The Moscow Club

45

Moscow

The black Chaika zoomed down October 25th Street at top speed, black Volga escorts in front and behind, through Spassky Gate, and into the Kremlin.

Inside was the first deputy chief of the GRU and the leading munitions expert of the GRU’s elite Spetsnaz troops. As they passed through Red Square, they could see the long line of people waiting to get into Lenin’s tomb in the distance. At the Spassky Gate checkpoint the car paused only momentarily, then proceeded through an iron gate into the section of the Kremlin that is closed to tourists.

The Chaika pulled up alongside the Council of Ministers building, and the bodyguard got out of the front seat to hold the door open for the two men.

The aristocratic, white-haired colonel-general and his young Spetsnaz explosives specialist were entering the seat of Soviet government. They passed several sets of blue-uniformed Kremlin Guards, who asked for their documents cursorily. The older man moved quickly, and the younger one just barely managed to keep up as they moved toward a green-painted elevator down a corridor that appeared to be used only for official business.

The elevator had a plain metal floor, and although it might have been constructed decades ago, the electronics were apparently up-to-date, and it descended smoothly. The name on the elevator was “Otis,” an American elevator company.

It opened on another corridor, tiled in a mustard color. The GRU officer led the young man past several more sets of guards. The corridor gradually narrowed, and it was clear that they were below ground level. The only light came from buzzing fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling not far above their heads.

At last, when they had been walking for almost five minutes, during which neither man had spoken, they arrived at another entrance. In front of it stood a pair of uniformed guards, who demanded their documents once again and then saluted.

Now down a set of steps made of polished black stone, and into the chamber. It was dark and cool and smelled vaguely of chlorine, like a swimming pool. The older man at once located the light switch and turned the lights on.

The room was a large smooth rectangle, apparently used to store armaments. There were crates of rifles and ammunition and assorted equipment piled along the walls.

“Well, you’ve studied the blueprints,” the older man said quietly. “You insisted upon seeing the structure at first hand. Here it is.” He did not have to add that the trip entailed some risk, but it would, most likely, seem simply a routine inspection by the GRU’s chief of security.

The explosives expert looked around and did a quick estimation. “Ten meters,” he said, “by ten meters, by five meters high,” he announced.

“Correct.”

“That’s five hundred cubic meters.” His confident voice echoed against the concrete walls. “From ground level, the structure is 12.25 meters high by 24.5 meters long. Add another five meters in height for this chamber and ten for the room above, which is also below ground level. That makes, ah, 37.25 meters high. Now, tell me, sir: what is this room customarily used for?”

“It’s an arsenal.”

“The building is made of granite, though, isn’t it? Heavy stuff.”

“Much of it is granite, yes. Some labradorite, some marble. This room, and most of the inside walls, are made of reinforced concrete.”

The younger man spoke very quietly now, but even his whisper seemed loud as it reverberated in the chamber. “I imagine that … that our superior has considered the possibility of a nuclear device. A small one.”

“He has ruled it out.”

“Why?”

His superior smiled. “Any number of reasons. Nuclear materials are guarded so closely that to remove a bomb, even upon orders from the very top, would attract immediate and widespread attention. Secrecy is of paramount importance. Furthermore, we don’t need the Red Army immediately jumping to the conclusion that the Americans did it, which might set off a global thermonuclear exchange.”

The younger man nodded thoughtfully.

“Of course, there is another, more convincing reason why a nuclear device cannot be used. Keep in mind the level of our Soviet defense preparedness.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Too much time in the laboratory, and not enough time keeping your ears open. The Defense Ministry, many years ago, placed in certain checkpoints in Red Square, in buildings and beneath the ground and even in vehicles that perpetually patrol Moscow, neutron detectors and gamma detectors. Expressly, you can imagine, in order to detect the presence of a nuclear device. To protect the Kremlin from a nuclear bomb being smuggled in. The Americans have a similar system to protect Washington. Nuclear weapons are out of the question. Certainly a nuclear device would be a mistake on the simple grounds that it’s difficult to believe a terrorist in this country could gain access to one.”

“Will all these guards be here on Revolution Day?”

“Of course. And more.”

“Then I would rule out plastic explosives as well. They are a bad idea.”

“Why?”

“Plastic explosives are quite powerful, but it would take a huge quantity to do the job. Hundreds of kilos. Crates of it. If there weren’t a problem of guards, I would say plastic explosives would do quite well.”

“Then what’s the answer?”

The expert smiled. “An FAE bomb – a fuel-air-explosive.”

“Explain.”

“The FAE bomb is one of the most sophisticated explosives weapons in any arsenal. It was developed by the Americans only recently, at the end of the Vietnam War. It’s enormously powerful; an FAE bomb is capable of leveling great buildings, even whole city blocks. And besides, for size it’s incomparable. The whole apparatus can fit in a small bag. All you need is a tank of fuel, propane, some grenades, some blasting caps, a little bit of plastique, and a timing device. A couple of other things. I’d suggest a simple digital timer device.”

“Why? It’s quite easy to detonate bombs using radio transmitters, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. But these conditions are different. A remote signal for detonation, especially through walls as thick as these, must go over a radio UHF band. That means that, if anyone happens to be monitoring the radio bands – which cannot be ruled out, given the safety precautions our own people will be taking that day – there is a chance that the signal could be jammed. No, we don’t even need to use a remote.”

“All right, then. But how will it work? What will be timed, exactly?”

“The timer will be set to release a cloud of gas in the chamber here and, at the time you designate, the small plastic bombs will go off, detonating the highly combustible cloud of fuel mixed with oxygen.”

“Will it be powerful enough?”

“Powerful? Sir, nobody within a hundred meters will survive.”

“Listen very carefully: this must not fail. When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”

46

Paris

Stone awoke very early in the morning, dazed from jet lag and the dislocation of waking up in a strange city. His head throbbed dully, and for a moment he did not remember where he was.

Sitting up, he allowed his eyes to focus and surveyed the hotel room, enjoying the quiet elegance, the velvet wallpaper of gray stripe, the bathroom whose walls and floor were of smooth green Venetian marble, and the view of the beautiful cathedral of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For a dead man, he thought grimly, I’ve certainly got a decent hotel room.

He had arrived in Paris late in the afternoon the previous day. As soon as his plane had landed at Heathrow, he had taken a taxi into London, directly to the French Embassy, where he obtained a “rush” visa to travel to Paris immediately, explaining that there had been a sudden change in his business plans. Tense and exhausted, he had considered catching the next flight to Paris, but stuck with his original plan – the Sealink ferry from Dover to Calais, where he could disappear into the crowds of tourists.

He knew Paris with a passing familiarity, having visited twice, years ago. On those occasions, Paris had been an adversary of sorts, a thing to be conquered, explored, learned. Now it was a welcome refuge, a warren of potential sanctuaries. His first instinct had been to choose a tiny, anonymous hotel. Most such places are run by proprietors eager to make an extra franc, and therefore probably vulnerable to bribery. Stone needed a hotel whose management he could trust not to cooperate unquestioningly with the authorities, if and when it came to that. He needed a place with a small, discreet staff resistant to payoffs, which would fiercely protect its records.

The hotel he had selected was a small, rather expensive place called L’Hôtel, on the narrow rue des Beaux-Arts. Its rooms were small, as are most Paris hotel rooms, but furnished in exquisite taste. Oscar Wilde had lived here (well, died actually), which was hardly a recommendation, as had Maurice Chevalier, which was. Number 46 was sumptuous, and flooded with sunlight in the afternoons.

He had registered under the name Jones and was relieved to find that the concierge did not ask for his passport. There was a time, years back, when hotels in Paris used to report the names and passport numbers of their guests to the police at the end of each day, but that was, fortunately, a thing of the past. Once or twice a year, the police may ask to inspect a hotel’s guest-registration cards, but rarely if ever do hotels submit these cards to the police otherwise. Despite all the talk in France about precautions being taken to combat terrorism, the simple fact is that one can stay under an alias indefinitely and never be caught. If the “accident” on Lake Michigan was at all successful, he would be safe here for a few days. He hoped.

He had quickly fallen into a sleep that was so deep it felt almost drugged. Now he ordered a breakfast in the room, café au lait and a croissant, and began to collect his thoughts. Little time remained, and there were two people he had to find as soon as possible.

In the years after the Russian Revolution, Paris was deluged by refugees from the Soviet Union. They formed their own subculture in the city, their own restaurants and nightclubs and social organizations, much as a later generation of émigrés would in New York City. But as the émigrés died off, their neighborhoods vanished, leaving only the merest traces of Russian heritage.

One such trace is located in the Eighth Arrondissement, nestled among the high-rent jewelers and chocolate shops, just off the Champs-Elysées. There, on rue Daru, is the Cathedrale Saint-Alexandre Nevsky, a Byzantine church crowded with ancient icons, a gathering place for the few remaining “white Russians.” Stone arrived there in the late morning and found the church empty, the only person in the building a young woman who sat at a small desk that held a display of postcards.

He had only a name, Fyodor Dunayev, but there was little doubt the man lived under an alias, well concealed and well protected. Anyone who had served in Stalin’s secret service and then defected would live each day in mortal fear. But Stone realized there was a way to get to the retired agent.

He now knew two potentially useful facts about Dunayev. One – from Warren Pogue – was that Dunayev had been accompanied by a man named Vyshinsky. The other was a morsel of information that Anna Zinoyeva had remembered from the newspaper account of Dunayev’s defection, a detail memorable because it was so curious. Dunayev had found shelter in Paris, decades ago, under the auspices of an émigré relief organization whose name Stone recognized from something he had once read. The organization was funded and supported by the Russian Orthodox Church in Paris. Stone had found it strange that an atheistic old Chekist would accept aid from a religious organization, but such were the paradoxes of the Russian people. Scratch a communist and you’ll find a fervent Russian Orthodox believer.

The young woman looked up. “Oui?”

“Parlez-vous anglais?”

“Yes.” She smiled pleasantly.

Stone chatted for a few minutes about the church. He was an American tourist, he told the woman, of Russian background. The woman’s face lit up: she, too, was of Russian heritage. She spoke English with a Russian accent – obviously her parents had been émigrés – and she got up from the desk to show Stone proudly around the church. They talked about Russia for a while, and about the woman’s relatives, and finally Stone casually mentioned that, since he was in Paris, he thought he might look up an old man, a Russian, a friend of a friend. Could she help?

“What’s his name?”

Stone hesitated momentarily, and then decided it was highly unlikely the name would mean anything to the woman. “Fyodor Dunayev.”

The woman shook her head: she had never heard of him.

“Let me ask the Father,” she said. “He knows most of the Russian émigrés. Or if he doesn’t, he may know people who do.”

Stone followed her out of the church and into the small building next door that served as a combination office and rectory. He waited tensely in the small, bare office. Would Dunayev still be alive? Living under his own name? Maybe he’d have disappeared into anonymity forever.

She returned a few minutes later. Now she looked at him differently, alarm registering in her face.

“If you will wait here,” she said, “one of the people in the office may be able to help you.”

Stone sensed danger. “Can this person get me his phone number?”

“No,” the woman said anxiously. “But if you will wait–”

“No,” Stone said. “Listen carefully. Your friend is right to be careful. You have no idea who I am. But let me assure you that Dunayev would be glad to hear from an old friend. I’ll give you something to give to Dunayev – will you do that for me?”

“I suppose …” she said falteringly.

“All right.” It was just as well; in writing he could pose convincingly as a Russian, whereas on the phone his accent would give him away at once. He asked the woman for a piece of paper and an envelope. Seated at a small, unused desk, he wrote out a brief note in Russian. “Urgent that I see you at once,” he wrote. “I am sent by your friend Vyshinsky.” It was a gamble, in some ways an enormous gamble, that Osip Vyshinsky was still alive. Perhaps out of curiosity alone – and reassured by seeing the name of an old colleague, which amounted to a species of recommendation – Dunayev would want to see the visitor.

He sealed the envelope and handed it to the woman. “Please tell your friend to hurry,” he said.

Stone passed the next two hours at a Russian restaurant directly across the street. He had a small, late lunch of pirozhki and lingered over coffee, watching the church’s entrance tensely. A few people came and went – tourists, it seemed. No one stayed long.

When he returned to the cathedral – certain from his observation that there wasn’t a trap – the young woman still seemed wary. “We have reached him. He says he will be delighted to see you,” she said. “Here is what he wants you to do.”

Chicago

Paula Singer disliked eating lunch at her disheveled metal government-issue desk, but she also disliked going out and braving the jostling lunchtime crowds at the coffee shops and Greek take-out places that surrounded the court building. Either choice, as far as she was concerned, was grim, but no one ever said being an assistant state’s attorney was going to be glamorous. So she sat at her desk, eating a ham-and-Swiss sandwich while browsing through the newspaper.

She’d been thinking nonstop about Charlie Stone since the moment he’d shocked her by showing up on her front porch. She wondered where he was, whether he was still in Paris, whether he had found the person he wanted to reach.

And whether there was anything she could do.

She turned to the sports pages of the Chicago Tribune, and then her eye was caught by a small obituary. Something snagged at her memory, and for an instant she paused before flipping the page to the box scores. Then she turned back, recognizing the name.

Warren Pogue. The FBI agent Charlie had talked to in Chicago, the man whose address and phone number Charlie had asked her to get.

Paula was suddenly oblivious of the office noise around her. She groaned softly as she read: “The victim, whom Indiana police identify as Chicago native Warren Pogue, a retired agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was apparently killed when his small plane lost velocity. …”

The date.

Warren Pogue had died the same day Charlie had talked with him.

Charlie had been right. People were being murdered.

Charlie would be next. She was sure of it. He was next, unless she did something to help.

For a few moments, she sat there, staring straight ahead, frantic, not knowing what to do. And then she remembered the name of the influential man Charlie said he had met with in Washington, William Armitage, and she knew she had to place a call. Charlie had insisted she stay out of it, but he was only trying to protect her.

She could protect herself, damn it.

Paula had to make a long-distance call. She knew that phone calls could be traced if you stayed on too long. But there were ways to make it impossible to trace a call, right? She got up and walked over to her boss’s office, and found that he was out. Probably at lunch. Great; his phones were available.

One of his telephones was a secure terminal desk set with high voice/data security, a Motorola STU-III SecTel. He almost never used it; in fact, he had gotten weeks of grief for investing government money in the thing. Probably using an untappable line would make no difference, but every little precaution helped.

Using the Motorola, she called a friend in New York who was a partner at what she thought of as a big scary law firm: one of those people who made twice what she made.

“Kevin,” she said when her friend answered, “I need you to do me a favor.”

Kevin was obliging, and, best of all, he asked no questions. By means of a conference call, he patched her through to Washington, to the office of Deputy Secretary of State William Armitage. If by any chance the call was traced, they would get no farther than a number at an enormous law firm in New York. Good luck.

She drummed her fingers nervously on the metal surface of the desk, wondering whether she’d be able to speak with Armitage directly, wondering whether he’d believe what she had to say about the death of an old FBI man in Chicago.

Finally, a female voice came on the line and announced, “Office of the Deputy Secretary of State.”

Paula gave her brief prepared spiel, ready to fence for a time with the secretary.

And then she went cold with terror.

“You haven’t heard?” the secretary asked solicitously. “I’m sorry, but Mr. Armitage passed away several days ago.”

She hung up the phone and sat at the desk, massaging her temples, sick with fear. Her eyes ached. She opened her purse and pulled out something that Charlie had given her.

It was a blood-smudged plastic card, the size and shape of a credit card. On it was embossed a telephone number, which you could use to charge a call if you were out on the road.

Charlie had taken it from the guy he’d killed, the guy who had attacked him in Chicago. It must be a simple matter, he’d said, to track this back to the source, to find a name to which to connect the man who was following him. Paula had grabbed it out of his hands and insisted she’d try.

Now, her mouth dry from apprehension, she picked up the phone and started to dial.

47

Moscow

The headquarters of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate is located in Yasenevo, on the outskirts of Moscow, in a new, elegantly curved building whose resemblance to the CIA’s headquarters is said to be no coincidence. In this building are the offices and laboratories of the Special Investigations Department, within which is the Soviet Union’s finest forensics laboratory. Whenever a bomb goes off in Russia, the Middle East, or anywhere else of concern to the Soviet government, samples are sent here for analysis.

One of the senior forensic chemists was Sergei F. Abramov, a plump, balding man of forty-two with a perfectly round face, smooth skin, and dimpled pudgy hands. He was married to a librarian at a technical institute, and had two daughters.

Abramov was grumpy this morning. His curiosity had been aroused by a peculiar message he’d gotten from an American television reporter he had met with once in a while, always with the utmost secrecy. She knew him only as Sergei. Charlotte Harper seemed smart and on the level, and she’d wanted to know whether he could confirm a rumor she’d heard that the wave of bombings that had recently struck Moscow really had something to do with the United States.

It wasn’t possible.

And why hadn’t he been consulted on the examination of the bomb samples? He walked into the lab, short-tempered and out of sorts, and hung his coat up on the hook on the wall.

The department secretary, Dusya, laughed raucously when he came in. He usually found her vaguely annoying, a dyed blonde whose dark roots always showed, with a double chin and too much blue eye makeup. Also, she always tried to flirt with him, which was repulsive.

“So now you’re trying to grow a mustache!” she called out.

“All right, Dusya,” Abramov said. “Do me a favor and requisition for me some samples. And the ones before that. You know.”

“Fine,” Dusya said, pouting. “So what’s with the mustache? Are you going to tell me or not?”

The Kremlin Armory bomb was the easiest of all to check, since not much of it had combusted. He saw at once that it was Composition C-4, the whitish American-made stuff. He didn’t even have to do anything more than a gross morphological exam, but just to make sure, he dissolved a portion of it and spun it down in a centrifuge. The residue results were clear: there was motor oil in it. It was definitely C-4.

He massaged his neck and thought momentarily about his kids, who had turned into giant pains in the ass. Well, the younger one, Maria, was doing well. It was the older one, Zinaida, who was giving him such trouble. She was a teenager already, beginning to look like a woman, and she was spending too much time with some thug four years older than she was, a long-haired guy of eighteen. He was sure they were sleeping together, but what could you do about that anymore? Zinaida skulked around the apartment, stayed out late, quarreled with anyone who crossed her path. Abramov shook his head and turned back to the matter at hand.

So it was C-4. Abramov knew C-4 like the back of his hand. C-4 contained the explosive hexahydro-1,3,5-trinitro-S-triazine, or RDX, the most powerful explosive in the world. And a lot of other gunk, like plasticizers and rubber binders. Every so often – more and more often, it seemed – he’d get a chunk of C-4 to analyze, using infrared spectrophotometry, on the Analect FX-62 50 Fourier transform. Sometimes gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. You could tell a lot – whether it was British PE-4, which has a different binder from American C-4, or Czech NP-10, the black explosive material with a PETN base, or whether it was good old home-grown Soviet-made stuff.

He remembered running the battery of tests on a bunch of samples taken from a wave of bombings that had struck an anti-Qaddafi Libyan community in Manchester, England. He discovered that the plastic explosive used in the bombs – surely set by Qaddafi’s people – was American-made! Which meant that some American elements were supporting Qaddafi, or at least selling it to him. This was a startling finding, and it led to an intensive KGB investigation.

The other samples were a little trickier.

He made a fresh pot of tea, poured himself a cup, and stirred in two spoons of sugar. Usually the tests he ran were dull as hell, revealing nothing. But these samples – he was intrigued.

The reporter was right, but there had to be more to it. This was fun – a little like a detective novel. Time like this, he loved his job. Buoyed by his discovery, he made a mental note to take Zinaida aside and tell her about the facts of life, but gently – God knows he didn’t want to provoke the little firebrand.

He took a sip of tea, added another spoon of sugar, and sat down to look under the microscope. The Prospekt Mira bomb was plastique as well. No surprise.

So he did a purge-and-trap, a vapor absorption, gently heating the sample in a vacuum in a closed container. This drew the organic material into a tube of activated charcoal, a trap connected to a vacuum line. After the vapor was trapped, Abramov removed the explosive compounds from the charcoal with dichloromethane.

He put it under the microscope again, and then dissolved the solid in an organic solvent and cleaned it up to run some more tests.

There wasn’t a lot of organic high explosive left. A tiny amount, really, probably measurable only in picograms. That meant he’d have to use the TEA, or thermal energy analyzer, an extremely sensitive gas-phase chemiluminescence device. It used a heated chamber at low pressure and a cryogenic trap to produce electronically excited nitrogen dioxide, which gives off precisely recorded wavelengths of light when it undergoes radioactive decay.

He worked slowly and painstakingly, and by the early afternoon he recognized the sample’s molecular structure.

Now something was really peculiar.

He checked his figures twice, comparing them with the library of spectra. When he checked a third time, he knew what was so eerily familiar.

He’d tested this particular explosive hundreds of times before.

This was no mere American plastique.

The formulation was unmistakable. Every sample of plastic explosive that had been used in the recent Moscow bombs had been manufactured at a company in Kingsport, Tennessee, called the Holston Army Ammunition Plant. This was the only place anywhere in the United States that manufactured C-4.

But there was something more.

It matched exactly the unique formulation of a special batch of C-4 that was manufactured exclusively for the Central Intelligence Agency.

He was one hundred percent certain.

He took another sip of his third cup of tea and began to dictate a report.

48

Paris

Stone waited for Dunayev at a café called A la Bonne Franquette, on rue de la Roquette, near the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Five, then ten minutes went by, and no sign of the émigré.

Stone checked his watch, irritated, and ordered a pastis. It tasted a little like Nyquil.

As he sat, he glanced around the bar for anyone who might resemble Dunayev. No one. A woman at the bar, clearly a prostitute, caught his glance and smiled. She was in her early sixties, with badly dyed long red hair and too much face powder, which did a poor job of concealing her wrinkles. Stone gave a neutral smile and turned away: thanks, but no thanks.

Twenty minutes had gone by, and still no Dunayev. The instructions from the woman at the cathedral had been quite specific. She stressed that Stone be punctual. And now Dunayev was twenty-five minutes late.

Had something happened to him, too? Had they gotten to him – just like all the others? He looked warily around the café for anyone faintly out of place, any indication that Dunayev had set him up. There seemed to be none.

The prostitute smiled at him again, and walked over, her walk an exaggerated sway, a lascivious swiveling of the hips. “Do you have a light?” she asked in a deep, guttural smoker’s voice. She spoke English; she obviously pegged him as an American.

“No, I’m sorry.”

She smiled, her teeth badly discolored, shrugged, and got some matches from the bartender. A few minutes later, she approached again. “Are you waiting for anyone?” she asked, bringing her cigarette up to her mouth with a highly stylized flourish, her head tilted to one side. It was as if she had learned to smoke by studying old movies.

“Yes, I am.”

The prostitute exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke. “May I join you?”

“Sorry, no.”

“Maybe I can help you find whoever you are looking for,” she said, flashing a sepia-toned smile.

Stone nodded, understanding now.

“I think,” the woman said, “we may have a mutual friend.”

So that was it. Dunayev, obviously an extremely cautious old agent, wanted a go-between to insulate him.

“Please, come with me,” she said. Stone rose from the table, left a few francs to cover the bill, and followed her out of the café.

“Mr. Dunayev apologizes for being so careful,” she said as they walked along rue de la Roquette. “He says you may understand.”

“It’s perfectly understandable.”

“He is very excited to see a friend of an old friend.” She continued to chatter, guiding him along a small side street, then stopping at a boxy maroon-and-black car that Stone recognized as a DCV, the cheap, ubiquitous, not very safe vehicle that originally had only three wheels, before the French government mandated a change to four. “Please,” she said, walking around to the driver’s side. “I’ll take you to him.”

The door was unlocked. Stone got into the front seat next to her and knew at once that something was wrong. He froze in terror, then turned his head slowly and saw the glint of a pistol, pointed at him from the back seat.

He sat stiffly as the woman reached over and frisked him with a skill that seemed professional. Turning his head ever so slowly, the blood roaring in his ears, he saw more clearly the figure in the back seat. A man who must have been crouching there, waiting.

He had been set up – but why? Dunayev was a defector, a killer who had turned his back on the Soviet state not out of ideology but out of fear for his life. Was it possible he, too, was involved with the fanatics in the West who were running M-3?

“Please don’t try anything,” came the voice from behind. A Frenchman, his English heavily accented. The DCV had pulled away from the curb into traffic. “Look in the rearview mirror. Do you see the car behind us?”

Stone nodded slowly. The Citroen behind them seemed to be following closely. Dunayev was thorough; Stone would give him that.

“Do you plan to tell me where you’re taking me?” Stone asked.

There was no reply.

They drove for several minutes in silence, the red-haired woman constantly glancing at the Citroen in the mirror. As she drove with one hand, she smoked with the other. Stone watched in silence, calculating, waiting for the right instant.

Now they were entering a neighborhood that seemed markedly rougher than the one they had just left. Many of the buildings were crumbling; those that were not seemed deserted. There was a hardware store whose windows were punctuated with bullet holes, a grocery store that was open but seemed to have no customers. Finally, they pulled into a driveway that gave onto a courtyard. The Citroen continued down the street.

“All right,” the man said from the back seat. “Go.”

Stone opened the car door and stepped out into the courtyard. Directly in front of him stood an older man in a short black leather coat, still muscular despite his age. He appeared to be in his seventies, with a long fringe of gray hair around a large bald spot. His pale face was dotted with wens. His right arm was extended, as if in greeting. But he was holding a pistol, trained at Stone’s head. The gun was old, Stone saw at once, the sort of reliable companion that a retired spy would be reluctant to part with. Not the familiar, standard-issue Soviet Army 9 mm Makarov. Probably a Tokarev automatic, which the Red Army hadn’t issued in some thirty years.

Was this Dunayev?

Stone lifted his eyes from the pistol and smiled. “What sort of welcome is this?” he said in Russian.

“So you are sent by Vyshinsky,” the man said at length.

Stone nodded.

The man spat on the ground, his gun still trained on Stone. “Then I would like to send Vyshinsky a return message,” he said coldly, quietly. “Your head.”

Oh, God. What had this ruse turned into? “Are you Dunayev?”

“I am Dunayev,” the man replied. Stone could hear the steady, quiet scuff of feet on gravel behind him. The man and the woman who had brought him here. Slowly he was being surrounded. Dunayev spoke louder now. “If Vyshinsky, that goddamned son of a bitch, thinks he will be clever with me, try to find me, then he can rot in hell. I have been waiting for years for this.”

With a sickening realization, Stone saw what had happened. He had used the name not of a friend, a compatriot, but of an avowed enemy. Vyshinsky, who had remained behind in Russia – of course. He would consider Dunayev a traitor.

“I want you to listen to me carefully,” Stone said, his heart hammering. He felt a rush of air as the two behind him moved closer. “You know I am not a Russian, Gospodin Dunayev.”

Dunayev blinked, his gun steady.

“You recognize my accent, do you not?”

No reply.

“It’s an American accent. You know that; you’re quite experienced at dealing with Americans. You were posted to the United States in 1953, assigned to locate a document that Beria wanted.”

Dunayev seemed to waver for an instant.

“You threatened a defenseless woman who had once been a personal secretary to Lenin. She gave me your name. Not Vyshinsky. I want you to understand that.”

“Your explanation isn’t sufficient.”

“Vyshinsky was the name of the other person who went with you to visit this woman. I knew you wouldn’t agree to see me unless I came with – with some bona fides. That was the best I could do. Obviously I miscalculated.”

Dunayev nodded now, almost smiling. “You are American. I can hear that. Yes.” He raised his voice again, suddenly. “Then who are you?”

Stone began to explain, carefully if not completely, leaving out no detail that would arouse the émigré’s deep-seated suspicion. He told him about being a man on the run who had been framed, was wanted by certain renegade American authorities because of what he had found out. Stone had an instinctual understanding of Dunayev’s character, and he used it with dexterity. Dunayev was not only a Russian who had known the terrors of a government out of control, but he was also a defector who had lived for years in Europe. Many Europeans who have lived through the years of World War II – the Resistance, the underground movements, the refugees – are naturally sympathetic to the plight of the fugitive who is fleeing the law.

When Stone had finished, Dunayev slowly lowered the gun. “Dostatochno,” he told the others: Enough, it’s okay. Stone turned and saw the red-haired prostitute and her friend walking casually to the car. He heard their car start, then pull out of the courtyard.

“Accept my apologies for this,” Dunayev said.

Stone let his breath out slowly, relief seeping into his body. “I need your help now, very badly,” he said. “I think you can provide the key to something that’s going on right now in Washington and Moscow.”

“Now? But I’m–”

“Years ago, you were sent by Lavrentii Beria to find something that he needed to pull off a coup–”

“How do you–?”

“You were protecting someone, isn’t that right?” Stone shifted his feet on the ground, his brain spinning. “A contact between Beria and certain Americans, whose name remains a secret even today.”

Dunayev’s nod was so subtle it was barely noticeable.

“And one of the links in that chain was a woman named Sonya Kunetskaya,” Stone said, as an explanation crossed his mind with great clarity.

Yes. The explanation of the present did lie in the past. It was the only way in; CIA data banks would do no good.

The chief of Stalin’s secret police, Beria, surely trusted very few with the details of his plan, and he trusted no one more than the mole code-named M-3. Dunayev, who had been allowed to live, had to have been kept on the periphery. He knew not the most sensitive state secrets but …

“You know something about her. You must,” Stone said.

The Russian smiled crookedly. “I was the contact man between Beria and Sonya Kunetskaya,” he said. “You guess correctly.”

Stone could barely contain his astonishment.

“I am rather proud of this,” the retired Soviet agent continued. “Beria would not have assigned just anyone to carry his messages to the daughter of the American millionaire Winthrop Lehman.”

49

The horrifying thing was, it made absolute sense.

Even half an hour later, Stone could barely concentrate. Stalin’s “control” over Lehman – that was it.

Of course. So simple.

“This sort of thing happens from time to time,” Dunayev explained, unaware of the effect the revelation was having on his listener. “Many times, you know, Americans or Europeans have gone to the Soviet Union to live, and then they fall in love with a Russian man or woman, and they have a child. Then, when the time comes to go, they suddenly find that the Soviet authorities will not grant the child an exit visa.”

They were walking up the long path into Père-Lachaise Cemetery. For the dead, Père-Lachaise is the place to be in Paris: it holds the graves of Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde and hundreds, thousands, of others. It is built vertically, its cramped paths winding their way up hills, crisscrossing with other paths, an overgrown mossy maze.

“A number of American men who could not find work during the Depression went to Russia,” Dunayev said. “Some of them went for political reasons, because they preferred communism, until they saw the real thing – the real monster – close at hand. Some of them genuinely went for the work. And then they had children, and they found that the children, who were Soviet citizens, were not welcome to leave. Oh, very often this happened. During the Second World War, several American news reporters assigned to Moscow fell in love with Russian women, and then their wives and young children were kept as prisoners. Hostages. Perhaps you know that the great American industrialist Armand Hammer spent ten years in Moscow, during the 1920s, and he and his brother both fathered children by Russian women. One child was allowed to leave; one was not.”

“That explains Lehman’s ‘cooperation,’ ” Stone thought aloud. They stood now before the grave of Frederic Chopin, a small white monument topped with a statue of a weeping girl. In her lap had been placed several red roses.

The émigré nodded.

“They had his daughter, and they wouldn’t let her go,” Stone said. “He must have used various people to communicate with her. Including my father.”

Dunayev continued walking. He seemed not to comprehend what Stone had said.

“When you say you were the contact between Beria and Lehman’s daughter, what do you mean, precisely?”

“Beria had learned somehow, from Stalin, that Lehman had a document of tremendous power. A document, or documents.”

Stone nodded. How much did this ex-spy know of the Lenin Testament? How did he know?

“And he sent you to get it from Lehman?”

“From Lehman’s daughter.”

“Because Lehman could never have had direct contact with officials in the Soviet intelligence services,” Stone concluded. “It would have destroyed his government career.”

“Exactly. And Beria knew that.”

“And he never saw his daughter after he left Moscow?”

“No. Once she was allowed to visit Paris, where she saw her father, although she was closely guarded.”

“When was that?”

“In 1953, I think.”

“So why didn’t Lehman free her then?” Stone demanded. “If Sonya was in the West, surely he could have arranged for a kidnapping–”

“Oh, no,” Dunayev said, and laughed. “The young woman wouldn’t have wanted that at all. You see, her mother was still alive in Russia, and I’m sure she would have wanted to ensure her safety.”

“A chain of hostages,” Stone mused aloud. “What do you know about this document that Lehman had?”

“Nothing. Only that he had it.”

“And did Beria ever get it?”

“No. He tried.”

“How?”

“He offered to release Sonya in exchange for this document. It meant a great deal to him. It was extremely important, for some reason.”

The cemetery was peaceful, quiet; Stone did not feel as if he were in Paris but, rather, in some pastoral, wooded area, the ruined graves like natural outcroppings of stone. Some of the wreaths had turned brown. Here and there was a mausoleum that had fallen into disrepair, its windows shattered, its interior defiled with beer bottles.

“Why didn’t Lehman agree to the trade?” Stone asked finally.

“Oh, but he did agree. He wanted his own daughter back very badly.”

“He did? But–”

“But Beria was shot before the deal could go through.”

“Ah, yes,” Stone said. “Yes. And did you deal with Beria directly? Or with one of his aides?”

“With Beria directly. He wanted absolute privacy.”

“Have you heard the designation M-3 before?”

“M-3?” Dunayev repeated slowly.

“A mole in Beria’s organization, and also someone he trusted implicitly.”

They passed the grave of Simone Signoret and entered the columbarium. Each marble plaque was engraved with gold letters and decorated with artificial flowers. “I don’t know of a mole,” Dunayev said. “But, then, I wouldn’t know, would I? If I knew, then Beria would have known, and then there would have been no mole.” For the first time, the émigré laughed.

“But you know about Beria’s attempt to seize power?”

“Of course. Everyone heard – after the fact. After he was shot, we were all told.” He now seemed to be leading the way somewhere, walking with purposiveness.

“You heard nothing of an attempt by private citizens in the West to help bring about the coup that Beria wanted?”

The émigré was already walking quickly, and Stone had to jog to keep up with the old man. Before them was a sleek black granite gravestone, highly polished, as reflective as a mirror. On its left side was an oval photograph, set into the granite.

Dunayev was silent, looking directly at the gravestone.

“You recognize this photograph, perhaps?” he asked.

Stone recognized it at once. The face was hardly older at all than the face in the photographs that Saul Ansbach had located for him, The spare gold inlaid lettering read:

“You see, Winthrop Lehman has been free now for many years,” Dunayev said grimly. “His daughter is dead.”

Washington

At the normally sedate headquarters of the American Flag Foundation on K Street in central Northwest Washington, there erupted a small commotion at around four in the afternoon, when one of the Foundation’s computer specialists, twenty-eight-year-old Army Reserve Corporal Glen Fisher, heard a rapid beeping on one of his terminals. He swung his swivel chair over to take a look, and when he saw what it was, he let out a whoop. “Tarnow!” he said, beckoning one of his colleagues.

The popular belief that a phone call of less than a minute cannot be traced is no longer accurate. The computer terminal over which Glen Fisher was keeping watch was connected to a bit of electronic wizardry known as the “pen register,” a trap-and-trace system that traces the originating numbers of telephone callers instantly. The Foundation’s field personnel had placed several telephone intercepts on offices and residences throughout Washington. Whenever a call was received over these lines, the phone number of the caller appeared on the monitors in the Foundation’s offices.

A few of the lines were given special attention, including that of the late Deputy Secretary of State William Armitage. Now a call had come in to the Armitage residence, from Chicago.

“Plug it in, Glen,” Tarnow urged.

“Hey, what do you think I’m doing, man?” Fisher shot back, rapidly entering the ten-digit number into another terminal, which contained a data base of several thousand contacts all known to have had an association with the former CIA analyst gone rogue, Charles Stone.

The terminal grunted mechanically for several seconds, and then the name came up on the screen.

“All right,” Fisher said, patting the monitor affectionately. “The general’s going to be one happy guy.”

Paris

Stone stared in shock.

“Can’t be,” he managed to mutter. “I don’t …”

The old man was nodding sadly. “Does this help you?” he asked. “Or does this further complicate things?”

“No–” Stone began, and then froze.

His nerves, his instincts, his peripheral vision – the events of the last few weeks had tuned them to an exquisite sensitivity, and now he sensed something out of the ordinary, not the slow paces of the other cemetery visitors, but a sudden movement toward them.

“Get down,” he ordered the old man.

Dunayev glanced in the direction Stone had been looking, and at that instant there was an explosion of gunfire. Stone dove forward, slamming Dunayev to the ground, just as a bullet cracked an old headstone only inches away. Stone felt his head spattered with fragments of stone. There wasn’t time to calculate; the shadowy gunman was perhaps a hundred feet to the right, and there was nothing between them. The next shot could be to their heads.

Another report. Almost instantaneously a bullet cratered the earth above Sonya Kunetskaya’s grave.

“This way!” Stone hissed. “Stay down!” He shoved the old man, whose face was bleeding, toward a tall, wide crypt.

Yes.

Safe cover – for the moment. No doubt the gunman could, from his vantage point, see them clearly. He would have to move, adjust the angle of firing. Dunayev now had his gun out and contorted his body awkwardly, trying to stay behind the white marble and yet establish a clear line of fire.

There he was, silhouetted, crouching into a firing position. The gunman could hit both of them now without obstacle. Stone glanced around – was there more than one of them? No – just the play of sun against the monuments, the shadows of the ancient graveyard.

“Back,” Dunayev ordered, releasing the safety on his gun and aiming.

Then – another explosion! Stone flattened himself against the old man, forcing him out of the way – but this time the shot came from the left. There was another gunman, and he had struck down the first.

The two of them, Stone and Dunayev, sat absolutely still for a moment that seemed endless. Not a sound. The firing had stopped. What had begun so suddenly had now ended. Dunayev lowered his gun, his expression shocked.

Stone looked up, weak with tension. Dunayev looked up, too, trembling.

“What happened?” the old Chekist asked, hushed.

“I don’t know,” Stone said, truthfully. “We’re alive. That’s all I know.”

The two men walked over to the crumpled body of the slain marksman. A distant commotion was growing steadily louder, the approaching voices of people no doubt alarmed by the gunfire.

“What are you doing?” Stone cried out.

Dunayev bent over and, with the agility of a lifelong spy, inserted a thumb into the dead man’s mouth, bloodied and twisted in the agony of his death. With a quick motion he forced the mouth open and peered in.

“It’s true,” he gasped. Dunayev ran his hands over the man’s torso. Nimbly, he tore at the man’s jacket until he could see the skin at the underarm. Evidently he was looking for something, and found nothing.

“Let’s get out of here,” Stone said. He looked away from the bloody mess of the would-be assassin’s face, sickened, reminded immediately of the nightmare in Cambridge. “What’s true? Let’s go; we can’t be connected with this.”

Dunayev rose and followed Stone down the knoll, toward the path that led out of the cemetery.

“Who shot him?” Stone asked. “Where’d the other one go?”

Dunayev, out of breath, seemed not to have heard him. At last he spoke, distracted.

“The dental work is Russian; I’d recognize it anywhere. But he’s not KGB, or, for that matter, GRU.”

“How the hell can you tell that?”

“Two ways.” Dunayev grimaced. “One, the dental work is vastly superior to anything done by those butchers in the Lubyanka who call themselves dentists. It’s Russian, but it’s the inordinately expensive sort I always thought was reserved only for members of the Politburo.”

“That hardly–”

“No, that’s soft evidence. But there’s something much firmer. Every KGB or GRU clandestine operative has, sewn beneath the top layer of his skin, one or two infinitesimal metallic ampules of poison, usually cyanide. Standard KGB procedure, to make certain a captured agent escapes interrogation – by means of his own death. They usually appear in any of three places, but this man had nothing. The man who tried to kill you – and I do think they were aiming at you – was a Soviet national not affiliated with any known intelligence agency.”

They had reached the cemetery’s exit, and Stone turned to the elderly spy. His voice was steely. “Damn it, that doesn’t surprise me. Nowhere near as much as what happened a few minutes ago. What I want to know is, who shot that man? You saw it as well as I did, but you haven’t said a word about it. Someone saved my life – our lives. Who?”

Before long, they were at Dunayev’s flat. It was a dismal, bare place, sparsely furnished with shabby furniture. The front room had clearly been decorated by a bachelor with no regard to design; the walls were a gloomy sand color, and Russian volumes competed for space on bookshelves with odds and ends collected over a lifetime of transient living.

The Russian had poured himself a glass of Smirnoff vodka, still visibly shaken. For a long time, he rambled on about what had happened, meaningless blather that the old Russian needed to calm himself.

In time, Dunayev began to speak more calmly. “Most of the specifics I don’t know,” he said. “I know there is a network, run out of Moscow. People say this network for some reason protects certain defectors, certain émigrés. Perhaps our man was one of those.”

Stone paused to consider what Dunayev was saying. A network of former Chekists? He was uneasy, suddenly, about his newfound comradeship with a former Chekist; if you sleep with dogs, the saying went, you get fleas. The fleas. Stone hoped, would wash off. This man knew things, and Stone had to use him. He had supplied Dunayev with several pieces of the puzzle; now he needed the old Chekist’s memory.

Dunayev nervously reached for a pack of Gauloises and lit one. He inhaled deeply and, as he exhaled, began to talk. “A few days ago, an old man named Arkady Stefanov was killed in Novosibirsk, in the Soviet Union – struck down by a car. He, too, was retired NKVD. My friends tell me Stefanov was on his way to an interview with a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, for, as it turns out, a soft feature piece on how life in Russia has changed.”

Stone nodded. “He, too, was one of Beria’s trusted assistants, am I right?”

“Yes,” Dunayev said. “Stefanov, I know, got involved with Beria’s attempted coup. He was in the shit up to his ears.”

“How?”

“One of Beria’s errand boys. He forced Beria’s personal physician to write a false report testifying that Beria had suffered a heart attack. I guess Beria planned to be absent, so he could marshal his forces. Probably wanted the absence to be believable to his colleagues, so they wouldn’t get any more suspicious than they already were.”

“Damn it, Stefanov’s dead now.”

“As I told you.” Dunayev laughed, flashing his gold teeth. “And forget about the good doctor – he was executed as soon as they found out he’d collaborated with Beria. Poor bastard.”

“Stefanov must have known something about the identity of M-3,” Stone said. He narrowed his eyes, thinking of something. “But why would he be eliminated now over a coup attempt that happened decades ago?” And then he remembered the HEDGEHOG report that had begun this whole thing, the report from the Agency’s asset in Moscow hinting that a convulsion was about to take place in the Kremlin.

“Do you think,” Stone continued, “that this so-called Lenin Testament in some way reveals the identity of the mole?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ve always thought so. Yes.”

Stone nodded. “The timing,” he said. “These things can’t be coincidental.”

“Timing?” Dunayev asked.

It’s about to happen, Stone realized.

The first glimmerings of an enormous, frightening upheaval. The pattern of the past was being replicated now.

“Yes. People are taking great risks of exposure. Something’s got to be urgent.” Stone looked around the apartment. “M-3 is about to be maneuvered into power. Imminently.” Then he added, with a sudden bolt of icy realization, “There is a deadline.”

“You tell me, Mr. Stone. You’re the Soviet expert. I was merely an employee.”

“The summit,” Stone said, and he sat in his chair, frozen in terror, like an insect in amber.

50

Moscow

The driving rain had not let up all day; the sky was steel-gray. Charlotte had negotiated the fifteen kilometers slowly and carefully. The roads were slick, and she suspected the Renault needed a new set of brakes, but she dreaded having that kind of work done in Moscow. You could never trust the Soviet mechanics, and they never had the parts anyway.

Directly ahead was the crumbling Krylovsky Monastery, just as Sergei had described it. It had once no doubt been a forbidding presence on the city’s outskirts, its rugged stone masonry solid and ageless; no doubt, too, the monks that had once dwelt within had imagined the place would endure forever. In the eighteenth century, the monastery had been converted to soldiers’ barracks, and then it had fallen into disrepair, and when the Revolution came, it was left to disintegrate into the surrounding hills.

She waited in the car, listening to the engine block tick, refusing to stand out in the rain any longer than she had to.

The rain was making her contemplative. She didn’t know whether she could trust Sergei. You could never trust official Russians anyway, and Sergei was KGB, which often meant trouble. KGB had their own veiled agenda, their own bureaucratic tangles that made the normal Soviet bureaucracy seem, by comparison, innocent.

When the bizarre call from Charlie had come in the middle of the night, she was momentarily baffled, wondering whether he were indeed out of his mind. Then she realized he was trying to tell her something.

He had mentioned the sites of all the most recent bombings in Moscow and said, with great emphasis, something about American and something about involvement.

Were these not native acts of terrorism? Were these done by … American terrorists? This, added to the suspicions she had already, made her more curious than ever.

The next day, Charlotte contacted Sergei.

She knew he had something to do with the KGB’s Special Investigations Department, but he was hardly forthcoming about that. He was in his early forties, round, with plump dimpled hands and stubby fingers. His large head was beginning to go bald. He seemed introverted, which made her trust him more. He was not a careerist, not the smarmy outgoing type who accosted you at a banquet and then went back to the office to write a “contact report” for the files. Sergei was the first “good” KGB employee she had ever met, although “good” was still a relative term.

But meeting in a deserted monastery? Either he had something terribly important to say–

– or it was a setup. Was that possible? “Receiving state secrets” – would that be the charge?

She got out of the car and found her way into the front of the ruin, pushing open a heavy wooden door that creaked on its hinges. She entered a small stone hallway, so dark she could barely see. When her eyes adjusted, she found the narrow corridor Sergei had described, and pushed open another wooden door.

The room, illuminated irregularly by shafts of gray light from jagged holes in the ceiling, had once been the refectory. She turned around and saw the dark shape that was Sergei.

“Privyet, Charlotte,” he said, his hushed voice echoing.

“Privyet.” She came closer, sat down on a stone bench beside him. “Nu?”

“Vy byli pravy” You were right. He seemed tense, and he kneaded his pudgy hands together.

Charlotte waited.

After a time, he spoke again, still hushed. “Where did you get your information?”

Charlotte shook her head. No.

“Do you plan to broadcast a story?”

“Perhaps.”

“Please don’t. Not yet. Wait.”

Charlotte turned and looked at him sharply. His features were distinct now. He looked terrified.

“That’s my decision to make, Sergei. You know that.”

He nodded slowly.

“What was I right about, Sergei?”

“The bombs were CIA. I checked the results. They are made from CIA materials. Your CIA is up to its old tricks. You should look into this. You should rip the lid off this scandal. In time. Your CIA is out of control.”

She felt her mouth dry out suddenly, and she could not turn her head. “Why are you telling me this?” she managed to whisper.

“Please,” he said. “You don’t know how much courage it took for me to meet with you. If I’m caught …” His voice trailed off. “Yes, things are much better in my country. But in KGB, well, things are not so much different from the old days.”

“But why are you telling me this?”

A long pause. “I wish I knew.”

Sergei Abramov sat on the bench for a long while after Charlotte had left. He shivered from the cold, and from his fear of being caught. His problems with his daughter Zinaida seemed so distant now. Was he doing the right thing in leaking this shocking news to a reporter? It had seemed shrewd when he first thought of it. Terribly risky, yes, but sound. He knew that Harper would not report anything until she’d begun to dig around with her sources in the CIA. Maybe she’d uncover another CIA scandal, which would discredit the American government. That would help Abramov’s career enormously, when his role was revealed. Yes, he had used her, but if she helped expose the CIA’s involvement in trying to destabilize the already unstable Soviet government, the result would be good. He rubbed his hands together, and after twenty minutes or so he went out to brave the rain.

Charlotte didn’t believe him. Sergei was planting a story, that had to be it. The theatrics, the meeting in the deserted ruins of a monastery. It all smacked of melodrama, and she refused to buy into it.

Why was he leaking this information about the CIA? True, he’d leaked before, but this was precisely the sort of thing a KGB investigator would keep secret until his higher-ups could decide how to handle it.

Was the KGB trying to manipulate her?

Yes. It had to be. They were trying to use her.

That was all it was.

51

Paris

At a café on rue de Buci, on the Left Bank, not far from L’Hôtel, Stone sat drinking an espresso, taking methodical notes in a small notebook he’d just bought.

He knew that at this moment Fyodor Dunayev was working on acquiring a gun for him. The old Russian had his sources, of course, and he recognized that it was close to impossible for an amateur to buy a gun on the black market anymore, especially in Paris. Even if Stone managed to find the right bar in the sleaziest part of town – in Pigalle, say – and managed to find someone who had the wherewithal to get him a gun, there would be no deal. No one, in this age of terrorism, would risk a sale to somebody who might later be linked back to the seller. It wasn’t worth it.

No, Dunayev would have to get it, and fortunately he had the connections to do it easily.

The only problem was that Dunayev’s knowledge of weaponry did not extend much beyond the mid-fifties, and automatic weapons had gone through significant changes since then. Most important, perhaps, was the development of the “plastic” – a high-impact-polymer semi-automatic pistol.

Only the grip is plastic, actually, but these guns had one chief advantage over all-metal ones: they could be smuggled onto airplanes, even past metal detectors. Or so Stone had been told; he had only the faintest idea of how to do it himself, if it became necessary.

If he was going to Moscow, he would probably need a gun he could slip into the country.

But he hoped to God he wouldn’t have to use it.

At a pay phone at the back of the café, he sent a telegram to Paula Singer: all well. But how to sign it? They’d agreed upon HASKELL, but for all its cleverness, that seemed too risky. If his ruse in Haskell had been uncovered by now, Haskell would be too obvious. He signed the telegram simply a friend. Paula needed to know he was all right.

Then he returned to the small round table, ordered another espresso, and resumed taking notes.

Soon he had an explanation that made some sense.

Winthrop Lehman had had a daughter during his years in Moscow – Sonya – who had taken her mother’s name so that she would never be connected with her famous American father.

So far, so good.

Sonya had been a hostage, a tool who had been used against Lehman to force his cooperation. The Soviets had once had a powerful hold on one of the most influential men in America, an aide to several presidents.

Yet this same man had been given a document by Lenin, something powerful and explosive that, if released, could have caused the Soviet state tremendous damage.

A document that, for some reason, might also reveal the identity of the mole M-3.

So Lehman had something of a counter-hold on them.

And his daughter was dead.

For some reason, still unclear, Lehman had once cooperated with a number of American officials, and at least two Soviet ones, to overthrow the Soviet government and install Beria. It made sense that Lehman had once gone to great lengths to try to free his daughter. Yet … Beria?

But that was the past.

The pieces of the puzzle – of the present puzzle – were at last coming together, and the questions that remained loomed larger than ever.

Haskell, Michigan

Chief Randall Jergensen of the Haskell, Michigan, police was just about fed up. Most of the night, he’d been out on the lake with his deputy, Willy Kuntz, and a handful of volunteers, dredging the Haskell shore of one of the goddamn hugest lakes in the entire U.S. of A.

As if dredging wasn’t bad enough, he had to endure the nonstop yapping from the feds who insisted on coming along, somehow thinking he could maybe do a better job if they were around to ask moron questions and flash their three-piece suits and generally act important. When all Jergensen wanted to do was say, All right, you win, the goddamn accident was a goddamn hoax, and be done with it. Tell the goddamn feds to write up their little reports and go back to their motels, and he could go home and get some sleep. “You just lay off,” he wanted to tell them, “and let me do my job.”

By half past four in the morning, he finally let them have it.

“All right, you sumbitch,” he said, “the guy set it up. He’s gone.” Jergensen turned and stormed off for his cruiser.

On the way home, he stopped by the dark station house and put a quarter in the vending machine around back. A can of Grapettes grape soda, icy cold, came tumbling down to the chute. He popped it open, took a long slug, and walked back to the car wearily.

That sly bastard, he thought as he drove home, smiling to himself. Whatever the hell the guy did, you gotta admire the smarts.

He pulled into his driveway, and remembered that his ex-wife, Wendy, wasn’t there, and he smiled again.

Paris

Lehman, Stone knew, had visited Paris countless times in his long life, on business and on pleasure. Two of those times. Stone realized, it had been to visit the daughter no one knew he had.

Suddenly an idea occurred to him. Stone went through the Paris Yellow Pages looking for the names of photo archives, companies that would have extensive photographic files – of historic personages and the not so historic, of events and moments captured on film by news photographers through the years. New York had quite a few of them, on which magazines, newspapers, and publishers relied heavily.

He came up with a list of four of the largest photo archives in Paris and visited them one by one. He was looking for photographs of Winthrop Lehman in Paris taken during two specific years.

Once Beria allowed her to visit Paris….

Sonya Kunetskaya.

When was that?

In 1953 …

Was it possible that Lehman’s daughter had been photographed? She had been buried in Paris, her name prominently displayed, engraved in gold. If Lehman, or Beria, had wanted to keep her existence secret, then why bury her in Paris’s most prominent cemetery?

The woman must have been seen in Paris.

Yet, after several frustrating hours. Stone had come up with nothing.

Finally, he walked into the fourth archive on his list, a small storefront on rue de Seine with the name H. ROGER VIOLLET painted on the window.

The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with green binders, no doubt filled with photographs.

“I’m looking for a photograph of someone,” Stone told the young female clerk in French.

“Historical, diplomatic, scientific …?”

“Well, none of those, really. She’s the daughter of an American statesman. Her name is Sonya Kunetskaya.”

“Let me check.”

The woman consulted a large card file. A few minutes later, she looked up. “Born 1929, died 1955?” she asked.

“That’s the one.”

“One moment.”

She got on a small stepladder against the wall and located a large green album marked L'histoire des États-Unis, k-l. She placed it before Stone, and opened it to a page. The photographs were affixed neatly and captioned with typewriting. Touching one page with her index finger, she said, “I believe it’s that one.”

It was Sonya.

The picture had been taken by a well-known French society photographer at a party at the Soviet Embassy in Paris. She stood talking to someone who was not Winthrop Lehman, while a few feet away several dour-looking men watched her.

“Oh,” the woman said abruptly. “I’m afraid that’s not the right one.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, I don’t think so. This picture is dated 1956.” She laughed nervously. “That would be a year after her death. This can’t be the same person.”

Nineteen fifty-six? Her gravestone had said April 12, 1955.

It made no sense.

Unless the very public gravestone, the date chiseled in the marble, was false. If it was a cover-up.

“Ah, here’s another,” the woman said, turning the page with a moistened finger.

Stone, his mind reeling, for a moment could not hear the woman.

“Monsieur?”

Could Sonya Kunetskaya still be alive?

“Monsieur?”

Stone looked up slowly, unable to think. “Yes?” he said thickly.

“Monsieur, if you like, here is another one. It is dated Paris, December 16, 1953. This one is three years earlier.”

Stone examined the second photograph, and his astonishment grew still further. He could scarcely believe his eyes.

It was a picture shot on a street outside the Soviet Embassy. Sonya was, as before, surrounded by menacing-looking guards, but this time her father stood nearby. It was unmistakably Winthrop Lehman.

And standing next to Lehman, only a few months out of prison, was the gaunt figure of the young Alfred Stone.

52

Moscow

Yakov Kramer sat in his cubicle at Progress Publishers, having done with his editing for the day. He was tired and saddened.

Stefan had now set off three bombs in the heart of Moscow, and still Avram was not free. There was no reply.

They had made a terrible mistake.

He had sent two letters to the Kremlin, both of which made it very clear that the destruction would continue, and that they would soon be forced to go public with their demands. He knew the Politburo could not want such a public humiliation, with the Moscow summit so near.

And his beloved son Avram remained in a mental hospital, his brain deteriorating by the day.

The office was almost deserted, and Yakov knew that Sonya was still at work in her cubicle across the large room. Any minute, she would come up to him, wearing her coat and a weary expression, and announce it was time for them to go. He straightened his desk, and got up to find Sonya.

She was already coming toward him. He took an irrational satisfaction in the innate sense of timing they shared. Somehow she always knew when he’d be ready to leave.

They did not like to kiss each other in the office, because they weren’t married, and Russians have a Victorian prudishness about public displays of affection; better not to offend people. But when they left, he grabbed her hand and felt a warming surge of affection for Sonya. He loved her, and he loved her increasingly, each day.

They had met here, at Progress, years ago. Yakov had recently been released from the gulag; Sonya was a fact-checker and researcher, a beautiful woman who kept to herself, shunned friends, a loner. Yakov, who was valued for his skills but ostracized because of his face – because of fear, really, the horror most people have of physical deformity, he knew that – used to fantasize about this small, dark-haired woman whose eyes were flecked with green. She was a Woman with a Past, he was sure. Why else would someone so beautiful act like a nun? In passing her desk one morning, Yakov said something to her, something reasonably clever, and she looked him directly in the eyes, and smiled, and his heart caught, and he was stuck.

At lunch that day, she appeared at his desk with a sandwich, cheese on thickly cut black sourdough bread, and asked him to share it with her – she wasn’t hungry. The gesture of a child who wanted a friend. Did she feel sorry for him? he wondered. They talked, she laughed at his jokes, they argued about literature, and that night, when he walked her to her apartment building, where she lived with her widowed mother, he kissed her in the middle of a torrential rain, and she didn’t flinch! What was wrong with her? he wanted to know. As they got to know each other better, she would talk, once in a while and always sketchily, about the traumas in her past, broken love affairs, that sort of thing. He wanted to know everything about this woman, and he would interrogate her – Who were these men, these bastards, who could possibly have left you? – but she would smile wanly, and say nothing. It seemed to Yakov, in the years that they had lived together – as lovers, not as man and wife – that both of them were, in a way, wounded, and that this was the bond between them.

Now Yakov wanted to tell her everything about what he and Stefan were doing to obtain Avram’s freedom, but that was out of the question.

Maybe she’d approve of what we’re doing, I don’t know, he thought.

No. The most selfish thing he could do would be to tell her. She must never be hurt by what he was doing, he’d resolved. She must never know.

He thought about that American reporter who had come to see her, and wondered what the secrets were that Sonya kept from him.

Sure, they had talked about her past, but the way she told it everything seemed so normal that Yakov could not help wondering whether she really might be concealing something. Was that any way to think about the one you loved?

After work, they had to do shopping, wait in line for bread and then for milk and then for chicken (the chickens in the store looked pale and scrawny) and then for vegetables. The whole fucking ritual, Kramer knew, was intentional. Keep the peasants so busy working and then scuttling around to feed their faces that by the end of the day they’ll be so tired they won’t even think of revolting.

Then there was the long subway ride, and at last they were traversing the muddy courtyard, into the urine-stained building lobby, and home at last.

Yakov and Sonya dropped the groceries on the kitchen table and looked at each other, mouths agape with frustration and exhaustion.

“Yakov, I don’t want to cook right now,” Sonya said.

“Don’t. I’ll cook. You sit down.”

“No, don’t you cook, either.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked, and then he saw what she was hinting at. “Sonya, I may be too tired.”

“No,” she said, coming up to him slowly and kissing him. She kissed both sides of his face, the good side and the bad, and then his lips.

Although her looks had faded somewhat with age, there remained something irresistible about her, something poignant, even tragic, in her dark eyes. He found her amazingly erotic. He wasn’t a young man; he could no longer make love with the old frequency, but he invariably found her arousing. There was something about her that made him feel tremendously virile. They didn’t rut like teenagers; they made love less urgently, more tenderly.

They got up slowly, went into the bedroom, and removed their clothes. Sonya took hers off neatly and folded them and put them on her night table, beside the photograph of her and her father that she loved so much, and they made love.

When they were done, and they lay in a loose embrace, she began stroking his neck and one of his shoulders.

“It’s always there, isn’t it?” she asked softly.

“Hmm?” he grunted.

“The anger. Even if they let Avram go free, you’ll carry it with you.”

There was no use in fighting her, so he didn’t reply.

“I want you to be careful.”

“What are you talking about, Sonyushka?”

“Sometimes I think they watch me carefully, and so they might see.”

“You’re not making sense.” He sat up and took hold of her shoulders.

“Please, Yakov. You don’t have to tell me any more than I know. But I want you to be careful.”

“Sonya …”

“I found an envelope on the floor. An empty envelope, addressed to the Kremlin.”

He stared into her eyes, terrified. How had she found it? He had been so careful.

“Sonya, I want to explain …”

“No, Yakov. Don’t explain. Please. I don’t know if you’re doing a good thing or a bad thing, but I understand why you’re doing it. And I’m scared.” Her voice cracked, and she spoke now through tears. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. Someday I’ll tell you something about my life before I met you, but right now I can’t. I’ve made a promise. I just want you to be very, very careful. For both of us.”

As she cried, tears sprang to his eyes, too. He could not stand to see her unhappy; it tore him up. He wanted to ask her. How can you love me so much? I’m so ugly, inside and out, I’m such a monster, how can you love me? But instead he said nothing and looked at her sadly through his tears, the way you look at something that might be taken away from you at any moment.

Washington

Early in the morning, wracked with tension, Roger Bayliss was attempting to relax in the Jacuzzi in the Executive Office Building, next to the White House, when the phone buzzed. He reached up to answer it.

It was the Director of Central Intelligence.

“Call me from a secure line,” Templeton said.

Bayliss got up, wrapped a towel around himself, and walked into the adjoining restroom, where the urinals were equipped with heat-activated flushing devices, installed during Nixon’s time. The heat sensors rarely worked.

Fifteen minutes later, he was dressed and back in his office, where he returned the director’s call.

“Yes, Ted,” Bayliss replied. “We’ve got a pretty good sense of the general direction he’s taking. I’d say this report about the murder of the Sekretariat guy in Paris is pretty definitive. More or less places it.”

He listened to Templeton’s reply, and then said: “Yes. Let’s keep up the passport-customs search plus the normal police fugitive search in the half-dozen or so target cities. But I’d say we should step up Paris.”

He listened again, and said, “The odds are pretty high he’ll turn up before long. We’ll have him. The stakes are too high to let him live.”

53

Moscow

Sergei F. Abramov of the Special Investigations Department of the KGB had never actually met the chairman. He was, he knew, just about to do so, and the thought of it made him nervous. Forty minutes earlier, his secretary, Dusya, had run up to him, her eyes wide, to tell him that the chairman of the KGB himself had actually, personally, sent for Abramov. What did he make of that? A car was sent round to pick Abramov up and take him to Pavlichenko’s office at the Lubyanka.

Standing in the chairman’s anteroom now, watching his feet and kneading his hands and listening absently to the secretaries answering the telephones, Abramov did not know what to make of it at all.

Was it possible the chairman himself had read his report, about how the bombs were made from American plastique? No, it hardly seemed likely, and, besides, why would the chairman himself want to talk to a mere technician?

The horrible thought crossed his mind fleetingly that somehow someone had discovered that he had leaked highly classified information to an American reporter, and that the chairman of the KGB was calling him in for interrogation … but why would the chairman himself be involved? Wouldn’t internal security handle it, swiftly and without a ruckus?

Please, he thought. Let it not be that.

But there was no time to think further, because suddenly he looked up and saw Andrei Pavlichenko standing in front of him. He was surprised at how dignified the chairman seemed. Pavlichenko was a man of sixty, but he had a head of thick brown hair that was probably colored.

“Tovarishch Abramov,” Pavlichenko said, shaking hands.

“Sir. It’s an honor.”

“Please.” The chairman led the way toward a white-painted double door. He walked with the springy step of a much younger man.

Abramov found himself babbling from nervousness. “I’m surprised to find there’s a door here,” he said as the two men entered Pavlichenko’s office.

Pavlichenko laughed. “You know, before I set foot in this office, in the days of Beria, I had heard the same stories. Everyone said Beria’s office had no doors. And then one day I was summoned to Beria’s office, much as you’ve been today.”

“And found there was no truth to the rumors,” Abramov ventured, a little more at ease. What did the chairman want? Please, I have a wife and two daughters at home who depend on me. Why did I ever meet with that American reporter? What did I think I was doing? At the time, it seemed like a good idea.

“And found the rumors were true.” Pavlichenko seemed a soft-spoken man, and an intelligent one, which was quite a divergence from the long line of brutal, brutish men who had always ruled Soviet state security. “I showed up at midnight, which was when Beria preferred to conduct meetings, and I was guided by one of his secretaries into a shkaf, what appeared to be a free-standing oak wardrobe closet against a wall. The secretary reached a hand into the darkness and pressed a button, and the back of the shkaf opened into the chairman’s office. Beria had a mania for privacy and protection. Well, years later, by the time I got this job, I was distressed to learn that Yuri Andropov had had the shkaf taken away and replaced with a conventional set of doors. So I’m sorry to disappoint you.”

“I’m not disappointed, sir,” Abramov said.

Pavlichenko had walked to his simple mahogany desk and had seated himself. Abramov sat, discreetly glancing around. The legendary office of the chairman of the KGB was even more plush than he had imagined. It was quite big, imposingly so, and ornately decorated. The floors were covered in large, beautiful carpets from Central Asia; the walls were wainscoted in lustrous mahogany, above which was wallpaper of ivory silk and just one portrait, of the founder of the Soviet secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky. There were off-white brocade sofas and mahogany end tables. The room looked like the library of a baronial manor.

Looking closer, Abramov saw that Pavlichenko was actually not a handsome man. His face was plain, with massive cheekbones and chin. Yet he cut a striking figure, with his fine English suits. It was joked around Moscow, especially among his detractors, that Andrei Pavlichenko looked like a star of the cinema – except from the front.

The chairman was also, Abramov knew, possessed of an extraordinary mental acuity, an ability to reason at lightning speed and to see the panorama where others could see only a few trees. He was blessed with a genius for politics, a talent for making allies that had catapulted him to the top – or so the scuttlebutt had it.

Which was not to say that the new chairman of the KGB – he had been in office less than a year – was not genuinely impressive. Everyone in the Committee had by now heard tales of Pavlichenko’s feats. Unlike most KGB chairmen before him, Pavlichenko had actually spent time in the West, having done tours of duty in London, Paris, and Washington. In the mid-fifties, he had been assigned as control for Sir Anthony Blunt, the Queen’s curator, who was also the “fourth man” in the spy ring of Burgess, Maclean, Philby, and Blunt. He had masterminded several false defections of KGB officers to the United States, operations that appeared to have successfully poisoned the CIA’s well. Abramov was awed to be chatting with him.

“I read your report,” the chairman said.

Abramov silently expelled a breath. Thank God, that was it. “Sir?”

“I’m impressed you took it upon yourself to request the samples from the recent terrorist bombings. You were admirably thorough, and I wish we had more like you around here. Unfortunately, we don’t.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I want to tell you, this is not the first report I’ve gotten indicating that the CIA has been supplying the terrorists.”

“Is that right, sir?”

“Tell me, what made you requisition the samples? Were you dissatisfied with the way things are being done in Forensics? If you are, I need to hear it.”

Abramov could not tell the chairman the truth, that an American correspondent had asked him about it – had actually planted the idea in his head – so he said instead, “Just a theory, sir. Pure instinct.”

Pavlichenko leaned back in his chair. He looked weary suddenly. “I’m told you’re one of the best.”

“No, sir, I doubt it.”

“From now on, I want you to be in charge of this matter. If Moscow is hit again, I want you to be the only forensic investigator. If you need to put together a team – and only if it is absolutely necessary – then I want you to be the sole authority. And you will answer directly to me.”

“But, sir …”

“Don’t worry about lines of authority. I’ve taken care of that. My friend, I know all about bureaucracy, and how governments can topple in a crisis because a single clerk chooses to oversleep one morning. Now, I can’t tell you precisely what sort of internal security investigations are going on, but let me just say that they are of enormous possible consequences. Nothing you will ever do will be of greater urgency. Is that clear?”

Abramov swallowed, astonished. “Of course, sir.”

“If we don’t track down the source of the terror, tovarishch Abramov,” Pavlichenko said, getting up from his chair, “I’m afraid we’re all in grave trouble.”

54

Paris

“Here,” Dunayev said, laying down a pistol on the coffee table in Stone’s hotel room. “The best my friends could do was an outrageous eighteen hundred francs for this thing.”

“Thank you,” Stone said, picking it up. It was a 9 mm Austrian-made Glock 17, small and lightweight because its receiver frame was high-density plastic. He loaded the seventeen-round cartridge and heard it click in. “Good. Well made.”

“Yes, it is. Use it in good health.”

Stone laughed as he removed cash from his belts and bookbindings, gathering much of it in one pile, which he placed on his person. He shoved another pile toward Dunayev. “I need you to keep this for me,” he said. “Put it somewhere safe. A bank safe-deposit box, perhaps. And take some of it for yourself.”

Dunayev scowled. “I wouldn’t think of it.”

“For a man who used to kill for a living, you’re pretty moral,” Stone said genially.

“Kill for a cause,” Dunayev said slowly. “In that, we are not so different. You, too, have killed.”

“Yes.” Stone shook his head slowly. “Once, in Chicago. Maybe again.” He got up and checked the closet, making sure he had taken the vital necessities. The rest, the clothing he didn’t need and so on, he would leave with Dunayev, so as not to provide his pursuers with any more traces than they already had.

“It’s not safe for me to stay here,” he said. “Not after what happened at Père Lachaise.”

Dunayev sighed, wearily and almost musically. “My friend, the gendarmes are already looking for you.”

“How do you know?”

“They are going from hotel to hotel showing a photograph of you. It is a slow process, but hotel managers will certainly cooperate. You’re not safe anywhere. If I hid you in my apartment, they might find you.”

“I just need a few hours. There are no flights at this time. If–”

“There is a place,” Dunayev interrupted. He beamed with triumph. “You can find shelter with the woman who met you at the café.”

“That redheaded woman?”

“Yes. For the time being, she is safe – they do not connect her with me.”

“But what is her connection with you?”

Dunayev shrugged and spread his hands, palms upward. “I am not a fool. Stone. If you think that when I defected from Moscow I did so without protection, you underestimate me.”

“What?”

“Like most clandestine operatives, I kept records to protect myself from my employers. Encrypted messages, onetime pads, payment records. Lists of Soviet agents-in-place in French and West German ministries. Even decades later, those lists are more valuable than platinum – some of those agents have now attained quite high positions. Every time I was in Paris, I squirreled away another scrap of paper, another shred of microfilm.”

“And this woman has them? This prostitute?”

“Yes, she is a prostitute. And, yes, she keeps them for me, in her flat in the Marais. My life insurance.”

“Why the hell would she–?”

“Loyalty. Gratitude. The reason many human beings do things for others. She was a fourteen-year-old prostitute during the Second World War when the Nazis discovered she was working with the Resistance. She was lined up on a roof with others, about to be shot. I had infiltrated the Nazis’ organization in Paris. I was one of the Nazis up on the roof that evening, and I saw this unfortunate girl, and I was able to spare her life. I told them I wanted her for myself. Yes, Mr. Stone, she keeps my files for me. The safest place for them. Do you know Paris?”

“Somewhat.”

“In the Marais, there is a small street, rue Malher.” He drew out a dog-eared map of the city and pointed with a stubby finger. “Here. For me, and for her, do not stay long. Where will you go next?”

“Moscow.”

“Moscow! That’s insanity. You are putting your head into the lion’s mouth!”

“Yes, maybe. But I have no choice. If I do not go, I will certainly be killed. If I do go – well, that’s my only hope. If I can connect with this network, perhaps I can draw upon their resources, to stop this conspiracy, and at the same time to protect me. In the interests of the Soviet state, they will have to.”

Dunayev nodded solemnly. “They will have to,” he echoed. “Yes.”

“Who are they? What do you know about them?”

“I hear they are called the Staroobriadtsy, the Old Believers.”

The Old Believers … Stone had heard the term before – where?

“I’ve heard it began in the last days of Stalin, when good, loyal people were being slaughtered indiscriminately. You hear talk about the Staroobriadtsy’s reach into the very Kremlin itself. When Nikita Khrushchev was about to be thrown out of office, he got advance warning: a phone call from a bodyguard working for one of the men conspiring against him. They say that was the work of the Old Believers, who saw Khrushchev as the Motherland’s last hope in those days.”

The Old Believers. Now Stone remembered. It was a passing reference in Alfred Stone’s letter in the safe-deposit box back in Cambridge. Was it possible he, too, had heard – that he knew something about this network? “Any underground network like this must have a head, a leader,” Stone said. “You have to help me here. Who is it? Who are these people?”

“Yes, there is a leader. A man whose name is secret.”

“There must be a way …”

Dunayev had been nodding very slowly, his face drawn in concentration. “I know some,” he said. “You must have heard – you are an expert on the politics of my godforsaken country – of one of the worst atrocities of the Second World War, an unspeakable horror only outdone by the Nazis, a mass slaughtering perpetrated by my very own people, the NKVD. The Katyn Forest Massacre.”

“Of course I’ve heard of it. Thousands and thousands – what was it, four thousand? – fifteen thousand? – officers of the Polish Army were killed in 1940. One of the most brutal episodes of the war.”

“Ah, my friend, you don’t even know the half of it. For years afterward, the affair was skillfully covered up by the Soviet government. The great Winston Churchill did not want the details revealed, for fear of what it would do to the war effort. Even now you in the West know very little about it.”

“If it’s relevant in some way …”

“On a spring day in 1940, fifteen thousand Polish officers suddenly disappeared. Professional men, engineers, doctors, professors, and generals. The Soviet government had taken them prisoners and then, because Stalin was afraid Hider might think the Russians were trying to steal the elite of the Polish Army, Stalin had to get rid of them. These men were packed up in trucks and buses and, load after load, taken to the edge of a giant, freshly dug pit.”

Stone nodded, unwilling to interrupt Dunayev, puzzled about what this had to do with the Old Believers.

“And then each one was shot in the back of the neck. Day after day, and it took weeks, there were so many of them. Bodies were piled on top of bodies, thrown in the pit. It was grotesque – a nightmare so unbelievable that even a few of the NKVD men, hardened and ruthless killers, later went out of their minds. As the days went on and the pit became a rotting, decomposing mess, the prisoners would look down into it just before they were to be executed and bellow in terror, struggling, wild. Mostly the work was done by NKVD, as I have said, but they were assisted by some infantrymen from the Red Army, a special detachment of troops who did not know what they had come there for. And on the sixth day, when the stench had become unbearable, some of the troops – vomiting, dazed – finally had had enough. They carried out a mutiny: their regiment commander led them in the rebellion against the NKVD sadists. They were arrested at once and sent back to Moscow for a court-martial.” Dunayev paused and closed his eyes.

“And?”

“And, my friend, the court-martial never happened. Suddenly the trial was terminated.”

“Stalin would not allow it?”

Dunayev laughed bitterly. “Stalin never got word of it. It was the work of one very brave, unknown man, someone powerful but most of all brave, who risked his career to save a few good soldiers.”

“And he’s the head of the network? Who was it?”

“I don’t know his name. Somehow he managed to survive. But, yes, he was the founder of this network of Party faithful who could no longer take what Stalin had done to a good nation.”

“He is alive?”

“So they say.”

“How can I get to him?”

“I wish I knew that. I wish I could help you.”

Stone was silent for a long moment. “Can you help me to get to Moscow?”

“If you’re so foolish as to go to Moscow,” Dunayev said, shaking his head, “I may be able to help. I hope you don’t plan to enter the Soviet Union illegally.”

“Only a fool – or a professional field operative – would try that. No, I need to get there legally, and to do that I need a visa to enter. But there’s no time. These things can take weeks.”

“Not always. When a great and powerful German industrialist decides on the spur of the moment to go to Moscow, the Soviet Embassy is always happy to arrange the paperwork for him.”

“But do you know of any way I can …”

“There is a man in the Soviet Embassy in Paris. A good, decent man – one of the network. He can arrange it.”

“That’s – that’s terrific. But I can’t wait even a few days.”

“I can probably get it for you in a few hours. If I can convey the urgency, he will do it at once.”

The squat, gray-haired Russian in the black leather coat came down the stairs that wound around the center atrium of the hotel, watching above and below. As he descended, however, he saw something that unnerved him.

Two French policemen were talking to the night concierge. It was too late at night for a casual chat; these policemen wanted something. Dunayev knew at once what it was. Their body language gave it away: they were showing a photograph, demanding the room number of a man they said was wanted for murder.

They were here, and they were seeking Charles Stone.

He turned and walked deliberately back in the direction of Stone’s room. Now he understood. Everything was out in the open. The French police had been drawn into the search for a fugitive American who had violated U.S. treason laws.

Dunayev knocked rapidly on the door. “Otkroi, tovarishch,” he said in a low voice. “Eto ya.”

Stone opened the door, bewildered, and saw the alarm on Dunayev’s face.

“Get out!” the Russian hissed.

55

Within a minute, Stone had finished gathering all the essentials, his passports, money, tape cassettes, checking to make sure that he was leaving behind nothing that could positively identify him.

“I’ll find a way to contact you, my friend, and get the visa,” he said, clasping the old Chekist’s hand as he left the room and headed for the back stairs. There was, he knew, a cave in the hotel, a cellar in which were a bar and various hotel utility rooms. He had inspected the hotel shortly after arriving in Paris; increasingly, he understood the importance of knowing one’s surroundings completely. This was the best, least-observed, way out.

He made it to the cave, glanced around swiftly, and found the laundry room. Its door was, as it had been earlier in the day, open. At the far end of the small chamber was a short set of steps leading to a door, which, he calculated, opened onto the tiny rue Visconti, behind the hotel.

Stone unlatched the lock and pulled the wooden door open to the dark, narrow street, which was barely more than an alley. A baby was crying somewhere nearby. He ran as quietly as he could, past a building marked VILLE DE PARIS CRÈCHE MUNICIPALE, then past several small art galleries, in the direction of rue de Seine.

“Au voleur!”

The cry came from a policeman who had suddenly spotted him. Now the Frenchman was running toward him. Stone put on a burst of speed. The policeman was shouting as he ran, calling out to others to join him. They had him ludicrously outnumbered.

He made it to rue de Seine, rounding the corner at great speed. The late-night street was almost deserted.

He saw it at once: a red Peugeot motorbike leaning up against a wall, a delivery vehicle with a yellow metal strongbox marked ALLO POSTEXPRESS affixed behind its seat. Its owner, who had evidently just gotten off, had crossed the street. He yelled when he saw Stone jump on it.

“Sorry,” Stone said, turning the key and starting it up. “Right now I need it a hell of a lot more than you do.”

The bike emitted a fearsome roar as Stone took off down rue de Seine, leaving the enraged deliveryboy running after him, the two policemen not far behind.

But now there was a police vehicle following. Stone saw it in the bike’s right rearview mirror, coming up rue de Seine, gaining on him, its blue light flashing, the siren wailing.

The little Peugeot accelerated remarkably well. Stone shifted into second, toward the river, to the Quai Malaquais, and pulled into traffic. The wrong way! He barely missed a Renault, and veered out of the road into the circular lot in front of a French Renaissance building with a columned portico, the Institut de France, and then up on the sidewalk. He had lost them!

At the Quai des Grands Augustins, he crossed the Seine over the Pont Neuf, and went into the Îlle de la Cité. Behind him, though at quite a distance, he could just make out police sirens. Had he lost them? He turned right onto the Quai des Orfèvres, toward the Palais de Justice. My God! he thought. The goddamned place is full of gendarmes. The sirens were closer now, he realized. A second police car – which must have been radioed by the first – suddenly pulled away from the curb, heading toward him.

Stone turned the accelerator on the handgrip and made a right turn at the Pont au Change, the wrong way up the Quai de la Corse. Thank God, several cars were coming. He heard the squeal of brakes as the oncoming cars sought to avoid hitting the police car, which was then forced to pull over momentarily. He heard a crash and saw that one of the police cars had collided with an oncoming Volvo.

He had not lost them; one police motorcyclist was especially adept, and he was closing in.

Across the street, he maneuvered the Peugeot onto the narrow rue des Archives, up a slight hill, then swung around the block. He had lost his pursuer – for the time being, at least. Then he took a hard right at a brasserie called La Comète, onto rue de la Verrerie. There, on the right, was a parking garage, its vertical lettering in English. He pulled in, shut off the motor, and shoved the bike against the wall.

In a booth at the front of the garage sat a night watchman, a pudgy middle-aged man in worker’s clothes.

There was no time to lose. It could be a matter of seconds. Stone pulled two hundred-franc notes from his wallets and waved them at the man. “Get me out of here,” Stone told the man in French, “and there’s another two hundred in it for you.”

The trunk of the car was filthy, overwhelmingly redolent of some kind of animal manure, and coated with a sludgelike grease. The watchman had grumbled, but when Stone had added another two hundred francs to the up-front price, he had acceded. Stone gave him the address, and the watchman opened the trunk of an old Renault and pointed; Stone got in. The watchman closed it after him. Crouched in the darkness, Stone heard and felt the engine start. They were moving.

But the sirens …!

The wail of police sirens was suddenly loud, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the old car’s motor. It had to be only feet away. He felt the car grind to a halt.

The car was idling now, and there were voices.

The wait was too long. Had the police stopped the car, realizing that Stone might be inside?

With enormous relief. Stone felt the car move again, bumping over the uneven asphalt.

A few minutes later, the engine was turned off. Then there was a knock on the metal of the trunk, a few inches from his ear.

“You want out,” came the watchman’s gruff voice, “you give me another five hundred.”

“All right,” Stone said. “You’ve got the fucking five hundred. Just get me out of here before I pass out.”

The trunk was opened, and Stone saw that he was in the courtyard of a building. He squirmed around to extricate himself but was stopped by the watchman’s hand.

“Jesus Christ!” Stone said. He pulled out his wallet and fished out five hundred francs. Thank God I changed a lot of money, he thought. After handing it to the worker, he lifted himself out of the trunk and jumped to the ground. As the watchman started up the car again and pulled out of the courtyard, Stone found the stairway and walked to the third floor. To the right of the stairs, in the dim corridor, he found the apartment door he was looking for.

He pushed the doorbell, but there was no answer.

“Shit,” he said aloud. It was past midnight. Would anyone be home? He glanced at the address, checking it again: 15, rue Malher. The right address; the right apartment. And what if …?

He pushed the bell again, and held it in for several seconds.

The door opened. Standing in front of him, in a blue dressing gown, was Dunayev’s friend the prostitute. He was surprised to see that even at night, even in bed, she wore makeup.

“Hello,” Stone said.

Moscow

Shortly after midnight, Charlotte Harper was in the editing room, trying to select a “sound bite” from a lengthy interview with a soporific Soviet official on the significance of the U.S.–Soviet summit meeting in an era of such rapid changes, when the phone rang.

She was startled, because the phone rarely rang so late at night at the office. When she picked it up, she realized at once, from the static on the line, that it was long distance. Rapidly she calculated that in New York it was four o’clock in the afternoon; probably it was her editor.

“Is this Charlotte?” The hoarse female voice was immediately familiar.

“Yes. Who’s this?”

“Charlotte, Jesus, I can’t believe you’re there so late at night. What is it, like midnight or something?”

Sometimes you can hear the voice of an old friend even after years, and it takes but an instant to recognize it. “Paula?”

“Yeah. God, I thought I’d try to reach you there. I can’t believe it.”

“How’re you doing? I can’t believe it, either. Long time.”

“Charlotte, listen, I can’t really talk. This is kind of complicated. I mean, it’s scary.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s about – well, you know who I mean if I say it’s about a good friend of yours.”

“I don’t think I …” Could she mean Charlie? But what the hell would Paula know about that?

“Look, it’s kind of a long story, but I don’t have any way to reach this– close friend of yours. I mean, I’m guessing he might try to contact you. And if he does, I need you to give him a message.”

“Paula, I don’t think–” I don’t think you should be talking on the phone! she wanted to shout. Charlotte’s mind reeled, not knowing how to react, whether to listen or to keep her from talking.

“If he talks to you, can you tell him something? Can you write this down?”

“Of course–”

At her end of the line, Paula was nearly frantic. How much could she say over the phone? “Write down – that I ran a trace.”

“A trace.”

How much was too much? How to indicate that she’d traced the phone number on the ID card Stone gave her to an organization called the American Flag Foundation in Washington?

“Tell him – oh, Christ, Charlotte, I’m really scared for the guy.”

“Paula, please be careful what you say,” Charlotte whispered urgently.

“Charlotte, look, tell him that the guy who attacked him is connected to this group in Washington that– Well, when I ran a check on them, it turned up that it’s a sort of a cat’s paw for … an American intelligence consortium.” Oh, God, Paula thought. Was that clear? Will Charlie understand? Did I say too much?

Charlotte felt short of breath. “Paula, I’m going to have to hang up. Yes, I’ll tell him if I can. But we can’t talk anymore. I’m sorry.”

And she hung up, and for a long time she stared at the blank video screen, feeling leaden with fear, listening to the faint ticking night sounds of the empty office.

56

Moscow

Andrei Pavlichenko’s black Zil limousine entered the main gate at the side of the Lubyanka, the headquarters of the KGB in Dzerzhinsky Square. The gate was opened by two soldiers in the gray-and-blue uniforms of the KGB internal-security troops. Another glanced into the limousine, confirmed that it was indeed the chairman, and saluted.

This evening’s work was to be done not in his third-floor office but at another, far more secret location, deep within the bowels of the Lubyanka.

The forensics scientist who was now solely in charge of the investigation into the terrorist bombings in Moscow had asked to meet with Pavlichenko urgently. Evidently he had found something of great importance.

Pavlichenko was met at the side entrance by his aide-de-camp, who nodded and then wordlessly accompanied him to a newly installed German elevator a few hundred feet away. In front of the elevator stood a guard.

When the elevator closed, the assistant spoke. “He says it’s a very serious matter.”

Pavlichenko nodded and leaned against the elevator wall. The strain of the past few weeks was beginning to tell on him.

The elevator had descended several flights, and it opened onto a windowless corridor whose concrete walls had been freshly painted white. The floor was of white stone. The aide led the way, opening the second door he came to.

The room was bare except for a copper-topped bar against one wall and a white metal conference table around which were four comfortable-looking chairs. The forensic technician, Abramov, was already seated in one of them, looking extremely worried. Pavlichenko noticed that the pudgy little man was wearing a cheap gray suit that was too short at the arms and legs.

“Tovarishch,” Pavlichenko said, walking over to him and shaking Abramov’s plump hand. “What is it?” His assistant hovered close behind.

“I need to see you alone, sir.”

“Certainly.” He turned and said, “Thank you, Alyosha. I’ll call you when we’re done talking.”

When they were alone, Abramov spoke. “Comrade Chairman, I’m becoming extremely concerned about what my investigation is turning up. Things are becoming more complex. More – disturbing.”

Pavlichenko was alert. “Yes?”

“I had a chance to do a thorough analysis of each of the last several bombs, sir. Really did a complete run-through of the data. And I kept coming up with the same thing: the explosives are CIA-supplied, whether plastique or dynamite.”

“Yes, yes, we know that,” Pavlichenko said impatiently.

“But then I began to examine the other fragments from the bombs, especially the detonators, the blasting caps, the chemical pencils, and so on. And, sir – I’m sorry to say this, but the equipment is entirely of KGB manufacture.”

“What do you mean to say?”

“That the bombs, sir, may have been constructed by someone within our organization. Using American explosives.”

“Who else knows of this?”

“No one, sir. As you asked, I was careful to be the sole authority. Because it may turn out to be the work of one of our own. I wanted to talk to you first.”

Pavlichenko stood up abruptly. “I want my assistant to debrief you fully. We need to compile a thorough file of names, of possible suspects.” He pressed a button on the underside of the table. “I’m grateful,” he told Abramov.

The door opened, and Pavlichenko’s assistant came in. “Please come with me,” the colonel said. Abramov got to his feet awkwardly and walked with the chairman’s man through the door.

Pavlichenko sat alone in the room, waiting. As he went to the bar to fix himself a Laphroaig straight up, his favorite single-malt Scotch whiskey, he reflected that it had been wise to encourage and isolate this man, the only one in the KGB who had an inkling. Only in such a way could Pavlichenko be sure that rumors did not spread, that he learned who else had ideas, that no one else could get on to this. He could hear the gunshot, muffled, through the concrete wall of the adjoining room. He felt a pang of genuine remorse, hating what he felt compelled to do, what justice in fact required, and, grimacing slightly, he poured two fingers of whiskey.

57

Paris

The building in which Stone had found sanctuary was located in the Marais district of Paris, the old, heavily ethnic area that had recently, during the wave of renovations of the 1980s, become a highly desirable place to live. It was five stories high, a small, free-standing triangular structure, an old beige stone island surrounded on three sides by narrow streets: rue Pavée, rue Malher, and rue des Rosiers. In addition to the three entrances to the building’s apartments, there were several commercial enterprises located on the ground floor, including a funeral-memorial store, an Italian restaurant, a small antique-store, a café-bar, a boulangerie-pâtisserie, and a Felix Potin convenience store, the French equivalent of 7-Eleven.

But Chief Commissioner Christian Lamoreaux of the Paris police did not know that this was the building. He knew only that the American had disappeared in the immediate neighborhood, an area heavily populated by orthodox Jews. And so the search had begun.

Lamoreaux had been contacted by his superior, René Melet, the chief of police, who had in turn been contacted by American intelligence – the very top of the Central Intelligence Agency, Lamoreaux was led to believe – who were urgently interested in apprehending this American, who was, they learned, a rogue agent. Melet had placed Lamoreaux in charge of the investigation, urging him to use all assets at his disposal. With that sort of mandate, the assets could be considerable.

But the American bastard had eluded them, taking off down the streets of Paris like a maniacal daredevil. It would not be long, though, before they found him. The American had made the mistake of trying to disappear in the Marais.

There were a limited number of doorbells to ring, apartments to search. With the men out in full force, they would have him in a matter of hours.

“What did you do?” the prostitute asked suspiciously. “You are on the run from something. I hear the sirens.”

“What is it, Mother?” A gawky teenage boy, wearing a soiled T-shirt and a pair of sweat pants, came out from behind a curtained-off room. “Who are you?” He approached Stone menacingly.

“No, Jacky,” she said to the teenager. “This is a friend.” She turned to Stone again. “What did you do?”

“I’m being accused of a crime I didn’t commit.”

“In Paris?”

“In America. It’s complicated. Dunayev thought you could shelter me for the night,” he said, and briefly explained what had happened.

“Why don’t you turn yourself in?” asked the son, who was trying, unsuccessfully, to grow a beard. “If you’re really innocent, you should have nothing to be afraid of.”

“Jacky,” the prostitute said warningly.

“It isn’t that simple,” Stone said. “May I please come in?”

More than seventy-five police officers, reassigned for the night from the forces of the twenty arrondissements, were combing the neighborhood, searching the alleys and storefronts, the trash dumpsters and parks and garages. Each had been ordered to let no one pass without questioning. Two-thirds of the gendarmes had been instructed to visit apartments, conducting searches if there was even a slightly reasonable suspicion.

“I would do anything Fyodor asked me to do,” the woman said, pouring Stone a cup of strong black coffee. “But this building is tiny. Eventually they’ll get to us, and then they’ll find you right away.”

The telephone rang, its abrupt, piercing bell making all three jump. The woman got up to answer it.

She spoke rapidly for a minute, arching her plucked brows, and then hung up. “It’s my neighbor across the street,” she explained. “She says the police are searching her building for a fugitive. They’ve searched her apartment!”

“I need somewhere to hide,” Stone said.

She drew aside the diaphanous curtains at the nearest window and peered down into the street. “She said our building is surrounded, too. I see she’s right.”

“What about the roof?” Stone asked, directing his question at the boy, who seemed incongruously young to be her son.

“No,” the son replied, “there’s no access to any other roof. Bad luck for you – the building isn’t next to any other.”

“You can’t think of any other way?” Stone prompted. “There must be tunnels, passages–”

The son’s face suddenly broke into a wide grin. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s take the back stairs.”

Stone, carrying his things, followed the teenager down a dark, narrow set of stairs and back into the enclosed courtyard. They ran as quietly as they could, knowing that any commotion could attract immediate attention now. Within a minute, they had reached the ground level.

“We have something that the nicer buildings don’t have,” the son explained, walking into the center of the courtyard.

“What is it?”

“Look.”

Stone looked at the ground and saw a large round disc of concrete, set tightly in a round frame of steel, within a large square. It was a manhole cover.

“My friends and I sometimes go down there.”

“The sewer?”

“I don’t think you have much choice.”

“No, I don’t,” Stone agreed. “But what’s down there? Does it lead anywhere?”

“Didn’t you ever read Victor Hugo? Les Miserables? Jean Valjean making his great escape, after stealing a loaf of bread, through the sewers of Paris?”

“No,” Stone admitted. “I couldn’t even get tickets to the musical.”

The boy walked over to a door off the courtyard and opened it. It was a storage closet of some sort. He pulled a large iron hook from the floor and carried it over to the manhole cover, then inserted the hook into the hole at the lid’s side. “Give me a hand, will you?”

Stone helped him pull back on the heavy concrete lid, which, after considerable effort, finally popped open. The two of them shoved the lid aside. A foul odor wafted from the dark opening. Stone could make out a metal ladder – actually, he realized, a row of steel handgrips that led straight downward.

“The only problem is, we can’t close it after us. You can only do it from outside. We can pull it closed, but not all the way. Maybe the police will just figure it was hooligans, like me and my friends. Can you deal with the smell?” the teenager asked, a trace of defiance in his voice.

“At this point, I can deal with just about anything,” Stone replied, as he followed the boy down into the opening.

58

The stench got progressively worse as the two descended the fifteen-foot drop. The boy had a flashlight, which he attempted to direct at the wall and the handgrips, but he succeeded mainly in illuminating the bottoms of Stone’s feet. The grips were slimy and covered in rust; it was hard to get a decent hold. Stone’s foot slipped from the bottom rung, plunging him without warning into the murky water.

Water it was, mostly. They had entered an égout élémentaire, a primary sewage-and-drainage line leading to the collecteurs secondaires, which are broader tunnels through which all the fluids sluice. This tunnel, about five feet wide and barely six feet high, was used to catch runoff from the gutters in the street. Floating in the water – it was so dark that Stone could not make out any hues – was street trash, empty cigarette packs, a plastic bag from Yves Saint-Laurent, a gnarled condom. The stone walls dripped with water and were webbed with pipes.

The two ran on one of the narrow concrete banks beside the wide, malodorous stream. “I’ll take you as far as the main juncture,” the teenager said, “so you can see where you’re going. Then I’m taking off.”

“I appreciate it.” They were wading through the thigh-high water. “Do you have a name, by the way?”

“Jacques. Jacky.”

“Nice to meet you, Jacky.”

“My friends and I used to climb around in here. It gets a lot easier once you get out of the égout élémentaire. You can start walking on dry land when the tunnels broaden.”

“You did this for fun?” Stone grimaced. The smell of excrement came in waves, as if from a neighboring tunnel. As they walked, glimmerings of light came in through street grates and manhole covers, fluorescent light from the crowded streets above.

“Yeah. Sometimes. There’s more than a thousand kilometers of canals, but it’s easy to see where you are. See?” He pointed up at the wall, shining his flashlight on a plaque set in the wall: the name of the cross streets above. “You can learn it pretty fast. Make a left here.”

The narrow tunnel suddenly met another, much broader one, a river with concrete banks four feet wide on either side. Jacky leaped up onto the bank, and Stone followed. “It’ll be a lot easier now. We can walk on this for quite a while. Not so long ago, I heard, you used to be able to get around on boats down here, but the cops outlawed it – bank robbers used to use them for getaways.”

Stone reached into his jacket pocket and fished out a pack of cigarettes. “Kill the smell,” he explained, lighting one and then offering one to Jacky, who took it. He coughed. Probably he’d never smoked before.

“What’d you do, really?” Jacky asked.

“I told you. I was set up.”

“Set up,” the boy ruminated. “That means you’ve got an enemy.”

“I suppose so.”

“Who?”

Stone paused to inhale, and answered truthfully. “I don’t really know. I’ve got some theories.”

Jacky considered that for a moment, and then asked, “You married?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“You think so?”

There was a rustling sound, and a dark shape came toward them, along the concrete walkway. “Cat?” Stone asked.

“Rat.”

The rat, which was larger than any rat Stone had ever seen or even imagined, scurried by, brushing up against Stone’s wet pants leg. “Jesus,” Stone said, giving a powerful, involuntary shudder.

The boy let out a whoop of terror, and then quickly regained his poise. “They get a lot bigger than that,” he scoffed, laughing nervously. “Wait. What’s that?” He froze.

“I don’t hear anything,” Stone said.

“Shh. There’s someone else down here.”

They stood completely still for a moment. There was something, faintly, a hollow noise quite unlike the periodic distant thuds from above.

Jacky shut off the flashlight, plunging them into almost total darkness. The noise became louder: Footsteps, the scrape of metal against stone. Then muffled voices.

“Can you see?” Jacky asked.

“A little bit.” Stone’s eyes were gradually adjusting to the dark.

“Let’s walk. Keep to the wall. I think they found the open manhole cover. Damn it – now I’m stuck with you.”

As they walked. Stone could hear the voices, quite distinct now, and then a flash of light played against the tunnel wall not twenty feet behind them.

“It’s them,” Jacky said. “This way.”

They ran, each of them moving as stealthily and silently as possible, their hands raking against the tunnel wall as they went. “Turn here,” Jacky whispered.

They entered a narrow tunnel, which descended at a sharp angle, wading in water that was now up to their waists. Stone felt for his passports and cassette tapes, which were in his breast pocket, still dry.

The voices grew fainter. Jacky led the way to another broad tunnel, and they pulled themselves up onto the bank. There was a splash as the water drained from their clothes. Another sound came, a few feet away: the rustle of a rat. “Shit,” Stone said.

Jacky flashed his light briefly against the wall and picked out the street signs. “As long as we’re quiet, they may never find us.” They ran along the tunnel, which bent a few times.

After they had been running for almost fifteen minutes and hadn’t heard a sound from the police. Stone said, “Let’s find an exit.”

“That’s no problem. We need another égout élémentaire that leads to a quiet street. If we listen, we’ll know which one is safe. The last thing we want is to get out on some boulevard.”

“Where are we, anyway?”

Jacky flashed his light against a wall, searched for a moment, and found a sign. “Montparnasse. Intersection of Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard du Montparnasse. Right near the Montparnasse Cemetery.”

This time it was Stone’s turn to hear footsteps. “They’ve caught up to us.”

“No.” Jacky shrugged dismissively and glanced around. “Wait.”

“You hear it?”

“Shit,” the teenager said, imitating Stone’s cadence.

“Let’s find another égout élémentaire,” Stone suggested.

“There’s one around here. There has to be.”

Now the voices were loud and distinct: several male voices, shouting to one another, “Over here!”

“I know a way,” Jacky said.

“Let’s take it already,” Stone said. “Come on.”

“It’s near here.”

“Move!” Stone started running along the walkway, feeling his way, his hands outstretched.

“No, wait. Over here. I know a way that I think the cops don’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe some of them. Not many people do,” Jacky said proudly.

“Well, let’s go already.”

The voice came from the tunnel they had left five minutes ago: “Do you hear that? Over there!”

Jacky leaped off the bank and into the foul sluice; Stone followed immediately. They swam across to the other side, then got back up on the edge and ran around to another narrow tunnel.

“This is it!” Jacky whispered triumphantly.

“Where?”

“Up there. Do you see?” The boy flashed his light at a grating on the wall a few feet above their heads. “Help me up.” Stone locked his hands together and used them to hoist the boy’s feet. Jacky grabbed at a pipe and pulled himself up, his feet now lodged against an indentation in the wall.

“That way!” The shout was perhaps fifty feet away.

The teenager grabbed at the top of the steel grating and pulled. The top came open with a metallic squawk. The bottom of the grating was hinged; now it lay open like a trapdoor. He shimmied his way in, and Stone, taller and stronger, was able to pull himself up on a water pipe. In a minute, he, too, was in the opening. The passage was less than three feet by three feet.

“Close it!” the boy ordered.

Stone awkwardly swung his torso around, grabbed at the grating, and pulled it back up until it closed. “Do you know what you’re doing?” he whispered.

“Shh!”

The voices now came from the tunnel directly below. Stone followed Jacky through the passage, his knees scraping against the damp stone. They did not have to go far. After they had moved about twelve feet, there was another iron grating directly ahead. The boy pushed at it, and it came open. “Careful,” he said. “Getting out is the hard part. There’s a pipe just on the other side of the hole. Crab that, and you can swing yourself down.” The boy reached his hands through the grate and patted them against the wall, searching. “Here.” He grabbed at it, curling his hands inward, and then dangled his feet out of the hole. They had reached a cave-like place, which could not be the sewers any longer, Stone realized: no water, no odor. Something else.

Stone swung himself down easily, landing on the ground beside the boy. “Is this your idea of an exit?” Stone asked. “Where the hell are we?”

The boy clicked on his flashlight and shone it against the wall.

Stone gasped.

Straight ahead of them was a doorway that led into a chamber of some sort whose walls, on first glance, were brownish and uneven. Stone’s eyes focused on the walls, seeing with terror what they were: human bones. The walls were constructed of human skulls and tibias, packed densely but neatly in gruesomely regular rows. A sign, carved in stone in the lintel at the top of the entrance, explained:

ARRÊTE!

C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT. Stop! it said. Here is death’s empire. They were in the Catacombs.

59

Chicago

Paula Singer was not expecting anyone.

The doorbell rang around fifteen minutes before midnight. She was watching the Johnny Carson show. There was a guest host, a comedian, and he was much better than Johnny usually was. Also, she had begun to nod off, so she had not noticed the bell until the third ring.

She tied her robe closed and looked out the front-door peephole.

It was a large man in a suit, a respectably dressed man. He had a round, fleshy face and long mutton chop sideburns.

“Yes?” she asked. Jesus, it was almost midnight. She refused to open the door unless he identified himself to her satisfaction.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Singer.”

So he knew her name. “Who’s there?”

“I’m a friend of Charlie Stone’s,” the man said. He had a foreign accent of some sort. “He asked me to give you a message.”

“Co ahead.”

The man laughed and shrugged. “It’ll take me more than five seconds,” he said. “It’s cold out here.”

She hesitated, and then unlocked the door. “All right,” she said, an instant before the man shoved his way in toward her, knocking her to the floor.

He had a gun.

“Please don’t,” Paula said. She began to cry at once. “Please.” She tried to get up, but he directed the gun at her face.

“Don’t move, Paula.” He closed the door behind him.

“What do you want? Please.”

“Where did Charles Stone go?” The man was tall and powerful-looking, and definitely not an American.

“I don’t know,” she keened softly.

“Take your time. You do know. Please don’t lie to me.”

What had happened? Had she and Charlie been seen in Toronto? Maybe at the airport. Then what–

The phone calls. From her office. Was it possible – had they somehow traced them? Did this have something to do with the American Flag Foundation?

“Now you can get up, Paula. That’s right. Walk straight ahead, slowly, slowly.”

Her back was to him, and she was so frightened she could not speak. He would shoot her in the back of the head. “Why do you think I know?” she managed to blurt out. “Please, I have no idea.” She walked, her knees barely able to carry her, toward the bedroom. He was going to rape her! Jesus Christ, she thought. Please don’t let this happen. Please. Oh, God.

“Lie on the bed, Paula.”

“No. Please, no"

“I just want to know where he went. He was with you.”

She could no longer stand it. “He left the country!”

“That’s not true. Please tell me the truth.” He pulled from the pockets of his suit several long leather restraints.

“Oh, God, please don’t do this!” Why wouldn’t he believe her? And then she remembered: Charlie hadn’t used his real passport. What was the name he had used?

“All you have to do is be honest with me.”

“Please believe me, he left the country. He flew out from Toronto. He – he didn’t use his own passport.”

The man stopped for a moment, the leather straps dangling from his left hand. He seemed intrigued.

“Where did he go?” he said again.

A thought occurred to Paula now, and her heart leaped. The gun. Charlie had given her a gun, and she had put it in the end table beside the bed. “Let me think,” she said, to gain time. “I have … I have a copy of his itinerary. His travel-agent thing, his voucher,” she faltered. “Would that help?”

The man gave a grunt.

She reached down and pulled the drawer open, her fingers sliding past the papers to the back, to the … There it was. She felt the cold steel, and she rejoiced.

With lightning speed she yanked it out and pointed it. The man flew at her, tackling her, and the gun would not fire. What was wrong with it? Oh, please, Jesus, fire, damn it! Go!

And she remembered now something about releasing a safety, but the man was on her, and she flung her knee forward, catching him directly in the groin. The man doubled over, howling in pain. He was a big, powerful man, and Paula had no doubt he was an expert, but he hadn’t expected meek, cowering Paula to use a self-defense expert’s blow, and that had given her a momentary advantage.

The man came back at her, but she grabbed his leg and flung him, hard, to the floor, cracking his head against the floorboards, and then ran out of the bedroom, into the kitchen.

The man was unstoppable. She had thrown him with a violence from which few people would recover, but this guy was an ox, night-marishly strong. He came after her and slammed her against the stove, but apparently he was still weak from the kick to his groin. In the tussle he had dropped his gun; now he was using his giant, powerful hands, but Paula had him, for a moment, slamming his head against the iron top of the stove with all of her weight, his head now locked in a grip she had perfected, and just as he reached around to grab her neck, squeezing with his enormous left hand, an inspiration flashed in her mind, an inspiration born of great anger.

She remembered the rapist who had tried to violate her a year ago, and she almost trembled with the adrenaline surge. In an instant, she slammed her elbow against the burner control at the front of the stove, turning it all the way on, and the gas flame in the rear burner, against which her assailant’s face was pressed, shot up. She never used the burner, because something was wrong with it, something that made the blue flame almost seven inches high.

Could she keep the hold? The man was far more powerful, and now he was an enraged bull, thrusting his body with great lurches. It took all of her strength, and she knew she could not keep this up for more than a few seconds.

The first thing she noticed, as she kept the man’s neck wedged against the top of the stove, was the distinctive, sweet, unforgettable odor of human hair burning, and then a peculiar, horrifying little crackle of the man’s hair, a human torch, and then, just before he overpowered her, the sight of the man’s facial skin singeing and crackling, and the man roaring in unspeakable pain.

His face and head still afire, the man slammed Paula to the floor and, with an almost inhuman strength, cracked her neck. It was the last killing he would ever do.

60

Moscow

Deep within the Lubyanka, which was once, before the Revolution, an insurance company, there is a private dining room used only by the chairman and his invited guests. It resembles a cathedral: its ceiling is high and slanted, its walls constructed of oak panels and stained-glass windows expropriated from a Russian Orthodox church during Stalin’s antireligious campaign of the 1930s and reassembled here in a flourish of irony.

The chairman of the KGB, Andrei Pavlichenko, was holding a private meeting with his personal physician. The doctor, who was not much older than Pavlichenko but looked ten years older, his face deeply lined, was the most eminent neurologist on the staff of the Kremlin Clinic, the hospital that treats members of the Politburo and Central Committee. The clinic is run by the Fourth Administration of the Ministry of Health, which is in turn run by the KGB.

But the physician’s loyalty to Pavlichenko went much deeper than the mere lines of authority suggested. Years ago, he had gotten a woman pregnant, the daughter of a high Party official, and the resulting scandal threatened to expel the doctor from the clinic and even the medical profession. Pavlichenko had personally intervened to save his career and have the matter expunged from official records. Ever since, the physician had remained unswervingly loyal to Pavlichenko, throughout Pavlichenko’s rise to the chairmanship of the KGB.

Now the two were speaking quietly, yet the tension between them was palpable.

In this very room, Pavlichenko remembered, he had once had dinner with Beria. It was March 9, 1953. He remembered the date well. He had been a young official of the secret police, and he had been taken aback when Beria had asked him to dinner in the cathedral. Especially on such a day.

Earlier in the day, Stalin had been buried. Beria had given a eulogy, and throughout his speech Stalin’s son Vasili, who was drunk, had cursed at Beria, calling him a “son of a bitch” and a “swine.” But Beria had been implacable. He had summoned his own forces that day, surrounded the city, and paraded his own strength, letting the rest of the leadership know who was in charge.

Pavlichenko had been integral in organizing the security forces that day, and he remembered thinking: Beria, Stalin – they’re the same thing. The day will come when I will command these tanks and machine guns and troops.

At dinner that night, as the young Pavlichenko almost shook with excitement, Beria had first told him about his plans for a coup d’etat. Beria wanted Pavlichenko to serve as a conduit between a Russian woman and a very rich and powerful American. There was a document Pavlichenko must get, a piece of paper that, once released, would throw the Soviet leadership into disarray, turn it inside out, pave the way for Beria. Pavlichenko listened with fascination to the details of the plan.

Beria had failed. Pavlichenko would not.

For no one – not Beria, not anyone now in the Soviet leadership – had endured what Pavlichenko had endured.

His parents had been peasant farmers in the village of Plovitsy, in the Ukraine. Their farm was tiny, consisting only of a horse and a cow and a small plot of land, but it was the time of Stalin’s great collectivization campaign and his war against what he termed the “kulaks,” the rich peasants, in the course of which seven million Ukrainians – a fifth of the Ukrainian nation – starved to death.

His parents were not rich, but they were classified as kulaks all the same.

And very early one morning, when he was only three years old, he, his two sisters, and his parents were carted off and loaded onto a train, all their meager belongings confiscated by the authorities. What little was left in the house was taken by the villagers. They were to be sent to a camp in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. They were crowded into a train that teemed with other deported farmers, whose anguished cries almost deafened the young Pavlichenko.

On the way, the train stopped at a small town in the Ukraine for provisions. And there Pavlichenko’s parents somehow, swiftly, abandoned him and his sisters in a crowd at the station.

The train departed without them, and the authorities, who could scarcely keep track of all their adult prisoners, took no notice of the missing children. For hours, Pavlichenko and his sisters didn’t know what had happened. Scared and miserable, they walked along a roadside, not sure where to go, asking help of passersby.

Within a few days, they found their way to a neighboring village, where an uncle took the trembling children into his house; later he adopted them.

It was not until years later that they learned that their parents had perished in the camps at Krasnoyarsk.

The young Andrei Dmitrovich, who nurtured a growing hatred for the system that had done this to his parents, remembered particularly one day in the hot and rainy summer of 1934. A terrible rain had eroded the topsoil from the graveyard where, just the year before, hundreds of villagers, who had died of starvation, had been buried. The flood washed the cadavers up into the streets and yards. Pavlichenko opened his uncle’s front door and saw the ghastly corpses strewn about, seeming to reach for him, and he screamed until he lost his voice.

He had not communicated in any way with the Sanctum in several years, not since he was named head of the First Chief Directorate. This had naturally infuriated the Americans, who quite understandably salivated at the prospect of having their own man at the very heart of Soviet intelligence, but Pavlichenko had insisted upon it. It was far too risky, he told them.

He had been M-3, as Sanctum had dubbed him, for decades. Since 1950 – which was virtually all of Andrei Pavlichenko’s adult life – and it made his life peculiarly shadowy, for he was always looking behind him, never knowing if he would be found out.

It had all begun when, as a newly married graduate of the KGB’s training school, the Vysshaya Shkola, he had made a foolish mistake. He had met secretly – or so he had thought – with an anti-Soviet Ukrainian activist in Kyiv, a young man whose views he privately shared, and then suddenly an American intelligence official had snapped a photograph. He was caught. His first reaction was terror, then resentment, and then he thought it over calmly and knew it was the right thing to do.

He remembered his first meeting with his control, a man named Oliver Nyland, who was for years the chief of the CIA’s counterintelligence division. They had met in London, furtively, in a location Nyland had arranged with considerable care to attract no attention.

The young, ambitious Pavlichenko had been surprised at the American’s appearance: he looked like a disheveled college professor, in a poorly cut tweed suit, one button missing from his shirt. He had long shaggy gray hair that spilled over his ears, and tired hazel eyes. Not at all the image of a CIA master-spy, but, then, the reality so rarely lived up to the fantasy.

“We’ve had our eye on you for some time,” Nyland had explained. “Ever since a relative of yours from the Ukraine emigrated and we learned the story of three children whose parents were killed by Stalin’s people during the collectivization campaign in the Ukraine. Adopted by an uncle who was so thoughtful and so careful as to change your names, so that the Russians wouldn’t come after you children later.”

Pavlichenko had just listened, amazed at how much they had learned. Not even the KGB, which had done the standard background check before hiring him, had managed to uncover the secret of an adoption, the changing of a family name done under the table by means of a bribe. In the turmoil of the Ukraine in the early thirties, records had been lost; the KGB’s internal-security operatives had naturally found nothing suspicious.

“We have the ability,” Nyland had told him at the safe house in Hampstead Heath, “to smooth your way to the very top of the KGB. To provide you with secrets that will look like brilliant insight, information that will make you seem even shrewder and more far-seeing than you are.”

The Americans hadn’t disappointed.

As soon as he agreed, they had given him detailed instructions, as well as the equipment he would need to stay in clandestine contact with his control. They supplied him with onetime pads, secreted in loaves of black bread that he bought from a certain assigned bakery on Gorky Street in Moscow. Each page of these onetime pads, a sophisticated type of codebook, consisted of a random five-digit sequence of numbers, which he would use to encipher messages, using a matrix that was then destroyed. The code was virtually unbreakable, since the only other copy of the onetime pad was in Washington.

At first, he furnished the Americans with KGB payroll sheets or personnel records, which listed every employee in a particular subsection. Gradually he gave them intelligence assessments, and then larger secrets. He photographed these documents with a small German camera they had provided.

He transmitted the material to the Americans by means of a dead drop, leaving the film cassettes behind a loose brick near a gymnasium that his oldest son attended. Or he would attend a certain showing of a movie, choosing a specified empty seat and placing his coat over the seat in front of him; when he left the theater, his pocket would be one item lighter. There were, too, brush contacts on crowded buses. He would be notified that the transfer was successful by means of chalk marks on telephone poles, or sometimes fresh black tar smudges on white interior walls of the banya where he went to take the steam.

He was even given a telephone number, which was routed through a private Moscow apartment and rang in the office of his case officer. This number, exclusively for Pavlichenko’s use, was for emergency purposes – a danger signal he had never had to use.

“It is all set, sir,” the physician said. “What you will have is not a stroke per se but a TIA, a transient ischemic attack.”

“Explain.”

“When the day comes, you can’t get out of bed in the morning. You can’t speak. You can’t move your right side. Naturally, you are brought to me, at the clinic. I do a CAT scan on you – that’s normal procedure – and it reveals, let’s say, an infarct of the left hemisphere. This is because you have a dysfunction in one of the arteries that supply your brain with blood, perhaps cerebral emboli, plaques in the vertebral or carotid arteries. You have always had this condition.”

“Very good,” Pavlichenko said, nodding slowly. “I shall depend upon you to make this condition known to the right people, immediately. A few words here or there; let it be known that you are treating me. Words spoken out of pride, or immodesty. I want the rumors to spread.”

“As they have about your alleged heart trouble,” the doctor replied.

“Exactly. But is there any way to forge the results of such an examination?”

“Yes, sir, quite easily. In the last few years, we have treated quite a number of people who have had strokes. I can take a CAT scan of someone else we’ve treated here, who’s actually had a stroke, as well as someone else’s computer-generated NICE studies – noninvasive carotid exam, an ultrasound examination of the carotid arteries – and I can simply change the dates.”

“After such a stroke – is it believable that I would recover quickly?”

Pavlichenko’s physician paused for a moment. “Yes, sir. Such a person could recover within days. It is entirely credible. The dead, sir, shall rise.”

“Ingenious,” the chairman of the KGB murmured.

He gazed around the dining room, at the stained-glass windows, and he knew now that his dream, and that of his people, was about to come true.

61

Paris

Stone sat on the rough gravel in the Empire of the Dead, reclining against the damp, russet bones. The air was dank, the smell acrid. He had been able to sleep for a few hours, and he awoke with a great stiffness in his back and neck.

He was waiting for Jacky to return.

The teenaged son of the prostitute was now imbued with a sense of adventure. This was his hideaway, late at night, the hideaway of his friends. Occasionally they would break into the Catacombs through the secret passage, and party for hours: drinking and scrawling graffiti on the stone walls. They found the ossuary exciting, morbid and illicit. As they got drunker, Jacky explained, some of them could even see the ghosts. The only rule they all observed was that the remains were never to be defaced.

Fortunately, none of the teenagers had decided to come in tonight and disturb Stone’s sleep. Fortunately, too, he could seek refuge here for part of the next day: the Catacombs did not open to the public until two o’clock.

There would be just enough time. Stone would require Dunayev’s assistance, if Dunayev was willing and if he thought it was safe. He gave Jacky his soaked Robert Gill passport and the set of three extra photos in a glassine envelope that he’d slipped into the passport’s last page.

With this, Dunayev could arrange to get him a visa to the Soviet Union.

Jacky had agreed to help. He told Stone he’d spend the rest of the night at the apartment of an old girlfriend, call his mother and let her know everything was all right, and call Fyodor Dunayev. While he waited for Dunayev to procure the visa, Jacky had agreed to go on a shopping expedition. The list Stone had given him was a long one. It included such disparate items as a metal pocket comb, an inexpensive suit in Stone’s size, a blazer and pair of pants, a pair of American hiking boots, a men’s carry-on garment bag, a leather shaving kit, a metal tape measure, a bar of soap, a can of shaving cream, a tube of toothpaste, an assortment of toiletries, and razor blades.

It was five in the morning. If his luck held out, the Catacombs’ guard would not return until after noon.

He got up, walked around, his feet crunching on the gravel. He shone his flashlight around the ossuary, admiring the morbid fastidiousness with which the skeletons had been packed. The perfectly symmetrical rows of skulls glistened by the lantern light, tight rows perched atop bundles of femurs, a mournful, deathly chorus line. In places, crossed tibias had been arranged in a skull-and-crossbones formation.

Plaques told of when the skeletons had been moved from which Paris cemetery, a process that was begun in 1786, when the Les Innocents cemetery was deemed overcrowded and unhealthy. Millions of skeletons, mainly of paupers, were transferred over the decades to the underground compact-storage burial ground, stacked neatly. OSSEMENTS DU L’EGLISE ST.-LAURENT, one sign proclaimed. Another: OSSEMENTS DU SAINT-JACQUES-DU-HAUT-PAS. Here and there were inscribed quotations about death and eternity.

The Catacombs, he remembered Jacky telling him, had once been the secret headquarters of the French Resistance during World War II, unbeknownst to the Nazis who swaggered about Place Denfert-Rochereau above them. Compared with the brave Resistance fighters, he felt laughably insignificant. He remembered his grandiose schemes of exposing it all, forcing powerful men to cooperate in exonerating him and his late father. Dashed – all of these hopes.

The thought of going to Moscow was terrifying. The American fanatics would no doubt be able to get to him there as well. But he had no choice.

He returned to his resting place, against a column of skeletons, and before long he was fast asleep.

Moscow

Charlotte had been pacing back and forth in the corridor next to the teletypes, thinking about the dispatch she’d been working on, thinking about Charlie, thinking about the upcoming summit. Thinking about dozens of things, which meant she couldn’t concentrate on anything.

For want of anything better to do, she tore off the telex printout from the 3 wire, and scanned it.

A name caught her eye.

Paula Singer.

A Chicago resident found dead in a fire in her apartment … apparently a cigarette fire …

She gasped and gave a shriek. The others in the office – the cameraman, the producer, the Russian employees – looked up, and the Russian woman, Zinaida, dashed over to see what was wrong.

Paula Singer, Charlotte knew, had never smoked.

Paris

A light was shining on Stone’s face. He opened his eyes, blinked a few times, and, to his relief, saw that it was Jacky.

“What time is it?” Stone asked, rubbing his eyes.

“About noon. We’d better get out of here soon.”

“Well?”

“Got it. The Soviet Embassy doesn’t open until ten, and he was able to get a visa by ten-thirty. Whoever this guy Dunayev is, he’s got – how you say? – clout.”

“That he does.”

“I bought you Timberland boots,” Jacky said uncertainly. “Good, yes? I hear they’re very good.”

“Just fine.”

Jacky had managed to get everything on the list. All of the smaller items he had stashed in the garment bag.

There was very little time now, and Stone worked quickly. First he would have to field-strip the gun, disassemble it entirely. He moved the slide release at the rear of the trigger guard and slipped out the magazine.

Always better to be thorough. He checked to see that there were no rounds left in it. There weren’t. He decocked the gun by pulling the trigger, dry-firing it; grasping the gun by the barrel, he pushed the slide assembly back until he heard a slight click. The square breech block had dropped.

Good; Dunayev’s brief tutorial had been useful.

Without releasing his pressure on the slide assembly, he gripped the slide lock, two inset pins on either side of the barrel, and pulled it down. The whole top of the gun now slid right off. He liked the feel of the Glock; it was well engineered and extremely lightweight. The whole thing was not much more than seven inches long.

In a matter of seconds, he had the gun apart. He laid the components carefully on the ground in front of him: the steel oblong that constituted the barrel, slide, and spring; the magazine, which was mostly plastic with some metal in it; and the dense-plastic receiver frame.

He picked up the plastic frame and examined it. He knew it wasn’t one hundred percent plastic; the manufacturer had in recent years begun to impregnate the polymer with some steel, as a precaution against terrorism. But the metal content was so slight it would register on metal detectors as nothing more than a ring of keys. Probably, in fact, less than one key.

If it were placed in the garment bag, it would show up on the airport scanners, however, as a gun frame. Stone slipped it into the breast pocket of his suit. They didn’t X-ray the passengers, of course – just the luggage.

The steel components of the gun were a much greater challenge, but the old Russian spy had provided Stone with some ideas. He placed the barrel-and-slide assembly end to end next to the magazine, which he knew held seventeen rounds and two extra 9 mm Parabellum cartridges. Getting the cartridges had been much easier for Dunayev than getting the gun, since most European small arms – from handguns to machine guns – take 9 mm Parabellum cartridges, and have done so since before the Second World War.

He wrapped the line of metal objects several times with aluminum foil until the package looked like a long, flat bar. This he inserted into a seam at the bottom edge of the garment bag, which he had opened by means of the razor blade. He slipped the metal tape measure between the suit and the blazer.

Next he took the bar of soap and unwrapped it. Against one of the catacomb walls he had earlier noticed a small puddle of water, which had probably seeped in from the surrounding earth. He carried the bar over and floated it in the water for a few minutes, while he uncapped the toothpaste, squeezed some of its contents out, and placed it into the shaving kit, along with the metal can of shaving cream, the razor blades, the steel cordless shaver, the metal comb, and the toiletries. When he picked up the slippery, now soft bar of soap and added it to the bag, he mushed the soap around the toiletries and the toothpaste. He inspected the goopy, unsightly mess with a proud smile, and zipped it up.

They left the Catacombs through a different way, briefly passing through the adjoining égout élémentaire and out through a manhole on a side street, rue Rémy Dumoncel, in front of the large illuminated green cross of a homeopathic pharmacy. Several pedestrians, startled, watched them come out.

“What the hell are you looking at?” Jacky shouted at them. “Mind your own business!” They turned away.

A block away was the car that Jacky had borrowed from his friend, a gigantic black late-1950s Chevrolet with sweeping tail fins. Placed on the back seat was an old suitcase Jacky had picked up for him and packed with clothes. The Chevy roared to life, and they were headed for the airport.

“The cops are all over,” Jacky said. It was clear he was enjoying playing the co-conspirator. “You can see them. Train stations, Metro stations. All over.”

“Doing what?”

“Watching. Once in a while, they stop people.”

“Who look like me.”

“I guess so.” He smiled. “Your suit is a wreck.”

“The sewers can do that. Do you have any idea where you can buy wigs around here?”

“Wigs?”

They stopped at a phone booth, where Jacky made a few calls and finally located a place in the Ninth Arrondissement, Les Costumes de Paris, a large and well-known store that rented clothing and accessories to film production companies. There Stone found a men’s wig, light brown with a very natural-looking sprinkling of gray. It fit perfectly. Worn over his brush cut, it altered Stone’s appearance entirely; he now appeared to be a well-groomed businessman. From a wardrobe rack he selected a dark-blue American naval uniform that was somewhat baggy but respectable. He glanced at himself in the mirror.

Jacky stood by, watching. “Pretty good. But anyone who looks closely will know it’s you.”

“True. But the naval uniform might gain me a few valuable seconds – they’ll be looking for anyone but a military man. In any case, it’s better than nothing. What about a mustache?”

“Why not?”

He added a grayish mustache to the order, and paid the rental fee and the deposit. A lot of money for a bad suit and an ugly head of hair, he thought.

On the street, he found another phone booth and placed a call to Air France, where he inquired about the schedule of flights to Washington and, using his Charles Stone credit card, booked a flight for the following afternoon, out of Orly Airport.

He was careful to book the flight under another, false name. If he was lucky, the ruse would work. They’d believe that he had made the mistake of an amateur – clever enough to book a reservation under a false name, but forgetting that a person could be traced by means of his credit card. And they would wrongly believe that he was returning to Washington.

Or perhaps they wouldn’t believe the trick at all.

He preferred not to think about that.

Then he called several of the airlines that had flights departing from Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Stone had been careful not to use the name of Robert Gill in Paris. The French police would be looking for a Charles Stone, who went by any of several aliases. Not for a Robert Gill.

At Charles de Gaulle Airport, Stone said goodbye to Jacky and, with a quick handclasp, gave his thanks. “Hold on a second,” Stone said, and withdrew a crumpled envelope from his pants pocket.

“What?”

It was a wad of bills, probably more money than the boy had ever seen.

“No,” Jacky protested, refusing to take the envelope. “Your money’s no good here.” Where had he picked that up? Stone wondered, amused. Studying B-movies?

“You risked a lot for me,” Stone said. “You probably saved my life.”

Jacky scowled in dismissal, but he was unable to hide a slight smile of pleasure. “I think you are out of your mind.”

“Maybe,” Stone said, pushing the envelope at him again. “Look, it’s for your mother,” Stone said. “Tell her to take a couple of nights off – tell her thanks for the help.”

There was a beat of silence, and then Jacky said, “I hope things go good for you.”

Stone shook his hand firmly, putting his other hand on the teenager’s shoulder. “Thanks.”

Then, after another long moment of silence, Jacky turned wistfully and was gone.

There were no signs of heightened security as he entered the terminal. Looking around nervously, he saw nothing more than the usual security guards.

Odd, he thought. You’d think they’d watch the airports especially closely.

He went up to the Air France ticket counter and bought a ticket on the next flight to Bonn, which departed five minutes before the Aeroflot flight to Moscow he really wanted – and, he ascertained, from an adjacent boarding gate. He paid in cash. The sales agent affixed his seat assignment to his ticket. Then he went up to the Aeroflot counter and bought a ticket to Moscow, also paying in cash, and got his seat assignment. He found a restroom and brushed his suit off, straightened his tie, and glanced at himself in the mirror. He looked a little rumpled, but no more than a military man who’d been traveling all night.

He took a deep breath, and returned to the terminal. Now came the worst part. He slowly approached the luggage X-ray check, hearing the last-call announcements for both flights.

Stone watched the long line. He was amazed to realize that his heartbeat had begun to accelerate, his face and hands to break out in fine drops of perspiration. There could be no holdup here. If they discovered the disassembled gun, they would immediately seize him, take him in for questioning, arrest him – and soon enough discover that the man who had just tried to smuggle a gun through airport security was the very same one whom much of Paris’s gendarmerie were pursuing so hotly.

Once again he heard a boarding call over the public-address system.

There was no time to spare.

A large noisy family – four boys and two girls all under ten – joined the line now, the children quarreling and running around their beleaguered parents. Stone could hear German being spoken. He quickly got into the line behind them, grateful for the distraction they would surely provide to the security personnel.

When the German family reached the metal-detector gate, the confusion mounted, as Stone had hoped it would. Several of the children tried to carry their luggage in through the metal detectors and had to be told by a rueful blue-uniformed security officer to place the bags on the conveyor belt so they could be X-rayed. One of the boys rapped his brother on the head with his knuckles; the younger girl started crying and tugging on her stout mother’s dress. Stone caught the eye of the young man who was operating the scanner and smiled benevolently, shaking his head. The man smiled back: what a disaster, he seemed to say.

Now it was Stone’s turn. His heart was hammering again, but he continued to smile good-naturedly. He placed his garment bag casually on the conveyor belt and stepped through the metal detector.

The green light flashed on.

Clear. The plastic gun frame had made it through. Thank God the magnetometer wasn’t set to pick up absolutely everything metallic.

Then Stone saw that the man operating the scanner was peering closely at the luggage-scanner monitor. He was seized with fear.

Watching the grayish X-ray monitor, the security officer, who was already exhausted even though five hours still remained in his day, grimaced inwardly. Something metal inside this thing. He looked closely at the X-ray image and noticed something: a profusion of opaque objects in the fellow’s garment bag.

“Hold it,” he said.

Stone turned to look at the X-ray operator, puzzled. “What’s up?” he asked, still good-natured.

“I’ve got to look inside, hein?”

“Go ahead,” Stone said, forcing his smile, feeling the tension wrack his entire body. “Whatever.” He felt a rivulet of sweat ooze slowly down the back of his neck into his shirt collar.

The Frenchman lifted the bag, which had emerged from the other side of the scanner, and zipped it open. He moved aside the suit and pants and located the shaving kit, which he opened at once. Glancing inside, he saw the repellent mess of oozing soap and toothpaste, a metal comb, some razor blades, what looked like a shaver. He wrinkled his nose in distaste and closed the kit, refusing to look any closer at what was obviously nothing more than the personal accessories of a not very neat man. His fingers touched something metallic, and he lifted it out: a metal tape measure. Crazy Americans. “Merde,” he exclaimed to himself. Aloud, he asked, “Vous êtes américain?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m going to have to put it through again, je vous en prie,” he said, fastening the bag and placing it at the entrance to the scanner.

He looked again at the image on the monitor. Just the filthy shaving bag and that damned tape measure. The only other metal that showed up opaque was the garment bag’s steel reinforcing bar at its perimeter. Nothing suspicious; the American businessman’s only crime was his slovenliness, and he let the man pass. The guy obviously was no terrorist.

As Dunayev had predicted, the barrel-and-slide-assembly-and-magazine package, wrapped in foil and inserted in the garment bag’s seam, appeared merely a part of the bag’s construction. Airport security personnel are trained to look within the bag’s outline, and not at the outline itself. The profusion of metal objects inside the garment bag had served as distractors. Stone slowly let out his breath, and walked on.

Passport control was a series of glassed-in booths at the entrance to the gates. If only my luck holds, he said silently, getting in the line. Just a few minutes left now.

The ritual at passport control, as it seemed to be everywhere in the West, was perfunctory. The guard scarcely glanced at him, caring not at all that his appearance differed radically from the photograph on the passport. He stamped Stone’s passport with a French visa mark to indicate that he had left the country, and then slid it through the window, smiling briefly. “Bon voyage, monsieur.”

As he walked away from the booth, he felt the tension ebb from his body. He had made it.

He noticed a man in a blue blazer and tie, standing at the end of the passport-control area, glance at him for a few seconds too long. Am I being paranoid? Stone wondered frantically.

In the next brief, sickening moment. Stone understood that the man, who seemed to be an airport-security officer, was indeed looking at him. Too closely: examining his face with more than passing interest.

Stone had been recognized.

He was sure of it.

Don’t move quickly, he told himself. Nothing is out of the ordinary. Only a scared man would run at this point. Walk with the normal hurried pace of a man late for a plane.

The man had turned to follow him. He had left his station at the passport booths and had begun to walk behind Stone.

Stone caught the reflection of the man in the plate-glass window of the corridor as he walked. Normally. Walk normally. Nothing is out of the ordinary.

There it was, the gate. It was empty; the flight to Bonn had already boarded, and the airline personnel were lingering at the gate, waiting for any last-minute stragglers, laughing and talking among themselves.

The man was still behind him. Why didn’t he catch up with him? Why didn’t the man just grab him, get it over with?

The airline employee at the gate watched Stone’s approach, shaking her head with disapproval. “It is very late, sir,” she called out. “The plane is about to depart.”

Stone waved his boarding pass at her. “I can make it,” he said, pushing his way past her. “I’m a fast runner.”

“Hey – sir!” the woman shouted as Stone ran past her, through the tunnel into the airplane.

Now!

He shoved his boarding pass into the flight attendant’s hand as he entered the jet, which was full. He ran through the length of the plane, shoving aside a man who was placing a suitcase in the overhead compartment, and to the back of the plane.

Yes! They had not closed the rear exit yet; they were about to.

“Sir!” One of the flight attendants, a man, gestured toward him. “What are you doing?”

But Stone was already descending the metal stairs, clutching his suitcase, now running onto the runway. The noise of the engines was deafening. He had timed it right. The next plane on the runway was, sure enough, the white-and-blue Aeroflot, the Soviet Ilyushin 62 jet that sat there preparing for takeoff, which would be in something like two minutes. He could just make it.

Stone had lost his pursuer, running in a direction he would not anticipate. From the terminal building, he knew he was not visible, blocked as he was by the plane’s girth. Mounting the exterior, service steps to the Aeroflot’s jetway, he saw the surprised look on the face of the plump Soviet stewardess as he entered the plane and handed her his boarding pass. The surprise turned to disapproval.

“Izvinitye,” he told the woman. “Prostitye. Ya ochen opazdivayu.” Forgive me; I’m running terribly late.

He took his seat, watching tensely out the window. He was safe. The airport-security guard thought he was on the flight to Bonn, and had almost certainly called in reinforcements to delay and search the plane; by the time it was discovered that he had left it, the Aeroflot plane would be in the air.

Stone felt the engines increase their pitch, and two minutes later the plane was moving down the runway. When, another minute and a half later, the plane lifted off, Stone sank back into his seat, closed his eyes, and breathed a sigh of relief.