are not plagued by the terrorism and the assassinations and the murders that beset the countries of the West.’ Only time will tell.” She paused for dramatic effect, and added, “This is Charlotte Harper, ABC News, Moscow.”

Right, she thought as the Volvo pulled away from the Moscow River. Another meaningless piece.

Just give me time, she told herself defiantly.

Early the next evening, she called the telephone number the babushka had given her. She’d tried it dozens of times over the last few days, with no luck, and she wondered if it were the right one.

Then a woman’s voice answered.

“Sonya Kunetskaya, please?” Charlotte’s Russian was fluent, but she could not disguise her foreign accent. Yet she had to be careful not to scare the woman off.

A long pause. “Yes, this is she.”

“I have a message for you from a friend.”

“A friend?” The woman was alarmed. “What friend?”

“I can’t say over the phone.”

“Who is this?”

“The message is urgent,” Charlotte said. It was vital to be cryptic. “I just want to drop it by. But if you’re busy …”

“I–I’m not – Who are you?”

“Please,” Charlotte said. “It won’t take any time.”

Another long pause, and then: “All right, I suppose.” Hesitantly, she gave Charlotte directions to her home.

Sonya Kunetskaya’s apartment was all the way across town, as it turned out, at the far north, almost at the last metro stop. Charlotte was nervous about taking her car, which, with its foreign-correspondent license plates, was a magnet for KGB tails.

The metro was jammed. She got off at the stop closest to the Exhibition of Economic Achievement, a large obelisk that swooped up to a point – the sharpest phallus in the world, Charlotte thought. Near it was Ostankino, where a vast czarist estate had once been located, now the site of the Gosteleradio, the State Television and Radio headquarters. The area around the metro was sparsely settled.

The woman lived a few blocks away, in an immense red brick building with endless numbered entrances, a dismal semimodern complex. The door to the entryway swung shut behind Charlotte with a clatter that made her jump, and the lobby, if that was the word for it, was shabby: concrete covered in peeling dark-blue paint, which smelled strongly of urine. A mangy gray cat scurried by, and Charlotte saw to her horror that it had no eyes, just empty sockets. She stifled a small scream, and checked Sonya’s apartment number.

The door to number 26 was covered with cheap padded Leatherette, punctuated by metal studs. The woman who opened the door was diminutive, in her early sixties. Her brown hair was peppered with gray, cut in a modified pageboy with bangs. She wore a faded floral-print house dress and steel-rimmed glasses. “Come in, please,” she said. “I am Sonya Kunetskaya.” And she extended a bony hand.

“Charlotte Harper.”

She led the way down a dark corridor into a sitting room furnished in heavy wooden pieces and sofas covered with a faded pattern. A man who looked about Sonya’s age was sitting in one of the easy chairs. His white hair was combed straight back.

He was the most horrific-looking man Charlotte had ever seen. It took all of her willpower to meet the man’s eye. His face was a mass of discolored scar tissue.

“This is my friend Yakov,” Sonya Kunetskaya said. Yakov sat in the chair with a self-possession that seemed to indicate he was no visitor.

“You said you had an urgent message for me,” the woman prompted.

“Well, perhaps I overstated,” Charlotte said. She remembered that Charlie had said Sonya Kunetskaya had met with Alfred Stone in Moscow, that she was connected in some way with Winthrop Lehman. What was her connection to Lehman? “I bring you regards from Winthrop Lehman.”

For a long time, there was silence.

“Who are you?” Sonya asked.

“I’m a reporter for ABC News. I was told to look you up.”

There was a long, uncomfortable silence. “Is this something you wanted to talk to me about in private?” Sonya asked. “Did Lehman tell you to call me?” There was an edge of desperation about the woman. She looked almost stricken, and her friend – or was it her husband? – looked uncomfortable. What was going on? Charlotte wondered.

“Yes, that’s right.” I’m stabbing in the dark, Charlotte thought. Why is this woman so nervous? “Have you known him long?”

“I met him in 1962,” the Russian woman said, seeming puzzled, but more at ease recounting a story she had obviously told many times. “I was an editor for Progress Publishers then.”

“But how did you get to meet someone as famous as Winthrop Lehman?”

“I was at a party at Boris Pasternak’s dacha at Peredelkino. I was Pasternak’s editor on a volume of poetry he was translating, and he invited me to a dinner party. Winthrop Lehman was also there.”

“Nineteen sixty-two? Pasternak must have been an old man.”

“Oh, yes. He must have been in his seventies.” She nodded vigorously.

“And what was Lehman doing in Moscow?”

Sonya hesitated momentarily, as if deciding precisely what to say. “I don’t know for certain. He visits occasionally.”

But Charlotte was stuck on something now and wouldn’t give it up. “You were Pasternak’s editor in 1962, is that right?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” Sonya said. “Boris Pasternak. All of you Americans know Doctor Zhivago, but have you read his poems?”

The question lingered in the air, awkwardly.

“Yes, I have,” Charlotte replied, “and they’re beautiful. I’m quite impressed that you worked with Pasternak.”

“He’s considered a great poet in our country,” Sonya said.

“Pasternak wasn’t alive in 1962. I’m afraid you picked the wrong date. He died in 1960.”

“So long ago,” Sonya said quietly. “I cannot remember, I’m sorry.”

And Charlotte knew for certain that the woman was lying.

37

Chicago

Stone arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport in mid-afternoon, tense and exhausted.

The file in Lehman’s archives had led him to Armitage. Pogue’s name was in that file, too.

Once again he tried directory assistance, but Warren Pogue’s number was unlisted. He called the FBI in Washington, but Pogue had left instructions that he was not to be disturbed in retirement. They refused to give out his address or phone number.

There had to be a solution.

He stopped at an airport coffee shop, bought a cup of coffee and a plastic-tasting ham sandwich, which he chewed slowly, considering. He needed some very specialized help, and he knew precisely where he could get it: a name that had been at the back of his mind from the minute he realized he had to go to Chicago. A woman he’d known since college – a friend of Charlotte’s, actually – who was an attorney. More specifically, an assistant state’s attorney in Chicago, which meant she probably worked closely with the Chicago police. Maybe – probably – she could get an unlisted phone number.

Paula Singer had been Charlotte’s roommate during freshman year, and she had kept in touch with Charlie and Charlotte over the years. Once, five or so years ago, she had stayed with them for a few weeks in their New York apartment, desperately unhappy over the breakup of a longtime romance, needing solace and companionship.

If she’d be willing to help now, she’d be invaluable. Maybe he could find temporary refuge, for a night.

Her name was not in his Rolodex or address book; she could not be known as a friend. He might be safe with her, at least overnight.

Stone looked around the coffee shop, instinctively suspicious by now. He desperately needed Paula Singer’s assistance, but the one thing he must not do was to be followed to her.

Tracking her down was, thank God, easy; she was listed in the phone directory. Her apartment was on Barry Street, on the North Side of Chicago, an area with an especially high density of youngish professionals. She was not home, of course, by the time Stone arrived at her house in the late afternoon. He would have to wait. He lingered in a coffee shop until the waitress made it clear he was no longer welcome.

As it turned out, Paula did not arrive at her house until almost nine o’clock, wearing a finely tailored burgundy business suit, a black tweed overcoat, and a pair of Reebok running shoes. In college she had worn an unvarying outfit of denim jacket, corduroy skirt, and leggings; now she was all crisp, upwardly mobile professionalism.

Balancing her briefcase and a stack of mail, Paula inserted her key in the front-door lock, oblivious of Stone, a few feet away in the shadows.

“Paula,” Stone said quietly.

She jumped, dropping her briefcase. “Jesus, who is it?”

“Charlie Stone.”

She looked in Stone’s direction and finally caught sight of him. “Oh, my God. My God. It is you.” Her tone was not one of pleasure. She was terrified. “Please, don’t.”

He realized with dismay what she meant. “I know what you’ve heard. Paula, it’s a lie. You know me. You have to help me.” He tried to keep the desperation out of his voice, but there it was. “Help me, Paula.”

Reluctantly, she pushed the door open and motioned him in.

“You eat yet?”

“No,” Stone said.

“Let me see what I’ve got in the fridge.” Paula’s initial terror had given way to a wary geniality; Stone, apparently, had persuaded her.

She’d offered to let him stay with her. “I don’t really do cooking, you know?”

Her kitchen was a tiny, narrow galley with a window counter through which you could serve food; to eat, you sat on tall stools at a bar on the other side. It reminded Stone of the arrangement Mary Richards had had on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He stood beside her, trying not to get in her way as she stared dolefully into the refrigerator, finding nothing, and at last locating one frozen dinner, a Le Menu chicken-parmigiana entrée, in the freezer. “Look, nothing fancy here. Hope you don’t mind if we split this,” she said, popping it into the microwave oven. Beneath her hearty poise, she seemed flustered. “You want booze or something? Sorry, but I don’t have any wine around. Scotch or nothing.”

“Scotch is fine. Paula, I need you to get an unlisted phone number and an address for me, first thing in the morning. I know you’ve got the resources to do it.”

She poured out the drinks. “Look,” she said falteringly. “I don’t know how to say this. I heard about what happened. About the stabbing and all that. The papers have been calling you a fugitive. Everyone talks about it.”

Stone noticed that she was standing some distance away. “You don’t believe it, I hope.”

“I don’t know what to think. If you tell me not to, I won’t. I mean, you want me to get a number, okay. But I want some facts. Like, what are you doing? And why here? I know you’re here to hide out. I figured that out.”

“Only for a night or two,” Stone said. “Just until I reach this person who can help me. I don’t want to get you in any kind of trouble. Believe me. But you’re not known to anyone as a friend of mine–”

“Thanks.”

“That’s not what I mean. You know that.”

“I know. But who are you running from? What the hell really happened, Charlie?”

The microwave beeped, and she removed the plastic tray. When she pulled back the plastic film, a cloud of steam rose from the chicken.

She cut the portion neatly in half, put one piece on a plate for him, and began to eat out of the tray. They alternated bites of chicken with sips of Scotch. She sat very close, and her legs touched his.

He would not tell her about his connection to Parnassus, to the CIA; she believed he was employed by the State Department, in New York, doing analysis of the Soviet Union, and he didn’t correct her now.

His story was sanitized, but even so it shocked her. Something in her was moved. She spoke quietly now, her voice almost trembling, rising and falling with anger. “Jesus,” she said. She had stopped eating, and she turned to face him. “If this is all true – this is a goddamned nightmare.”

Stone looked down at his Scotch glass, nodding.

“I’ll get the info for you. Stone. I got a guy. One of the cops I worked with, doing witness prep on a really high-profile DWI – a drunk-driving case, you know? – he’s a good guy. Got a crush on me, I think.”

“Great.”

“Married with eight kids. Not so great. So he’s got a friend who’s a billing clerk at the phone company, if you really want to know. That’s how even the cops do it, bypassing all the paperwork crap, the court-ordered shit.”

Stone smiled, slowly allowing himself to unwind. Good old brassy Paula. Charlotte’s college roommate, Paula was smart, unyielding, caustic, often abrasive. In college, she’d seemed absolutely sexless; that had changed, but she was as plainspoken, as alarmingly frank, as ever. Twenty years ago, she’d been overweight, with pudgy cheeks, brown eyes, long brown hair. Now she was much more slender, her hair short and soft around her face: an attractive, magnetic woman.

“You like it, Paula? Your job?”

“Yeah, Stone, I like making about one-tenth what all my friends in private practice make,” she retorted. Her voice softened. “Yeah, I like it. I like it a lot.”

“Too much work, probably.”

“Sure. Shit, yeah. Mind-boggling caseload. Barely enough time to interview the witnesses, you know? There’s hundreds of ASAs – assistant state’s attorneys – and all we’re really supposed to care about is numbers. Convictions. Biggest bang for the buck. You got a shithead you know is guilty and your testimony is weak, forget it. Bargain it down.”

Stone smiled, shaking his head as he listened. He appreciated what she was doing, trying to take his mind off his own trouble.

“Plus, the place I work in. Like a concentration camp. Really. The big, scary Criminal Courts Building at Twenty-sixth and California, metal detectors, graffiti all over the place, weirdos, and – get this – guards with rifles pointing down at you from towers.”

“Nice. But you’re doing what you want, more or less, right? Doing some good. I mean, you’re not defending corporations who dump toxic wastes.”

Paula gave an exasperated sigh. “Yeah. Sometimes. You know me, I’m always fighting battles. I took on this one case last year, against the advice of just about everyone in the office. My boss told me to lay off. State of Illinois v. Patricio, a rape case. A local judge accused of raping a thirteen-year-old neighbor girl, and, goddamn it, he did it, Charlie. I know it. But the goddamned judge had dozens of bigwigs, all these prominent people, ready to testify in his behalf, including some big-deal judges. Major players, even a bishop. My boss said plea-bargain it down to a lesser included offense, to minor assault. Avoid a trial we couldn’t win. He didn’t think our testimony was strong enough; the jury wouldn’t buy it. So I really called in my markers on this one, you know? I said. Look, I’ve been here for you, I’ve done fucking everything you wanted. Now give me this.”

“And?”

“And I lost.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me, too.” She hoisted the Scotch bottle and refilled their glasses. “So, hey, how’s Charlotte? She seems to be doing pretty well for herself. You can’t put the news on without seeing her face.”

“Yeah, she is.”

“Are you two – I don’t know how to say this, but when I last talked to Charlotte, like a year or so ago–”

“We’re separated, Paula. We’re still married, I think.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she said, although she didn’t sound it. “Who’d have thought she’d do so well? You know what I mean.” She shook her head slowly. “Jesus.”

“It’s true, she’s really doing great.” There was something double-edged about her compliments – was there still some old rivalry between Paula and Charlotte?

As the Scotch hit Stone’s empty stomach, he began to find her sexy, and he suspected that she felt the same thing about him. Maybe she had always been attracted to him.

“You know,” she said, sipping her Scotch deeply, “when you two were in bed, in college, I used to hear everything.”

She looked at him provocatively. Their faces were only inches apart. There wasn’t any question now what she was thinking. He moved his lips closer, and she did the same. Their lips met tentatively and then came closer still. After a moment, she pulled her mouth away and ran her left hand through his hair. “I always liked your curls,” she said softly.

“I’m starting to lose them, I think,” he said hoarsely. “Listen, Paula.” His nostrils took in her perfume, something cinnamony and musky. She slipped off her suit jacket. Under her silk blouse he could see her breasts, which were large. Her nipples jutted out against the fabric. He wanted desperately to remove her clothes, to see her naked, and he was embarrassed by his desire.

“Paula, this is wrong.”

“Do you think Charlotte’s not seeing people?” Paula whispered, her breath hot against his ear. Her hand moved lightly over his erect penis. For a moment Stone almost lost his balance on the stool.

Stone didn’t say anything, but, confused and guilty, he returned her kiss, his tongue piercing her mouth, exploring the softness.

“Hey, listen, Charlie, I’m glad you showed up,” she whispered, and they both got up to move to the other room.

When they got to the couch, she unbuckled his belt and slipped her right hand, still cold from holding the Scotch glass, into his Jockey shorts and on to his buttocks, then moved it around to the front. He held his breath, and he could hear her breathing heavily. He unbuttoned her blouse, and marveled at her erect nipples, large brown disks.

He bent to put his mouth on them, feeling both very wrong and very right, pleasures he hadn’t felt in a long time.

Washington

The first secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., Aleksandr Malarek, arrived at his office unusually early the next morning. He helped himself to a glass of tea from the seventeenth-century silver samovar he kept in a corner of his spacious office and sat down at his desk to review the overnight cable traffic from Moscow.

As rezident, or the highest-ranking KGB official in the United States, he oversaw the entire range of KGB operations in the U.S., which were now, in the days of glasnost, directed mostly at the acquisition of high-technology. He was assisted by the four other rezidents, in New York and San Francisco.

But his time in the last weeks had been spent entirely on something his KGB compatriots must never know about.

Malarek did not consider himself a traitor. He was a faithful servant of the Soviet state: he loved his country, and no longer did he question whether he was being disloyal. No, he believed firmly that he was helping to save his great country.

But he was increasingly displeased with the Americans, his colleagues – the Sanctum. In their attempts to locate one particular man, the Americans were being far too lax.

As rezident, Malarek was able to draw upon the KGB’s network of illegals and sleepers dispersed throughout the United States. The illegals, or agents living under false identities, were controlled by the KGB’s Department Eight, Directorate S, which is responsible for planning assassinations and sabotage. Trained for years outside of Moscow, these men (and a few women) were given forged passports and documents and slipped into the U.S. Here they supported themselves quietly in unremarkable jobs and met as infrequently as possible with their controls in the rezidentura. They were expensive assets, to be used with extreme delicacy. Often they carried out assignments in the Middle East, under the cover of businessmen.

And a number of them worked not for the KGB but for the Sekretariat. Which meant that, given the present urgency, these particular illegals had had to carry out “wet affairs” – murders.

It is generally believed that the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union and the United States no longer engage in the taking of human life. In fact, such actions are avoided whenever possible, since they run the risk of exposure, perhaps causing grave political damage.

But wet affairs do continue, on both the Soviet and the American sides, although rarely directed at each other. Whenever possible, the work is done by proxies – the Cuban Security Service (DGI) or American criminals. The Sekretariat, however – because its existence was so carefully concealed from both Washington and Moscow, as well as the KGB – could not entrust these jobs to anyone but their own.

At half past eight, there was a knock on the door. It was Malarek’s assistant, the Line PR, in charge of political intelligence. He was Semyon L. Sergeyev, a small, balding man with a graying mustache. He was a few years younger than Malarek, although he looked older and perennially anxious. He, too, was Sekretariat.

Sergeyev’s face was grave. “The situation with Armitage has been taken care of,” Sergeyev said as he entered and took a seat.

“Cleanly?”

Sergeyev explained, and Malarek smiled at the cleverness.

Malarek took some pride in the elegance of the operation. A code clerk in the State Department’s security-classified-file section, compromised by several years of bribes discreetly channeled by Malarek’s office, had informed Sergeyev that Deputy Secretary Armitage had requisitioned a particular X-classified file. Malarek had immediately dispatched one of his assets, working as a courier at the State Department, to do the job. It had been done with the efficiency Malarek expected.

Malarek was silent for a long time, pensively smoothing the lapels of his American-made Harris-tweed suit. “What precisely was in the files William Armitage requested?” he said at length.

“A dossier on a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation named Warren Pogue.”

Malarek raised his eyebrows. He recognized the name; he was quite familiar with a number of files connected with this matter. “Ah. Is it possible our man intends to contact him?”

“Sanctum thinks it’s unlikely but possible. By later in the day, they’ll have a team of watchers.”

“Watching isn’t enough. If this man is contacted by Stone in any way, he obviously has to be killed. Even if contact has already been made. But cleanly. There must be no connection with us.”

Sergeyev had been nodding steadily. “Yes, sir. There is a way.”

“And Stone,” Malarek began, distracted, but he did not have to continue. Sergeyev knew perfectly well that decades of scrupulous planning on the part of a few very powerful men in the capitals of the two superpowers must not be undone by a single desperate man, whose location remained unknown.

38

Moscow

Stefan Kramer was about to set off their last bomb.

Little remained of the explosives that his old cellmate had given him, enough perhaps for one TNT bomb and one plastique.

He had the night off from work – as an ambulance driver, he usually worked nights – and now he and Yakov sat in his bedroom in the shambling communal apartment in which he lived, assembling the most basic sort of bomb: a few cartridges of dynamite attached to a blasting cap and a chemical pencil. In fact, he did all the work, and Yakov, sitting alongside him on the too-soft bed, kept him company.

The room was musty; the single bed in the center of the frayed blue rug was covered with a spread that had once been cranberry-red and was now a quilt of bald patches. The walls were a depressing hospital tan.

“Stefan,” Yakov said, “we’re making a mistake.”

“Why?”

“With every bomb, the chances of our being caught increases enormously. The militsiya must be looking for us now, everywhere.”

“As long as I’m careful–”

“No. We’ve tried. There’s no response from the authorities. Nothing. Not a word. Avram is still a prisoner.”

“Be patient. Things take time,” Stefan told his father.

Yakov shrugged. “You should move out of this apartment. Try to find someplace nicer. We have room, you know. You can move back in with us. …”

“The Politburo moves slowly,” Stefan continued. “We must give them a decent interval to quarrel among themselves. We can send them another letter. But I think we’ve got to avoid making our motives publicly known. Then our chances of getting Avram released will shrink to almost nothing. Keep it private, and the government can still save face.”

“I just don’t know,” his father said.

“This is a package bomb,” Stefan said, holding the contraption up.

But Yakov shook his head. “I have a very bad feeling about this,” he said.

Late that afternoon, wearing a standard blue worker’s uniform that one of his apartment-mates had left lying around unused, Stefan walked to Sverdlov Square, around to the side of the enormous Bolshoi Theater with its portico of eight columns.

There are many entrances at the side, and during the day none of them is guarded. He selected the one that seemed most likely to be the service entrance and went in. In his blue uniform and, over it, a quilted gray worker’s coat, he looked like a deliveryman of the sort whose deliveries would interest no one. He carried a cardboard box filled with a stack of papers that might have been programs but were actually nothing more than discarded invoices he’d taken from a nearby trash heap.

“I’m looking for the dressing rooms,” he grumpily told a passerby in the corridor. “You know where they are?”

The passerby pointed the way, and soon he found a hall that appeared to be where the performers’ quarters were. Actually, any Bolshoi office would have done, but why not aim as high as possible? The hall was deserted, and he began to open the doors, one by one. If he surprised anyone, or anyone surprised him, he would say he had a box of stuff that he was supposed to give to any stage manager, and he’d pretend that he was lost. But the second door he tried was unlocked, and no one was inside. He put down the box and quickly searched the room, and his heart leaped when he found exactly what he wanted, and so quickly, too: a work pass left on a dressing table by one of the ballerinas. It was small and red and embossed with an official golden seal. Quickly he stuffed it into his pocket, picked up the box of forms, and re-entered the hallway. Two ballerinas in tutus and toe shoes passed by, giggling, but did not give him a glance. Part one of the operation was a success, which was not surprising. People in dressing rooms tend to be careless about their possessions.

That evening, he returned to the Bolshoi.

The bomb consisted of a chemical pencil inserted into a cartridge of dynamite. It would not be very powerful, but it would cause a tremendously large noise in the huge theater. It was small – seven-eights of an inch by eight inches – so it fit neatly into the large, beautiful bouquet of flowers wrapped in cellophane.

Any sort of close inspection would reveal the apparatus underneath the flowers, but Stefan calculated that there would not be time for a close inspection. The Bolshoi pass would help with that: he would be seen as an employee of the company making a delivery to some important minister from, perhaps, the director of the theater.

At night, the Bolshoi Theater is lit up majestically; its portico glows with an almost amber light. In front of the portico’s eight columns is a striking equestrian statue of Apollo at his chariot. Within is a splendid Baroque auditorium, sumptuously appointed in gilt and red plush, which seats an audience of almost three thousand.

The common Russian usually cannot obtain tickets for a performance unless he is willing to wait in line for endless hours on the chance that the few available tickets will not be sold out. For the most part, the audience comprises the more privileged Russians – members of the Central Committee, KGB, Supreme Soviet, and Congress of People’s Deputies – foreign diplomats, and the like. Often the ornate boxes are occupied by people of Politburo rank and their families.

The night was cold and rainy. Stefan waited in his car until the crowd in front of the theater disappeared and all the latecomers had gone in. Then he got out of the car, still wearing his blue uniform, and carried the bouquet to the front entrance of the theater.

Now he handed the stolen red Bolshoi work pass to the fat woman who sat in a chair by the door. Luckily, these passes have no pictures on them; with their calligraphic script, they look more like tiny, shirt-pocket diplomas.

In the car, a few minutes earlier, Stefan had squeezed the chemical pencil – it would not do to be seen tinkering with it in public – so he calculated he had ten minutes before the bouquet exploded. He had allowed a minute for admission to the theater and two minutes to find a place to put the bouquet: ideally, a reserved private box that was empty, its regular patrons off somewhere on business. There were always several vacant boxes, even if there were rarely any available seats. And then one minute to exit safely from the theater, and it would detonate.

But the porcine-faced woman frowned. “Hold on a minute,” she said suspiciously. “What are these flowers for?”

Stefan affected the sardonic tone of someone who has been at the bottom of the social hierarchy a long time. “For some big-ass minister or something. I don’t know. He wants to give this to the prima ballerina after the show.”

Like any good babushka, she was hung up on propriety. “Why don’t you use the chyorny khod?” she demanded, using the old Russian term for “back entrance.”

He glared at her. Already almost a minute had gone by. Hurry up, you fat bitch! he thought. Or well both go up in smoke!

“Look, I’m in a hurry,” he told her. “The guy wants it yesterday, you understand?”

The babushka wagged a pudgy finger at him and got slowly to her feet to consult with another woman, who was sitting at an adjacent entrance.

His heart beat wildly now. He could imagine the acid inside the chemical pencil eating its way through the threadlike metal wire, a hairsbreadth away from detonating the explosion.

“All right, come on,” the woman said reluctantly.

Stefan walked as quickly as he could into the grand entrance to the theater and up two carpeted flights, around to the first box he came to, and found it – locked!

Of course! He had neglected the most obvious possibility of all – that, if a box weren’t being used tonight, the management would keep it locked! – and now he held in his arms a bomb that would go off momentarily.

Desperately, he ran down the hall and opened the door to the neighboring box. It was full of people, a well-dressed man and his heavily made-up wife and three well-scrubbed children. He closed it, hoped he hadn’t been seen, although he thought the youngest child had turned around and seen his face, and went on to the next box, and the next.

The door to the fifth box he came to was open and – thank God – empty. Probably its occupants had informed the theater that they would be arriving quite late, and the management had kept it open pending their arrival. He got to his knees, shoved the bouquet inside, and closed it. He ran down the nearest staircase, his heart now pounding so hard he thought it would fail. Have to get out of here, he thought, but I mustn’t run. Running will alert anyone and everyone that I’m the culprit. Must get to the exit and walk past the old ladies. God help me, he prayed. He had not prayed for decades. God help me.

There it was, the entrance to the theater, with the two ladies sitting on their metal folding chairs, and just as he nodded his head at them, he could hear a terrifyingly loud explosion in the theater, followed by an instant of silence and then a roar, a chorus of screams.

He couldn’t help himself: he ran through the doors and out. Behind him he could hear a woman’s voice shouting after him, but he didn’t stop until he was in his car and had safely pulled away into the light evening traffic.

39

Chicago

Warren Pogue was a contented man. He’d always feared retirement – the idea of sitting around doing nothing had terrified him – but retirement had turned out to be quite pleasant. The FBI had been good to him, and his forty-four years in the Bureau had netted him a respectable pension.

His other friends sat around the house and watched TV and complained, but Warren Pogue kept busy. He was more active than he’d ever been in his life. His wife, Fran, had been even more terrified than he at the prospect of his retiring, but she enjoyed it now, too. He mowed the lawn and gardened and kept their small, immaculately manicured backyard on Mozart Street, in the extreme north section of Chicago known as Rogers Park. He played golf and had even taken up tennis.

And he flew. During World War II, he’d been in the air force, and he’d fallen in love with flying. That was it for forty years, and then, a few weeks after he’d retired from the Bureau, he got together with a few friends and bought a single-engine four-seat Piper Arrow.

So once a week, Saturday, he went flying. Today was Saturday, and he’d been up for an hour. Time to go. He talked to the air-traffic controller and requested clearance to land.

Pogue dipped the plane to twenty-five thousand feet and dialed in the flaps to thirty percent. The throttle back, he made a sharp left, another left, another left: a full circle, watching the hands on the altimeter steadily clicking counterclockwise as he decreased altitude and glided in to the final approach. Just before the wheels touched down, he pulled the nose up so the rear wheels landed first.

A clean landing, he thought with satisfaction. He steered the plane to the parking ground, lining the nose up carefully, the wings precisely in line with the ones on either side. He shut off the ignition, the fuel tanks, the battery switch, and got out. He anchored the plane to the hook embedded in the ground.

He thought about his only daughter, Lori, who was thirty-two and still not married. She’d be coming in tonight to stay for a few days. He wondered whether he’d let it slip and tell her she ought to settle down already and get herself a husband and a family.

Leaving the airport, he said goodbye to Jim, the mechanic, and got in his car. Half an hour later, he pulled up the driveway to his small home.

The driveway could use another blacktopping, he thought.

Pogue was a chain-smoker. His voice, deep and gravelly, reminded Stone of some character on the old ‘Terry Mason” show, although he couldn’t remember which one.

The retired FBI agent looked to be in his late sixties. He was fat, with a potbelly that jutted like a shelf above the hoop of his black leather belt. His wife was a small woman with ash-blond hair who appeared long enough to say hello and then disappeared to an upstairs room to watch television. His place was tiny, a ranch-style house with perfectly rectangular hedges in front and a lawn that resembled Astro-Turf.

Paula had tracked down Pogue’s address and phone number first thing in the morning – she had left her house long before Stone got up, probably because they both felt awkward about having made love.

Then Stone had called Pogue, telling him he was working with the director of the FBI on a book about some of the Bureau’s greatest exploits – and Pogue was on the list. Stone counted on there not being enough time for Pogue to make phone calls – “I’ve got a plane to catch in about two hours,” Stone said, “and this will hardly take any time.” And, amazingly, Pogue had said yes.

“I agree,” Pogue was saying, a broad smile creasing his face, as he unwrapped the cellophane from a pack of Marlboros, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. “The FBI under Hoover was a bunch of fucking heroes. Not like the candy-ass losers you see around today, you know what I mean?”

Stone nodded, smiling amiably. Ten or fifteen more minutes of this, Stone told himself. You can stand it. You’re sitting here talking to the guy who went to Moscow to gather information on your own father, the guy whose trumped-up evidence sent Alfred Stone to the federal penitentiary, and you’re chatting as if you were two lifelong buddies at an Elks reunion.

At last the opportunity came up. Stone remarked in passing that, well, didn’t Pogue have something to do with the famous Alfred Stone case?

“Something to do with it?” Pogue shot back. “I single-handedly covered it.”

“I’m impressed,” Stone said, grinning. Bastard. “Didn’t you catch the Stone guy in Moscow, meeting with a Russian spy?”

Pogue bowed his head modestly, and lifted it again, exhaling evenly as he did so. “All right.” He looked around as if someone else were in the room, the prefatory gestures of a seasoned raconteur. “I’ve been involved in almost eight hundred cases. On this one, I remember every fucking detail. It’s the one that got me promoted from peon right up the ranks. I was on the Soviet espionage squad. We were on to the commie spy network – Klaus Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, Alfred Stone, starting from the time we cracked some secret Soviet codes during the war. I was just out of my apprenticeship, wearing my white shirt and my snap-brim hat and all that. As soon as we got word that Lehman’s assistant was going to Moscow, I got the orders to follow him. See if he met with the same lady his boss did, you know.” He smiled, smoke escaping from his lips. Although Pogue was hardly giving away any secrets, his demeanor suggested he was breaking a number of security regulations. “You know who Winthrop Lehman is.”

“Sure. But who’s Fyodor Dunayev?”

Fyodor Dunayev’s name had appeared on one of the documents in Lehman’s archives, interrogated by Pogue.

Pogue expelled a lungful of smoke violently, with a hacking cough.

Then he stared, and stared, his cigarette burning. Ten, twenty, thirty seconds. The gray ash of the cigarette grew steadily longer. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I told you. I’m–”

“Who the fuck are you?” the FBI man shouted. “You aren’t writing any fucking history of the FBI.”

“All right,” Stone said calmly, sitting perfectly still. He had a gun; was it wise to pull it out now? Pogue might well be a dangerous adversary. “You’re right. I’m not working on a history of the FBI, and I apologize for coming to you under a pretext.”

“If you’re a goddamned federal–”

“I’m not a federal anything. I’m Alfred Stone’s son.”

There was a grim set to Pogue’s jaw. He crushed out his cigarette in the large star-shaped glass ashtray, then lit another.

“Don’t try anything,” he said menacingly.

“I’m not planning to. Believe me, I realize you were doing your job. I don’t blame you.”

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

“You interrogated a guy named Fyodor Dunayev. I want to know who he was. Is he a Russian? An émigré? A defector?”

“Get the fuck out of here,” Pogue bellowed.

“Let him stay.”

It was his wife. She stood clutching the banister on the carpeted staircase. She had been listening for quite some time. Stone now realized.

“Fran, get upstairs,” Pogue said, pointing at her with the lit cigarette. “This is none of your business.”

“No, Warren. You should talk to the man.”

“Get the hell upstairs, Fran. This doesn’t concern you.”

His wife descended the stairs slowly, still clutching the banister as she went. “No, Warren,” she repeated. “You’ve felt guilty about the Alfred Stone affair for years. You know he shouldn’t have been put in prison, and you didn’t say anything. For years.”

“Fran–” Pogue said, more softly.

“You knew you did the wrong thing in the fifties. You put an innocent man in jail. That’s not what you stand for. You’ve felt terrible about it. Now, make up for it, Warren. The poor man’s son is here, Warren. Tell him what he wants to know!”

“Leave us, Fran,” Pogue said.

Pogue’s wife made her way back up the stairs, just as slowly as she had come down.

And Warren Pogue, with a crestfallen expression, spoke without looking at Stone. “Fyodor Dunayev was a defector from Stalin’s secret service who lives in Paris,” he said. He spoke in a sort of monotone, as if the very process of remembering, reaching back into a buried vault of recollection, was painful. He exhaled, the smoke seeping out of his mouth and nostrils. “I suppose it doesn’t make a goddamned difference what I tell you now.”

An hour later, Stone walked through Rogers Park, numb from shock. He reached into his jacket pocket to reassure himself that the miniature cassette tape recorder was still there. The Nagra he had found in a Washington electronics-specialty shop was capable of recording conversations across a large room for up to six hours on a single cassette – and that machine had secretly recorded the testimony of William Armitage and Warren Pogue.

He would have to go to Paris.

There, Pogue had said, lived a Russian émigré who knew more than anyone else about the Beria coup. Ancient history that would reveal the present. He would have names of the people involved, either on the American side or the Russian side – people who were now, years later, about to throw the world into upheaval.

Fyodor Dunayev had served in Stalin’s secret police, the forerunner of the KGB. He had been one of Beria’s trusted agents, so much so that he had been sent on a mission in 1953 to terrorize an old woman in Chicago. Anna Zinoyeva. To try to obtain a document.

There were three of them, Pogue had said, among the fiercest of Beria’s agents. One was Dunayev. Another had died in a purge immediately after Stalin’s death. The third one, Osip Vyshinsky, was still believed to live in the Soviet Union. After Beria’s execution, Dunayev had defected, knowing his days were numbered.

He had to see Dunayev.

A dense fog now blanketed the city; figures at a distance seemed shrouded and mysterious. As he walked past a movie theater and a delicatessen, he felt something. Saw something, more accurately – something in his peripheral vision, a figure that the fog made unrecognizable. Almost unrecognizable, but the cues remained, silhouettes, gaits. Suddenly he knew he was being followed again.

They had tracked him to Chicago.

No, dear God. It couldn’t be.

No.

Stone stepped up his pace, and the man on the opposite side of the street, still not quite visible, walked faster, too. Stone turned a corner, and now the man crossed the street, following at a distance of just a hundred yards. There was something familiar about the man, something eerily familiar. A bulky man in a black leather jacket, a goatee. Stone had seen him before. He was quite sure of it.

Now Stone turned another corner, sharply, and immediately spotted an alley. He ducked in and flattened himself against the brick. The follower would catch up to him in seconds.

A discarded table leg on the ground caught Stone’s attention, its metal glinting. Quickly he retrieved it with his good, right hand. It was the heavy iron leg of an old-fashioned kitchen table.

Now!

He swung the iron rod at the follower, catching him by surprise. The rod cracked into his shoulder, and then Stone immediately lunged at the man and pummeled him to the ground, and at that instant he suddenly knew where he had seen him.

In Cambridge.

This was the man who, along with accomplices, had killed his father. He was the murderer.

The man rose from the ground, a bit sluggish, and as he did so, he slipped a hand swiftly into his jacket pocket.

A tremendous rage suddenly gripped Stone, and with a force that was scarcely human, he slammed his body into his attacker’s. But the man had recovered now, and Stone felt a fist crack into his face.

Stone tried at the last second to protect himself, but he was too late. Instantly, swinging his fists back, he could taste, smell, blood, and he moved with an insane fury, cracking the iron rod against the attacker’s shoulders, then – though the man tried in vain to knock Stone off balance – against the top of his head, swinging with enormous force.

This is for my father! he thought, crazed, feeling a warmth ooze over his lips and chin.

The man was dead.

The attacker’s body lay sprawled on the ground in the alley, hidden by the dumpster from the view of passersby. His face was bloodied.

Stone stared for a long moment in disbelief. He had killed a man.

He reached into the man’s jacket and found the gun in the holster, a Llama M-87 with a full magazine, which he removed and shoved in his front pocket. The man’s wallet was in his breast pocket. He flipped it open and saw the usual false identification papers, credit cards, and licenses under various names. Digging farther, Stone found a concealed compartment, which he forced open. In it was a small plastic telephone-company card, on which was embossed a calling-card number. A phone number the attacker had no doubt used to place telephone calls to a central office, whose area code was Washington, D.C.

With bloodied hands. Stone pocketed the plastic card, and then he began to run.

40

When Stone had left, Pogue removed a handkerchief from his front pocket and mopped his forehead.

Oh, Jesus, he thought. Oh, Jesus. What’s this fellow stumbled onto?

He picked up the phone and called Jim at the airport, asking him to fuel the Piper all the way up, check on the weather conditions, make sure it was clear to land in Indiana. He had to move fast. He had to get to Indianapolis, Indiana, immediately.

He picked up the phone again and called Justice Bidwell’s private number. Justice Harold Bidwell, the retired associate justice of the Supreme Court. Still one of the most powerful men in the country and, even five years after his retirement, still intimately connected to everyone in Washington who counted. Justice Hal Bidwell, whose nomination to the Supreme Court had been assured thirty-five years ago when a young, ambitious FBI agent named Warren Pogue had managed to dig up compromising material on all of Bidwell’s rivals.

The phone rang, once, twice, three times.

Bidwell would know instantly what it was about. Pogue realized how unorthodox it was for him to call Bidwell directly, but the matter was urgent.

“Your Honor,” Pogue said when Bidwell answered. “I must see you right away. I’ll be arriving at Indianapolis in” – he checked his watch – “about two hours.”

“What are you–”

“The channel,” Pogue said tensely. “It’s been corrupted! We – all of us – we’re in danger!”

“I’ll have my man pick you up,” Bidwell replied, a slight quaver in his rich baritone.

The methodical preciseness of flying calmed Pogue. You had to go through a litany – A and then B and then C. The law said you had to consult a printed checklist, even if you knew the procedure by heart. It always relaxed him, and his heart was going so fast, he needed a little relaxation. Needed a clear head.

He looked the Piper Arrow over carefully, as he always did before he went up: looked in the engine cowling, the spark plugs, the fan belt. The oil level, the distributor caps. He checked the wings for any cracks, checked the pressure of the tires, the gas caps under both wings, even shook the tail. Everything was fine.

The battery and the auxiliary battery were both charged. Pogue got into the plane and fastened the seat belt. He tried the mechanical steering equipment, turned the wheels, tested the pedals, pushed on the steering wheel. He got in and revved it up to four thousand rpm, kept his foot on the brake, felt the plane rattle. The pressure gauges were fine. Tired of the shaking, he let the plane idle. One, two, three: there was a pleasing order to it. He switched from the fuel tank to the reserve tank, felt the engine falter for an instant, but that was normal. The wheel flaps were fine, too, and he kept them in neutral for takeoff.

Using the radio navigation equipment, he called the tower to ask for the barometer reading, and set the altimeter. Then he checked his flight plan, the Loran navigation aids, and dialed in his wavelength. And then he requested permission for taxiing to takeoff.

He dialed the pitch of the propeller to the maximum, pushed the throttle lever, revved up again, and with the throttle all the way forward removed his foot from the brake and felt the plane lurch ahead. The plane bounced down the runway and felt pleasantly light, running along at seventy-five miles an hour. He eased back on the nose, and the plane lifted off the ground.

He was on his way.

When the plane had reached three thousand feet, he throttled the engine back to three thousand rpm as he gradually climbed up to five thousand feet.

The secret was out. How, Pogue didn’t know. But it was out. He wondered if his visitor knew what sort of danger he was uncovering.

But suddenly Pogue’s thoughts were interrupted by a signal from his nose: a peculiar smell. The smell of overheating, of oil burning. That made no sense; he’d checked everything out carefully. How could that be?

Probably just a jet trail, he thought, and he looked around through the Plexiglas window. No, no jet trail. He saw no smoke at all. He banked the plane up and down to look for a smoke trail. Yes: there was a blackish-blue vapor trail behind him.

The engine temperature had started to climb. Why? He’d kept a steady altitude for the last several minutes. He brought the plane down to a lower altitude, down to four thousand feet, and instantly saw the engine temperature begin to shoot up. He examined the oil gauge and noted with horror that the level had dropped from full to half.

Was there an oil leak? He tried to enrich the mixture, throttle the engine back, reduce the speed from 160 miles per hour to 125. Please, Lord, he thought, don’t screw the pooch. Don’t let me fuck up.

He had to get to Bidwell, had to get to Bidwell’s files. He picked up his radio handset and called an operator, giving his QM number, the number of his telephone account. Thank God you could make phone calls from this craft.

“Operator,” came the woman’s voice reassuringly over the radio.

“Operator, I need you to place a third-party call for me,” Pogue began.

Harold Bidwell’s estate, outside of Indianapolis, was generally considered the finest in the area, a handsome Georgian house set back a good distance from the main road. At precisely eleven o’clock in the morning, the front-door bell rang.

The uniformed butler opened the door and saw that the person who had rung the doorbell was a postman.

“Harold Bidwell?” the postman asked.

“This is his residence,” the butler said. He was a balding, bespectacled, portly man in his fifties whose mustache was flecked with gray.

“Certified letter,” said the postman.

“I can sign for that, thank you,” the butler said. The mailman, a young man with dark hair, stepped into the foyer and handed the butler the envelope on a clipboard.

The butler took it, leaning over to write. “I don’t see,” he muttered, “where I’m supposed–”

But he did not finish the sentence.

He gagged on the wire that the postman had slipped around his neck and had swiftly tightened. The butler’s tongue lolled out, his eyes bulged in an expression of sheerest terror, his face a beet red, his entire face contorted in a scream that would never come. His glasses clattered on the marble floor.

The postman closed the front door behind him and dropped the corpse on the floor as he entered the house.

Upstairs, Harold Bidwell was sitting in an armchair, where he had been sitting for a very long time in his silk dressing gown, terrified. It had been over half an hour since Warren Pogue had called, and he had been unable to stop trembling.

The channel was corrupted. How could it be?

Now the phone was ringing, and Bidwell reached over to get it, but then he heard a noise from the hallway, a rustling of some kind.

“Rico,” Bidwell called out.

It was not Rico. It was a man with dark hair wearing navy-blue pants and a light-blue shirt – a U.S. mailman. What was he doing in the house?

“What the–” Bidwell began.

The mailman had a revolver and was pointing it at him. “Don’t move,” the intruder said. He had a foreign accent that Bidwell couldn’t identify. “Please stay right where you are and you won’t get hurt.”

“What do you want?” Bidwell asked desperately. “Take whatever you want. Just take it – please don’t shoot me.”

“I want you to take these pills,” the mailman said, coming nearer.

The hand that wasn’t holding a gun was extended, two tablets in the flat of his palm.

“No!”

“Don’t worry,” the young man said. “These are just Demerol. Just a nice tranquilizer. I don’t want to have to shoot you.”

Bidwell was shaking his head violently. “Don’t. Please. Don’t.”

The gun was now at his head. “Swallow these,” the man said quietly. “I want you to be very calm. Open your mouth.”

Bidwell did as he was told. The man placed the two tablets on his tongue. “It’s poison,” Bidwell managed to say as he swallowed. “Where’s Rico?”

“It’s not poison,” the man said reassuringly. “I just want you to be very quiet. A pleasant narcotic. Now, please open your mouth. I want to make sure you’ve swallowed them.” He inserted several fingers into Bidwell’s mouth, moved them around, and was satisfied. “These will take effect quite soon. Now I want you to open your safe. While you’re still alert.”

“I don’t have a safe,” Bidwell protested.

“Come with me, please,” the intruder said, his gun still at Bidwell’s temple. Bidwell got to his feet. The man slowly walked the judge over to the one of the built-in bookcases behind the desk and pulled at a row of books, which came open in one segment, exposing the dial of a safe. “Please don’t lie to me. I also know what’s inside, and if need be I can open it myself. Please. Save me the bother.”

Bidwell spun the dial, his fingers trembling. His first attempt failed; the safe remained locked.

“Don’t make another mistake,” the young man cautioned. “I’m perfectly aware that if three attempts fail the safe’s lock is electronically frozen for an hour. Please, get it right.”

Bidwell spun the dial once again, this time opening it.

“Thank you,” the man said. He reached into the small safe, past the jewelry, and extracted a large, bulging manila envelope. “The gold and diamonds I leave to your heirs,” he said. “This is all I want.”

Bidwell now knew. “You!” His lips formed the words slowly now. “You’re … one …” A thought occurred to him suddenly, and he narrowed his eyes. “My heirs?”

“I think it’s time for a bath. Judge Bidwell.”

Bidwell could only shake his head slowly, his eyes wide with terror.

The young man escorted the judge out of the room and into the hall, the gun always at the old man’s temple. The bathroom was directly ahead.

Bidwell suddenly reached out a hand and pressed the oak door frame of the bedroom as they passed.

The young man smiled and did nothing. “I’ve disabled the burglar alarm,” he said. “That won’t work.”

They had reached the bathroom, which seemed terribly bright to Bidwell now, its overhead light shining glaringly on the white-and-black tiles. The young man guided Bidwell over to the toilet seat and sat him down on the closed lid. Bidwell’s eyes began to droop.

Then the man in the mailman’s uniform went over to the marble bathtub with its gold-plated fixtures and turned on both taps to full force. The water gushed out, splashing into the tub, filling it quickly.

Bidwell’s eyes were now almost closed. “What do you want with me?” he moaned, his voice almost inaudible under the roar of the water. “I’ve kept the secret. I’ve never said a word. You’re all madmen. I never said a word.”

The bath was now half full, and the young man began removing Bidwell’s clothes, starting with his silk dressing gown, unknotting the tie. In a short time, Bidwell was naked.

“Into the tub,” the young man said.

Bidwell slowly, slowly climbed into the tub. He whimpered softly. “The water’s cold!” he rasped.

“Now lie down.”

Bidwell lay down in the tub. His eyes were devoid of expression.

The young man rolled up his sleeves, took a large natural sponge from the bathroom vanity, and placed it over the old man’s face, depressing until Bidwell’s head was fully submerged, and the last bubbles of breath stopped.

“It’s so easy to fall asleep in the bath,” he said aloud.

As the phone rang, its reassuring tone crackling over the speaker, Pogue frantically increased the pitch on the propeller, downshifting to increase power at fewer engine revolutions. No luck. The plane was overheating.

Now the engine was slowing, and now, with a silence that terrified him, it stopped. Absolute, horrible silence. The plane began to sink. He tried the starter, but it would not fire up.

The phone was ringing. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Pick it up, you son of a bitch. Pick it up.

He began to talk aloud, to the unhearing handset. “Please, God,” he repeated several times. His limbs were frozen in fear. “Please, God.”

The phone continued to ring blandly. Where was Bidwell?

There was a wooded area below him. He thanked God for that; he could be over a city instead, and that would be that. The plane began to glide. Below him he saw a highway, where he could attempt an emergency landing.

In about sixty seconds, he would be on the ground, and he prayed to God that the landing worked.

He let the handset drop to the floor.

The operator’s voice came over the box: “Sir, I’m sorry. Your party doesn’t seem to be answering.”

His thoughts raced. What had happened? He had been thorough in his preflight check. It was impossible.

There was the highway, perhaps two hundred feet below. It would happen. He was safe.

He did not count on a crosswind.

He gasped, and then let out a long, shrill scream of terror.

The wind, without warning, carried the plane to the right, directly into the path of a bridge over the highway, into the concrete abutment, where it exploded into a ball of fire.

In the instant before he was killed, he suddenly understood why, why this had to happen now.

41

Chicago

The fog had gotten so dense that Stone could not see even twenty feet ahead. His body weak, his limbs trembling from fear, he ran without once stopping. He could not blot out the horrifying image of his attacker’s body, sprawled in the alley a few blocks from Warren Pogue’s house.

He took a circuitous route to Paula’s apartment to make sure he was not followed. But visibility was so poor that anyone who might have been trying to follow Stone would have lost him in a second anyway.

It was a Saturday, which meant that Paula only had to work a half-day. She was home when Stone arrived, and she immediately took in his torn clothes.

“Oh, Christ, Charlie. What the hell happened?”

Stone told her.

“Oh, my God. You goddamn killed a man.”

“Everything came to the surface, Paula,” Stone whispered. “My father – everything–”

“We gotta get you out of here, out of Chicago.”

“We? No, Paula. I don’t want you to get involved any further.”

“I’m not involved.”

“Bullshit, Paula!” Stone exploded. “I should never have put you in danger in the first place.”

“Charlie–”

“I was extremely careful to make sure no one saw me arrive, yesterday or today. No one knows I’m here. No one can connect you to me. As long as we keep it that way, you’re safe. Now, I’m going to get a plane out of here – I’ve got to get to a guy in Paris. He may be the only one who can help me. You know I’m grateful for everything you’ve done, and–”

“Stone,” Paula said, her voice rising with anger. “You’re not flying anywhere tonight,” Paula said. “The airports are closed. Fogged in.”

“Jesus Christ. I can’t stay in the city! They’re sure to find–”

“My parents live in Toronto. We can drive there and you can fly out. Shit, it’s an okay drive. Anyway, from Canada it’s probably safer, don’t you think?”

Stone spoke slowly, thinking aloud. “It’s common knowledge that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has some sort of computer to check on people leaving and entering. People have been nabbed on the spot, at gunpoint. But most people don’t know that Canada’s not on our computer. …”

“There you go.” She gave a slight smile. “Anyway, don’t forget, they’re not after me.”

“Paula,” Stone said, “as long as you’re seen with me, you’re in real danger.” He shook his head, then bit his lower lip. “I won’t take that chance. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Don’t condescend to me, damn it,” Paula snapped. “I’m fully capable of making my own decisions, you get it? You fucking show up on my doorstep, now you’re stuck with me.” She slipped an arm around his waist and continued, sweetly, “Anyway, Stone, I know how to take care of myself. I don’t plan to die. I’ve got too big a caseload.”

“Paula–”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I can take a personal day on Monday, if I have to. If we leave now, we can be in Toronto by late tonight.”

Stone grinned at her enthusiasm, in spite of himself. “Now, I need to take a look at a map.”

“You got it.”

“Hey, you know something, Singer? Underneath that facade of grim professionalism there’s a real live human being.”

“Thanks,” Paula said sarcastically, poking him in one buttock with her fist. “Fuck you very much.”

They drove in Paula’s white Audi Fox along 1-94 and then north on 1-96 along the great expanse of Lake Michigan. Bruised and wounded from the fight in the alley, he found driving tiring and painful, so she drove, and soon he was fast asleep.

After a few hours, Paula woke him up.

“Where are we?” he mumbled.

“You asked me to wake you when we got into Michigan. You’re a barrel of fun as a traveling companion. I’m almost falling asleep at the wheel here, and I can’t put the radio on for fear of waking the wounded. We’re just north of a place called – what the hell is it? – Millburg. State of Michigan.”

“What time is it?”

“Four-thirty. Afternoon, not morning.”

“Thanks.”

“Why’d you want to get up now, anyway?”

Stone pulled a map from the map holder and examined it for a moment. “We need to make a detour.”

“What for?”

“Let’s stay on 96 for a while. Don’t make the turnoff here.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m a smart woman. Stone. I can deal with complicated situations.”

Stone was silent, studying the map. “I’ll explain later. I promise. Just keep going north. Fifty or sixty more miles. Okay?”

“This isn’t the way to Toronto.”

“I know.”

“You’re wide awake enough to talk?”

“Yeah. Just barely,” Stone said.

She paused, then said: “Let’s hear it. What’s going on?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” was all Stone allowed himself to say.

A little over an hour later, they came to Haskell, a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan, just over the line that divides Van Buren County from Allegan County. On the outskirts of town was a small general store appended to an old-fashioned Good Gulf filling station.

“Pull over here, please,” Stone said. “I need to get a few things.”

Paula looked at him quickly, shrugged, and steered the car into the station.

A few minutes later, he returned to the car with a pack of Merit cigarettes, a box of Ohio Blue Tip strike-anywhere matches, and a roll of toilet paper. “I forget, do you smoke?” he asked, lighting a cigarette.

“No,” she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “I didn’t know you did.”

“I used to, and I do now.”

“Toilet paper?”

Stone smiled cryptically, went around to the trunk, and pulled out a small, cheap suitcase he had picked up in Chicago that morning, which contained a few items of clothing and a backpack. He took off one of his shoes and pulled a concealed wad of bills from its lining. Then he returned to the front seat and pointed to a spot on the map. “This is about five miles north of here,” he said. “I’ll meet you there in, let’s say, two hours.”

“What the hell is this, Charlie?”

“Stop off somewhere for dinner. Take your time. Read. I’ll meet you in two hours.”

“How are you going to get there? On foot?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be there. Be patient if I’m a little late.”

Haskell was a minuscule town on the shore of Lake Michigan whose livelihood seemed to come from fishing and related industries all having to do with the lake. There was hardly any “downtown,” except a White Castle burger joint, a bar, a bank, and a couple of buildings that seemed to hold offices of various kinds. Directly down the hill from the main drag. Stone could see a timber jetty.

He stopped a passerby and asked about accommodations in the town. He was directed to a small, comfortable-looking clapboard inn called, unsurprisingly, the Haskell Inn. Stone introduced himself by his real name and shook the proprietor’s hand. He registered as Charles Stone, using his credit card. Most of the rooms were vacant, the innkeeper said; he could have his choice.

Drawing on a cigarette, Stone said, “Whatever’s comfortable. I’m a smoker, obviously, so if you’ve got a smoker’s room or something …”

“Nothing like that,” the innkeeper, a small balding man, said. “You’ve got your pick, just about. Just don’t smoke in bed. That’s our one hard-and-fast rule.”

“Don’t worry,” Stone assured him. He looked around the inn, taking in the worn Oriental rugs and the cherry paneling. “The place looks great.”

“Thanks,” the innkeeper said, genuinely pleased. “You in town on business, Mr. Stone?” It was clear from the way he asked it that the possibility of such a thing was remote.

“No. Pleasure. Getaway, really. I’ve been going through some rough times these past few weeks.”

“Here to escape,” the balding man said, nodding.

“Basically. When I was a boy, my father and I used to go fishing around here. Is there a place in town that rents fishing boats?”

“There isn’t a town on the lake that doesn’t. Sure. Capp’s.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll just check in and maybe even go out for a spin tonight. See if I can get a boat.”

Capp’s Boat Rental was located in a small shack on a small wooden pier. The owner, a rough-hewn, large, red-faced man, seemed to be closing up for the day. Stone, toting the backpack, introduced himself, also by his real name, and told him what he wanted.

“Sure, we got fishing boats,” the owner said. “Look, what do you want? We got everything from a sixteen-foot skiff to a one-hundred-eleven-foot boat. Fifty-three-foot Weejack, holds twelve guys. Thirty-six-foot Nauti-Buoy.”

“Just something small, for myself. Motorized, of course.”

“How about a Hawk?”

“How big is it?”

“Twenty-six-foot. Sport fisherman. Holds six; nice and comfortable for one. Just you?”

“Right. How much?”

“Fifty bucks a day.” The price seemed to have been set on the spot. He added hastily, “Of course, we supply everything. Rod and reel, bait, even lures. I mean, you probably got your own equipment, but we supply it anyway.”

“Sounds just fine. I’ll take it out now. Is that all right?”

“Tonight? No way, José. You gotta be out of your mind. It’s dark already.”

“I know that.” Stone explained about what a difficult past few weeks he’d had, how he desperately needed to go out for a spin, even if a brief one. A hundred dollars an hour wasn’t so bad, now, was it?

Reluctantly, the owner took Stone down to the pier. The Hawk was old and not in the best repair, but it would do. Stone checked to make sure there was an inflatable life raft and life jacket, then examined the rusty metal tackle-box. “Everything’s here,” Stone observed.

“I don’t like to rent at night,” the owner said truculently.

“I thought we discussed that.”

“I don’t know you from Adam. These boats belong to friends of mine. I got a responsibility to make sure they don’t get stolen.”

“But they’re all insured. They have to be.”

“I want a deposit.”

Stone pulled another hundred-dollar bill from his wallet. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“There’s gas in the tank?”

“Three-quarters full, I think.”

Stone unscrewed the gas cap to look inside.

“Hey,” the owner said suddenly. “Careful with that butt, guy. Gas is flammable, you know.”

“Sorry,” Stone said, tossing the cigarette into the water. “Boy, you got enough gas in there to get to Canada and back,” he joked. He slipped the rope off the steel post at the end of the jetty, got on board, and turned the ignition switch. It started right up. The boat rumbled beneath his feet. He removed his backpack and put on the orange life jacket.

“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” Stone yelled to the owner as he lit another cigarette.

He ran the boat at top speed, bouncing over swells on the lake’s surface, and made several large circles, enjoying the powerful little boat’s speed. In a few minutes, he was out of sight of shore. He steered the wheel to the right, moving parallel with the shoreline until he approached a dark patch of woods looming perhaps five hundred feet off, and then he shut off the engine.

The sudden quiet was almost palpable. He could hear the distant croak of a few bullfrogs. The water here was deep, Stone noted, and not stagnant, yet the shore was quite close. He could not be seen from any point on the shore.

He threw the life raft onto the water and watched it drift about, tethered to the boat by a thin rope. After grabbing the oars and setting them by the stern, near the floating life raft, he unzipped his canvas backpack and took out the roll of toilet paper and the matches. He unscrewed the gas cap and began unrolling the toilet paper into the tank, then jammed the rest of the roll into the tank’s opening. It fit snugly. He took a cigarette from the pack and lodged it into the roll so that it stuck out like an accusing finger, tobacco end out.

Then he pulled the cigarette out and, with one of the matches, lit the cigarette, drawing on it until it glowed bright red in the darkness. He wedged it back into the toilet-paper roll with the burning end away from the gas tank.

Leaving the backpack on board, he climbed over the edge while holding the oars, lowered himself into the icy water, and got onto the raft. His wounded arm made him nearly scream out in pain. After a shaky start, during which he almost landed head first in the water, he managed to row the raft quickly, and quietly, away from the boat. Because he was favoring his left arm, this proved to be more difficult than he’d anticipated. A few minutes later, he felt the scrape of sand; he had reached shore.

He pulled himself up, shivering from the cold in his soaked jeans and sweatshirt, and pulled the stopper from the raft to let the air out. If his calculations were accurate, he had only about ten or fifteen minutes to walk, during which he would probably catch a bad cold. His left arm throbbed.

Suddenly there was a terrific explosion, a low boom, and a great flash of light. He glanced around quickly and saw that the Hawk was now a ball of flame, illuminating the surface of the lake in bright, festive orange.

He accelerated his pace, trudging through the woods with the oars and the deflating rubber raft all clutched beneath his right arm. Even running did not warm him; he could feel himself shivering, the discomfort of the cold battling with the throbbing of his left arm in the pain centers in his brain.

Two hundred feet ahead or so, he saw Paula’s white Audi under a highway arc lamp, parked next to a picnic table. The dome light was on, and Paula was reading. He ran as fast as he could for the warmth of the car.

Weakly, Stone opened the door, startling Paula. She stared at him in disbelief.

“I need to put some stuff in the trunk,” Stone said.

“What the hell–?”

I no longer exist, he thought. But he said nothing.

42

Langley, Virginia

From the window of the Director’s seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters in Langley, all you could see was forest, miles of the rolling Virginia woods. A splendid view, Roger Bayliss thought. It was marred only by a small round plastic device resembling a hockey puck, affixed to many windows in the CIA, which emits an ultra-high-pitched sound to foil laser surveillance of room conversations.

Director Templeton sat at his large contemporary white-marble-topped desk. Roger Bayliss stood, pacing nervously back and forth before the window. In front of Templeton’s desk was the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Ronald Sanders.

Next to him sat the senior agency psychiatrist, a sixty-two-year-old man named Marvin Kittelson. Kittelson, who knew everything about Charles Stone except why he was being pursued, was small and wiry with a deeply lined face. He had a gruff, coarse manner, which was somewhat muted in the director’s presence. A former navy lieutenant, he had received his psychiatric training at the University of California at Berkeley, and later made a name for himself at the Agency as head of the Technical Services Staff’s behavioral-sciences division. His expertise was in personality assessment; during times of crisis, Templeton – and the President – had called upon Kittelson to provide assessments of various world leaders, from Gorbachev to Castro to Qaddafi. Within the Agency, Kittelson was widely considered a genius.

“Our initial strategy failed miserably,” Templeton said. “It’s obvious now, with hindsight, that we should have moved in on him sooner, rather than using him to lead us to others.”

His three listeners nodded agreement, and Templeton continued. “Now the trail’s gone cold.” He addressed Bayliss directly. “Your strategy to abduct him was clearly misconceived.”

Bayliss looked suitably chastened. “The man’s far more agile, far more clever than we’d anticipated.”

“Stone’s a goddamned wild card,” Templeton barked. “Some kind of fucking lunatic. Instead of turning himself in, giving it up, he’s persisting.” He shook his head and scowled. “I just don’t understand it.”

“Ted, don’t forget how long Edwin Wilson eluded us,” Sanders put in. Edwin P. Wilson was by now a legendary case in CIA annals: a renegade CIA agent, con man, and illegal arms dealer to Muammar Qaddafi, who had managed to escape a CIA manhunt for four years.

“But Stone’s a goddamned amateur!” the Director said. “I don’t care if he’s the smartest analyst we have, he’s just not trained as a field operative!”

“He’s an amateur, yes,” said Sanders, “and he’s alone and outnumbered. But he’s resourceful and as strong as a goddamned ox. And he’s desperate.”

Unlike Templeton and Sanders, the Agency psychiatrist knew nothing of Bayliss’s attempt to entrap Stone, and he was savvy enough not to probe things that weren’t his affair. He smiled neutrally.

“Our people are plugged into every domestic and just about every foreign airline’s computers,” the Director said, exasperated. “If his name appears on any airline anywhere in the Western world, we’ll nab him in a second. And we’ve got his name on TECS.” The Treasury Enforcement Communications System is the national computerized system for tracking all persons who pass through U.S. ports of entry and departure.

Templeton turned to Kittelson. “Marvin, let’s hear from you. The man has managed to elude not just our field personnel but the Russians’ as well. It just doesn’t make any goddamned sense.”

“It makes a good deal of sense, Mr. Director,” Kittelson replied, pulling several sheets of notes from a manila file folder. “May I say, you folks, with your computers and your fancy software and your high-tech surveillance devices, you forget one thing.”

Templeton’s scowl lengthened. “Such as?”

“The human factor. I’ve gone through everything he’s written, every analysis of Soviet politics he’s ever done for Parnassus and before, and it’s clear he has a chess-player’s mind. It’s brilliant stuff. Really shrewd.”

“We know that,” Sanders interjected. “But that hardly explains–”

“You have professionals following this man,” Kittelson persisted with a shrug. “But, precisely because he’s an amateur, he doesn’t observe the laws that professionals do. He doesn’t follow predictable behavior patterns. Unlike most amateurs, though, he persists, as you say, with a vehemence that’s striking. You might say he’s ruthless.”

Bayliss nodded.

Kittelson continued: “I’ve put together a full profile on the man, and everything in his makeup, everything in his personal history, suggests that he’s become extremely dangerous.”

Ronald Sanders, the former Notre Dame quarterback, expressed his derision by sighing noisily. “Marvin,” the Director cut in, but Kittelson kept speaking.

“What I’m suggesting is this. He’s something of a loner with a strong drive for perfection, an abhorrence for self-pity. It’s logical that his coping mechanism to defend against the traumas he’s recently suffered was, in effect, to decompensate.”

“Explain,” Templeton said.

“I believe Stone’s exhibiting a ‘pathological grief reaction.’ I see this quite often among our Clandestine Services personnel. It’s an occupational hazard; it presents in those who tend to enter such lines of work.”

“All right,” the Director prompted.

“What you’re really saying,” Sanders remarked with a dismissive shake of his head, “is that this guy’s a nasty piece of work.”

“He’s become highly unpredictable and therefore dangerous,” Kittelson said with some irritation. “Rather than succumbing to grief, he calculates and exacts revenge. He may have trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy, and so he masters his considerable resources to fight. Only by acting out his rage can he cope with his grief. Look, I’ll tell you this. If I were to make up a textbook profile of the genesis of a human killing machine, I couldn’t do any better.”

One of the three telephones on Templeton’s desk rang, and Templeton picked it up at once. He listened, grunted, and hung up.

“Well, Marv, you’re right. Stone is out of control.”

“What are you talking about?” Bayliss demanded.

“They just found one of our people dead in Chicago, in the Rogers Park area.”

Bayliss whirled around, suddenly understanding. “The files Armitage tried to get!” So Stone actually had gone to visit this retired FBI agent.

“Roger,” Templeton ordered, “contact Malarek. I want maximum force on this. Stone’s obviously in the vicinity.” He got up from his chair, looked at the two men, and then murmured: “I think the trail has finally gotten warm.”

43

Toronto

Wrapped in a blanket, Stone fell asleep almost immediately. Paula put the heat up full blast, and gradually Stone’s chills melted away. They took 196 north to Grand Rapids; there they got on 96 and took it across Michigan, skirting Lansing, and into Detroit, where Paula stopped briefly at a Ramada Inn for coffee. It was close to midnight when they arrived at the border crossing at Windsor, Ontario.

“Wake up, Charlie,” Paula said. “Time to become Patrick Bartlett.” She had borrowed some credit cards and a birth certificate from one of her neighbors, identification enough for the lax Canadian border guards. Stone knew it would be foolish to use his own, and he wanted to avoid showing his forged passport until it was absolutely necessary.

The passing was brief and perfunctory. The immigration agent glanced at Paula’s and Stone’s IDs and asked what the purpose of their visit was.

“We’re visiting my mother,” Paula explained. That was that, and they were over the border.

“Do you think they’d really have put your name on some kind of computer?” Paula asked when they were safely down 401.

“Yes,” Stone said groggily. “By now I’m almost certain they’re watching every border crossing.”

Within a day, his “death” would undoubtedly be reported to the Haskell town police. The owner of Capp’s Boat Rental would probably remember the man named Charles Stone, would remember most of all that he had told the fellow not to smoke around gasoline. The innkeeper would remember Stone, too. The accidental death would be quickly investigated, and just as quickly set down in the police logs. But would it be believed by his pursuers? Probably not forever. Stone would know soon enough, but for the time being he considered that he had some breathing space.

“Charlie,” Paula said, an hour after they had crossed the border.

“Yes?”

“Listen, I wanted to tell you something. About our – making love and all that.” She was visibly embarrassed, and she spoke slowly. “I know we shouldn’t have done it, so don’t think I’ve got the wrong idea, okay?”

Stone nodded.

A long moment passed; then Paula continued: “But I just wanted to tell you. I haven’t made love with anyone in, like, a year.”

Stone nodded again.

“This isn’t easy for me to talk about, okay?”

“Take your time,” Stone said gently.

There was another lull, and then: “You know how I went after that rapist, that case I told you about? I mean, the guy was guilty as hell, and I guess anyone would be mad, especially a woman. But – Jesus, Charlie, I was attacked last year.”

“What do you mean, attacked?”

“I mean, nothing happened. Thank God. But it was close. I was coming home from work really late one night, in that shitty neighborhood.” She fell silent, and then continued. “The guy was scared off by a passerby, thank God.”

“Paula–”

“You know, I took a martial-arts class after that, so I could defend myself, but that was the easy part. The hard part was, you know, dealing with sex.”

“I understand–”

“No, listen. I just wanted to say …” She didn’t finish the thought, but Stone understood, touched by this rare display of Paula’s tenderness.

They arrived in Toronto when the sun was just beginning to rise, at around five o’clock Sunday morning. They had made very good time; Paula had stopped for coffee only twice.

Paula Singer’s mother lived in a spacious old brick house in the Rosedale area of Toronto. She was asleep when they arrived, but she was expecting them, and had left a key for them under a mat.

“My bedroom is clear on the other side of the house from my mother’s room,” Paula whispered as they walked through the garage into the house. “We’ll have privacy.”

“To sleep,” Stone said.

They fell asleep quickly in Paula’s large and comfortable bed, and in the late morning they woke up and made love. Then each of them showered and came down to the kitchen, where Paula kissed her mother. Stone said hello, and they ravenously consumed the large breakfast that Eleanor Singer had prepared for them.

Stone took Paula’s car into the center of the city to buy a new set of clothes in Eaton Centre. He returned a few hours later utterly transformed.

Paula gave a little shriek when she saw him. “What have you done to yourself? Your curls!”

“You don’t like it?” Stone had gone to a barber shop and had his hair shorn so that he now had a buzz-cut. A pair of heavy black-framed eyeglasses made him look like someone else entirely. To complete the outfit, he wore a worker’s uniform of dark-blue shirt and pants.

“You look like a janitor. Like a deinstitutionalized janitor, I mean.”

“Anything but a guy on the lam. Although, I have to say, people do get the wrong impression – on the way over here, I passed a park where a bunch of skinhead punks were hanging out. One of them shouted out to me, ‘Hey, skinheads live forever, man!’ ”

“You have another passport, I assume.”

“Right.”

“What about the picture? Does it match up?”

“That’s not how passport agents work. They look for points of similarity, just as anyone would. They’ll look at my face, then at the passport, and they’ll realize that it’s the same person, who happens to have gotten a haircut and a pair of glasses. People change glasses and haircuts all the time. They’ll be looking to confirm it’s the same person and the facial resemblance is there. But if they’re looking for Charlie Stone, they won’t find me by name, and the description isn’t going to help them, since I look like hundreds of thousands of other guys my age.”

By late afternoon, Stone had made flight reservations to London on British Airways. He had rejected the notion of taking a more circuitous route to Paris – to Atlanta, say, and then to London – because he thought it best to avoid any American ports of entry or exit, where a description of him might be logged in to the computers. From London, he could get to Paris by ferry, thereby leaving no paper trail.

Before departing for the airport, he took Paula aside and handed her the Llama semi-automatic pistol that he had taken off the man he had killed in Chicago. Paula gasped as if she had never seen a gun before, and shook her head violently. “No way, man. No way am I going to touch that thing. Jesus, I don’t even know how to use one of them.”

“Take it, Paula. It’ll make me feel safer knowing you have it.” She stared at him, and then, reluctantly, she nodded.

When they arrived at the airport. Stone stopped at a newsstand to buy some newspapers and magazines for the flight, and he was at once struck by a front-page story in a Toronto newspaper. It was an AP story filed from Moscow about yet another terrorist bombing in central Moscow, this one inside the Bolshoi Theater. Stone bought the paper and read it numbly, alarmed.

Was this the coup that the HEDGEHOG report had warned about? Would it be a series of bombings, masquerading as terrorism, and then – and then a violent assault?

He checked his watch, found a phone booth, and placed an operator-assisted long-distance call to Moscow.

To Charlotte.

There was the distant crackling and static roar, a sequence of mechanical noises, tones, and then a high-pitched, regular beep. The phone was ringing at Charlotte’s apartment. It was after one o’clock in the morning, too late to call, but there might not be a chance later. He had to know what she had found, if indeed she’d looked. She’d understand.

After ten rings, there was a thick, slurred “hello”: Charlotte’s voice.

Stone felt his chest constrict. “It’s me.” His voice reverberated electronically, a metallic echo.

Mustn’t say a name. Correspondents’ phones are tapped in Moscow, Stone knew. No doubt of that.

A long pause. Charlotte’s voice, husky from sleep, sexy, thrilling. “Oh, God. Where are you?”

“I’m – I’m safe. I need your help.”

A long, long pause. An eternity.

Would she agree to do one more thing for him, knowing as she surely did what a desperate situation he was in? If anyone could do it, it was Charlotte – the best-connected reporter in Moscow. But how much could he say on the phone? How to communicate it safely? Elliptically: a conversation that to whoever else was listening would sound natural if puzzling, but to Charlotte would mean something.

“Listen,” she began, but he interrupted. There was no time. He took a deep breath and plunged ahead, spewing a disjointed, oddly emphasized bluster of words. “Got a question for you. What would you recommend an American spend most time visiting: the Kremlin Armory, the Bolshoi Theater, or the beautiful Prospekt Mira metro station? Or all three? I know they’re all architecturally fascinating; what do they have in common? They’re all certainly involving enough, aren’t they?”

Charlotte, in bed, stared at the dark bedroom wall, gripping the phone tightly. What was he trying to say? She wondered where he was; what he was doing. Didn’t he know how dangerous it was for him to be talking to her on the phone this way? Didn’t he realize that her phone was tapped, that he was endangering both of them? She’d have to terminate the call at once.

She felt the hot tears streaming down her cheeks, and, her heart racing, she replaced the phone in its cradle.

He listened for her reply, not knowing how she would respond, and then he felt a jolt when he realized she had hung up. Stone stood in the booth, looking around at the airport terminal, dazed. By turns hurt, angry, unbelieving.

He had tried, to no avail.

Damn her. Damn Charlotte.

Paula accompanied Charlie to the British Airways desk, where he took out his wallet and paid cash for the ticket. The only seats remaining were in first class; the money was not really an issue, but Stone would have much preferred the anonymity of economy class.

“Your passport, please,” the ticketing agent, a redheaded girl in her mid-twenties, said.

Stone gave her the Robert Gill passport, which she inspected cursorily; then she looked up at him.

“Could you wait here a minute, please?” she asked.

Stone nodded and smiled pleasantly. He caught Paula’s frantic glance, and gave a small shrug, as if to say, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, either.

The ticketing agent was now joined by an older man in a British Airways blazer, who approached and asked matter-of-factly, “Mr. Gill, do you have any other identification on you?”

Stone’s heart began to race. “Certainly,” he said, making rapid, silent calculations. “Is there a problem?”

“Not at all, sir.”

Stone handed him Robert Gill’s driver’s license.

The man stared at it for a moment, and then looked up. “Fine, sir. I’m sorry, but we’re required to confirm the ID of anyone who pays cash. Airline policy.”

“No problem,” Stone said with false joviality. “I’d do the same thing in your place.”

Charlie and Paula walked toward the departure gate. Stone saw the metal detectors, standard equipment in virtually every airport in the world by now, and was thankful he had decided to leave the gun behind. He embraced Paula, and he noticed there were tears in her eyes. “Hey, listen,” he said. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’ve done for me. I just want to make sure you’re never, ever connected with me in any way. I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“How am I going to know you’re okay?” she asked as she saw him to the gate.

“Don’t try to get in touch with me, whatever you do. Don’t talk to anyone about me; don’t let anyone know you saw me. Promise me that.”

“Okay. I promise. But will you get word to me somehow?”

“All right. I’ll use an alias; you’ll know it’s me.”

“What alias?”

“Haskell.”

“Haskell?”

“After Haskell, Michigan. The place where a fellow named Charlie Stone had a boating accident and met his untimely demise.”

44

Haskell, Michigan

The Tastee Do-Nut shop on Elm Street in Haskell, Michigan, is legendary for its glazed buttermilk doughnuts. Its coffee is less than legendary, but no one ever complained about it to the Tastee’s owner, Millie Okun.

At a little after ten in the morning, precisely half of a buttermilk doughnut sat uneaten on a plate in front of Randall Jergensen, Haskell’s chief of police and one of its two police officers. Chief Jergensen had already had three of them; besides, he was deeply involved in the Haskell Mercury’s lively report of the all-county basketball championship game last night.

Chief Jergensen was a large-framed, large-bellied man with a round face and a chin that barely demarcated his face from the ample folds of his neck. He was forty-seven, and he had been divorced for almost three years from his wife, Wendy. He thought about her every day and then immediately praised the Lord that he lived alone.

“Millie,” he said from behind the Mercury, not looking up. “How ’bout a refill?”

“Coming right up, Randy,” Millie Okun said, sweeping the glass coffee pot from the Bunn-O-Matic and lofting it over to Chief Jergensen’s mug.

At that moment. Randy Jergensen’s squawk box went off.

“Shit,” he said, and eyed the fresh coffee longingly.

By the time he arrived at the station house, most of the story was already in place. His deputy, Will Kuntz, had gotten a call from Freddie Capp, reporting that one of his boats had blown up on the lake. With some fool in it. Freddie’s report was confirmed by the Coast Guard. Sounded an awful lot like a damn-fool accident; Freddy remembered that the guy, who’d said he just wanted the boat for an hour, was a smoker. Probably he just went and blew himself up.

Goddamned tourist, up from Chicago. With a great sigh of annoyance, Chief Jergensen got in the cruiser and paid a call on Freddie Capp. Freddie had the guy’s name, from the driver’s-license data he’d copied down. Then Jergensen took a spin down the shore until he found the site of the accident, a great big mess of charred wood and metal floating on the surface of the water and poking up out of it. Fire just goddamn burned itself out before the fire trucks got there. The man, whose name was Charles Stone, had evidently ignited the gas tank. Deserved it, Jergensen thought, spitting into the water.

Shortly after noon, Jergensen had talked to Ruth and Henry Cowell at the Haskell Inn and gotten this Charles Stone’s credit-card imprint. He had enough now to notify the next of kin. This was the part of his job he disliked most.

He picked up the phone to call New York, and then put it down, dreading the task.

Oh, yes. He hadn’t completed standard operating procedure yet, he remembered with some relief, thankful that he could put off the call a little longer.

“Willy,” he called out to his deputy. “Run this one up on the NCIC computer, will you?” He was referring to the National Crime Information Center’s computerized listing of all persons with arrest warrants outstanding. Nothing ever came of it, at least this far from the crime centers, but you had to do it anyway.

Jergensen settled back to enjoy a grape soda and a crossword puzzle. He thought he had the three-letter word for “Oriental sash” figured out, when his deputy called something out.

“Huh?”

“Bingo, Randy. Jesus, the FBI’s got a fugitive-flight warrant out on him. Whoa – treason laws! The guy was wanted by just about every federal agency.”

“Well, we just found him, Will. In about twenty thousand pieces at the bottom of the lake. Obviously he was trying to escape to Canada. Probably afraid he’d get nabbed at the border. Instead, he blew himself right up to the sky.” He snorted. “Send that over the wire.”

Jergensen returned to the puzzle and remembered that the Oriental sash was “obi,” and he wrote it down with a dull stub of a pencil.