The Negotiator

Chapter 3

Thirty miles west of Oklahoma City lies the federal penitentiary called El Reno, more officially known as a “federal corrections institution.” Less formally, it is one of the toughest prisons in America -in criminal slang, a hard pen. At dawn on a chill morning in the middle of March a small door opened in the frame of its forbidding main gate and a man emerged.

He was of medium height, overweight, prison-pale, broke, and very bitter. He stared about him, saw little (there was little to see), turned toward the city, and began to walk. Above his head, unseen eyes in the guard towers watched him with small interest, then looked away. Other eyes from a parked car watched him far more intently. The stretch limousine was parked a discreet distance from the main gate, far enough for its license plate to be out of vision. The man staring through the rear window of the car put down his binoculars and muttered, “He’s heading this way.”

Ten minutes later the fat man passed the car, glanced at it, and walked on. But he was a pro, and already his alarm antennae were activated. He was a hundred yards beyond the car when its engine purred into life and it drew up beside him. A young man got out, clean-cut, athletic, pleasant-looking.

“Mr. Moss?”

“Who wants to know?”

“My employer, sir. He wishes to offer you an interview.”

“No name, I suppose,” said the fat man.

The other smiled. “Not yet. But we do have a warm car, a private airplane, and mean you no harm. Let’s face it, Mr. Moss, do you have any place else to go?”

Moss thought. The car and the man did not smell of the Company-the CIA-or of the Bureau-the FBI-his sworn enemies. And no, he had no place else to go. He climbed into the backseat of the car, the young man got in beside him, and the limo headed not toward Oklahoma City but to Wiley Post Airport to the northwest.

In 1966, at the age of twenty-five, Irving Moss had been a junior provincial officer (a GS 12) with the CIA, fresh out of the States and working in Vietnam with the CIA-run Phoenix program. Those were the years when the Special Forces, the Green Berets, had been steadily handing over their hitherto rather successful hearts-and-minds program in the Mekong Delta to the South Vietnamese Army, who proceeded to handle the notion of actually persuading the peasants not to cooperate with the Viet Cong with considerably less skill and humanity. The Phoenix people had to liaise with the ARVN, while the Green Berets switched more and more to search-and-destroy missions, often bringing back Viet Cong prisoners or suspects for interrogation by the ARVN under the aegis of the Phoenix people. That was when Moss discovered both his secret taste and his true talent.

As a youth he had been puzzled and depressed by his own lack of sexuality, and recalled with unappeased bitterness the mockery he had suffered in his teenage years. He had also been bemused-the fifties were an age of relative innocence among teenagers-to observe that he could become immediately aroused by the sound of a human scream. For such a man the discreet and unquestioning jungles of Vietnam were an Aladdin’s cave of pleasure. Alone with his rear-echelon Vietnamese unit, he had been able to appoint himself the chief interrogator of suspects, aided by a couple of like-minded South Vietnamese corporals.

It had been, for him, a beautiful three years, which ended one day in 1969 when a tall, craggy young Green Beret sergeant had unexpectedly walked out of the jungle, his left arm dripping blood, sent back by his officer to get medication. The young warrior had gazed for a few seconds upon Moss’s work, turned without a word, and crashed a haymaker of a right-hand punch onto the bridge of his nose. The medics at Danang had done their best, but the bones of the septum were so shattered that Moss had to go to Japan for treatment. Even then, remedial surgery had left the bridge of his nose broadened and flattened, and the passages were so damaged that he still whistled and snuffled as he breathed, especially when excited.

He never saw the sergeant again, there had been no official report, and he had managed to cover his tracks and stay with the Agency. Until 1983. In that year, much promoted, he had been with the CIA buildup of the contra movement in Honduras, supervising a series of jungle camps along the border with Nicaragua from which the contras, many of them former servants of the ousted and unlovable dictator Somoza, had run sporadic missions across the border into the land they had once ruled. One day such a group had returned with a thirteen-year-old boy, not a Sandinista, just a peasant kid.

The interrogation had taken place in a clearing in the bush a quarter of a mile from the contra camp, but on the still tropical air the demented shrieks could be clearly heard in the camp. No one slept. In the small hours the sounds finally ceased. Moss walked back into the camp as if drugged, threw himself on his cot, and fell into a deep sleep. Two of the Nicaraguan section commanders quietly left camp, walked into the bush, and returned after twenty minutes to demand an interview with the commander. Colonel Rivas saw them in his tent, where he was writing up reports by the light of his hissing Petromax. The two guerrillas talked to him for several minutes.

“We can’t work with this one,” concluded the first. “We have talked to the boys. They agree, Coronel.”

“Es malsano,” added the other. “Un animal.”

Colonel Rivas sighed. He had once been a member of Somoza’s death squads, had dragged a few trade unionists and malcontents from their beds in his time. He had seen a few executions, even taken part. But children… He reached for his radio. A mutiny or mass defection he did not need. Just after dawn an American military helicopter clattered into his camp and disgorged a stocky, dark man who happened to be the newly appointed CIA Deputy Chief of Latin American Section, on a familiarization tour of his new bailiwick. Rivas escorted the American into the bush and they, too, came back after a few minutes.

When Irving Moss awoke it was because someone was kicking the legs of his frame cot. He looked up Wearily to see a man in green fatigues looking down at him.

“Moss, you’re out,” said the man.

“Who the hell are you?” asked Moss. He was told.

“One of them,” he sneered.

“Yep, one of them. And you’re out. Out of Honduras and out of the Agency.” He showed Moss a piece of paper.

“This doesn’t come from Langley,” Moss protested.

“No,” said the man, “this comes from me. I come from Langley. Get your gear into that chopper.”

Thirty minutes later Agent David Weintraub watched the helicopter lift away into the morning sky. At Tegucigalpa, Moss was met by the Chief of Station, who was coldly formal and personally saw him on a flight to Miami and Washington. He never even went back to Langley. He was met at Washington National, given his papers, and told to get lost. For five years, much in demand, he worked for a variety of less and less palatable Middle Eastern and Central American dictators, and then organized drug-runs for Noriega of Panama. A mistake. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency put him on a Top Target list.

He was passing through London ’s Heathrow Airport in 1988 when the deceptively courteous guardians of British law stepped in front of him and wondered if they might have a quiet word. The word concerned a concealed handgun in his suitcase. Normal extradition procedures went through at record speed and he was landed back on U.S. soil three weeks later. At his trial he drew three years. As a first offender he might well have drawn a soft penitentiary. But while he was awaiting sentence two men had a discreet lunch at Washington ’s exclusive Metropolitan Club.

One was the stocky man called Weintraub, now risen to the post of Assistant Deputy Director (Operations) of the CIA. The other was Oliver “Buck” Revell, a big former Marine flier and Executive Assistant Director (Investigations) with the FBI. He had also been a football player in his youth, but had not played long enough to get his brain mashed. There were some at the Hoover Building who suggested it still worked quite well. Waiting until Revell had finished his steak, Weintraub showed him a file and some pictures. Revell closed the file and said simply, “I see.” Unaccountably, Moss served his time in El Reno, also housing some of the most vicious murderers, rapists, and extortionists currently under lock and key in America. When he came out he had a pathological loathing of the Agency, the Bureau, the British… and that was just for starters.

At Wiley Post Airport the limousine swept through the main gate on a nod and pulled up beside a waiting Learjet. Apart from its license plate number, which Moss at once memorized, it bore no logo. Within five minutes it was airborne, heading a whisker west of due south. Moss could tell the approximate direction from the morning sun. The direction, he knew, was toward Texas.

Just outside Austin is the beginning of what Texans call the hill country and it was here that the owner of Pan-Global had his country home, a twenty-thousand-acre spread in the foothills. The mansion faced southeast, with panoramic views across the great Texan plain toward faraway Galveston and the Gulf. Apart from a sufficiency of servants’ quarters, guest bungalows, swimming pool, and shooting range, the estate also contained its own landing strip, and it was here the Learjet landed shortly before noon.

Moss was conducted to a jacaranda-framed bungalow, given half an hour to bathe and shave, then led to the mansion and into a cool, leather-upholstered study. Two minutes later he was confronted by a tall, white-haired old man.

“Mr. Moss?” said the man. “Mr. Irving Moss?”

“Yes, sir,” said Moss. He smelt money, a lot of it.

“My name is Miller,” said the man. “Cyrus V. Miller.”

The meeting was in the Cabinet Room, down the hall and past the private secretary’s room from the Oval Office. Like most people, President John Cormack had been surprised by the comparative smallness of the Oval Office when he had first seen it. The Cabinet Room, with its great eight-sided table beneath Stuart’s portrait of George Washington, gave more room to spread papers and lean on elbows.

That morning John Cormack had invited his inner Cabinet of close and trusted friends and advisers to consider the final draft of the Nantucket Treaty. The details were worked out, the verification procedures checked through; the experts had given their grudging concurrence-or not, in the case of two senior generals who retired and three Pentagon staffers who had chosen to resign-but Cormack wanted last comments from his special team.

He was sixty years old, at the peak of his intellectual and political powers, unashamedly enjoying the popularity and authority of an office he had never expected to hold. When the crisis had enveloped the Republican party in the summer of ’88, the party caucus had looked around wildly for someone to step in and take over the candidacy. Their collective eye had fallen on this congressman from Connecticut, scion of a wealthy and patrician New England family who had chosen to leave his family wealth in a series of trust funds and become a professor at Cornell until turning to Connecticut politics in his late thirties.

On the liberal wing of his party, John Cormack had been a virtual unknown to the country at large. Intimates knew him as decisive, honest, and humane, and had assured the caucus he was clean as the driven snow. He was not known as a television personality-now an indispensable attribute of a candidate-but they picked him nevertheless. To the media he was a bore. And then in four months of barnstorming campaigning, the unknown had turned things around. Forsaking tradition, he looked into the camera’s eye and gave straight answers to every question, supposedly a recipe for disaster. He offended some, but mainly on the right, and they had nowhere else to go with their votes anyway. And he had pleased many more. A Protestant with an Ulster name, he had insisted as a condition of his coming that he pick his own Vice President, and had chosen Michael Odell, a confirmed Irish American and a Catholic from Texas.

They were quite unalike. Odell was much farther to the right than Cormack and had been governor of his state. Cormack just happened to like and trust the gum-chewing man from Waco. Somehow the ticket had worked; the voters went, by a narrow margin, for the man the press (wrongly) liked to compare with Woodrow Wilson, America ’s last professor-President, and the running mate who bluntly told Dan Rather:

“Ah don’t always agree with mah friend John Cormack but, hell, this is America and I’ll flatten any man who says he doesn’t have the right to speak his mind.”

And it worked. The combination of the arrow-straight New Englander, with his powerful and persuasive delivery, and the deceptively folksy Southwesterner took the vital black, Hispanic, and Irish votes and won. Since taking office Cormack had deliberately involved Odell in decision-making at the highest level. Now they sat opposite each other to discuss a treaty Cormack knew Odell disliked profoundly. Flanking the President were four other intimates: Jim Donaldson, Secretary of State; Bill Walters, the Attorney General; Hubert Reed of the Treasury; and Morton Stannard of Defense.

On either side of Odell were Brad Johnson, a brilliant black man from Missouri who had lectured in defense studies at Cornell and was now National Security Adviser, and Lee Alexander, Director of the CIA, who had replaced Judge William Webster a few months into Cormack’s incumbency. Alexander was there because, if the Soviets intended to breach the treaty terms, America would need rapid knowledge through her satellites and intelligence community with their in-place assets on the ground.

As the eight men read the final terms, none was in any doubt that this was one of the most controversial agreements the United States would ever sign. Already there was vigorous opposition on the right and from the defense-oriented industries. Back in 1988, under Reagan, the Pentagon had agreed to cut $33 billion in planned expenditures to produce a defense budget total of $299 billion. For the fiscal years 1990 through 1994, the services were told to cut planned expenditures by $37.1 billion, $41.3 billion, $45.3 billion, and $50.7 billion respectively. But that would only have limited spending growth. The Nantucket Treaty foresaw big decreases in defense expenditures, and if the growth cuts had caused problems, Nantucket was going to cause a furor.

The difference was, as Cormack stressed repeatedly, that the previous growth cuts had not been planned against actual cuts by the U.S.S.R. In Nantucket, Moscow had agreed to slash its own forces to an unheard-of degree. Moreover, Cormack knew the superpowers had little choice. Ever since he came to power he and Secretary of the Treasury Reed had wrestled with America ’s spiraling budget and trade deficits. They were heading out of control, threatening to shatter the prosperity not just of the United States but of the entire West. He had latched onto his own experts’ analyses that the U.S.S.R. was in the same position for different reasons, and put it to Mikhail Gorbachev straight: I need to cut back and you need to redivert. The Russian had taken care of the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries; Cormack had won over NATO-first the Germans, then the Italians, the smaller members, and finally the British. These, broadly, were the terms:

In land forces, the U.S.S.R. agreed to cut her standing army in East Germany-the potential invasion force westward across the central German plain-by half of her twenty-one combat divisions in all categories. They would be not disbanded but withdrawn back beyond the Polish-Soviet frontier and not brought west again. Over and above this, the U.S.S.R. would reduce the manpower of the entire Soviet Army by 40 percent.

“Comments?” asked the President. Stannard of Defense, who not unnaturally had the gravest reservations about the treaty-the press had already speculated about his resignation-looked up.

“For the Soviets this is the meat of the treaty, because their army is their senior service,” he said, quoting directly from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but not admitting it. “For the man in the street it looks fantastic; the West Germans already think so. But it’s not as good as it looks.

“For one thing, the U.S.S.R. cannot maintain one hundred and seventy-seven line divisions as at present without extensive use of her southern ethnic groups-I mean the Moslems-and we know they’d dearly love to disband the lot. For another, what really frightens our planners is not a rambling Soviet Army; it’s an army half that size but professionalized. A small professional army is much more use than a large oafish one, which is what they’ve got.”

“But if they’re back inside the U.S.S.R.,” countered Johnson, “they can’t invade West Germany. Lee, if they shifted them back via Poland into East Germany, would we fail to spot it?”

“Nope,” said the CIA chief with finality. “Apart from satellites, which can be fooled by covered trucks and trains, I believe we and the British have too many assets in Poland not to spot it. Hell, the East Germans don’t want to become a war zone either. They’d probably tell us themselves.”

“Okay, what do we give up?” asked Odell.

“Some troops, not a lot,” Johnson replied. “The Soviets withdraw ten divisions at fifteen thousand men each. We have three hundred and twenty-six thousand personnel in Western Europe. We cut to below three hundred thousand for the first time since 1945. At twenty-five thousand of us against a hundred and fifty thousand of them, it’s still good: six to one, and we were looking at four to one.”

“Yes,” objected Stannard, “but we also have to agree not to activate our two new heavy divisions, one armored and one mechanized infantry.”

“Cost savings, Hubert?” asked the President mildly. He tended to let others talk, listen carefully, make a few succinct and usually penetrating comments, and then decide. The Treasury Secretary supported Nantucket. It would make balancing his books a lot easier.

“Three-point-five billion the armored division, three-point-four billion the infantry,” he said. “But these are just start-up costs. After that, we save three hundred million dollars a year in running costs by not having them. And now that Despot is canceled, another seventeen billion dollars for the projected three hundred units of Despot.”

“But Despot is the best tank-busting system in the world,” protested Stannard. “Hell, we need it.”

“To kill tanks that have been withdrawn east of Brest-Litovsk?” asked Johnson. “If they halve their tanks in East Germany, we can cope with what we’ve got, the A-ten aircraft and the ground-based tank-buster units. Plus, we can build more static defenses with part of the savings. That’s allowed under the treaty.”

“The Europeans like it,” said Donaldson of State mildly. “They don’t have to reduce manpower, but they do see ten to eleven Soviet divisions disappearing in front of their eyes. It seems to me we win on the ground.”

“Let’s consider the sea battle,” suggested Cormack.

The Soviet Union had agreed to destroy, under supervision, half its submarine fleet; all its nuclear-powered subs in classes Hotel, Echo, and November, and all the diesel-electric Juliets, Foxtrots, Whiskeys, Romeos, and Zulus. But as Stannard was quick to point out, its old nuclear subs were already archaic and unsafe, constantly leaking neutrons and gamma rays, and the others scheduled to go were of old designs. After that the Russians could concentrate their resources and best men in the Sierra, Mike, and Akula classes, much better technically and therefore more dangerous.

Still, he conceded, 158 submarines were a lot of metal, and America ’s Anti-Submarine Warfare targets would be drastically reduced, simplifying the job of getting the convoys to Europe if the balloon ever did go up.

Finally, Moscow had agreed to scrap the first of its four Kiev-class aircraft carriers, and build no more-a minor concession, as they were already proving too expensive to support.

The United States was allowed to keep the newly commissioned carriers Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, but would scrap the Midway and the Coral Sea (destined to go anyway, but delayed to be included in the treaty) plus the next-oldest, the Forrestal and the Saratoga, plus their air wings. These air wings, once deactivated, would take three to four years to bring back to combat readiness.

“The Russians will say they’ve eliminated eighteen percent of our ability to strike at the Motherland,” groused Stannard, “and all they’ve given up are a hundred and fifty-eight subs that were bitches to maintain anyway.”

But the Cabinet, seeing savings of a minimum $20 billion a year, half in personnel and half in hardware, approved the navy side of the treaty, Odell and Stannard opposing. The key came in the air. Cormack knew that for Gorbachev it was the clincher. On balance, America won out on land and water, since she did not intend to be the aggressor; she just wanted to make sure the U.S.S.R. could not be. But unlike Stannard and Odell, Cormack and Donaldson knew that many Soviet citizens genuinely believed the West would one day hurl itself at the Rodina, and that included their leaders.

Under Nantucket, the West would discontinue the American TFX fighter, or F-18, and the European multi-role combat fighter for Italy, West Germany, Spain, and Britain, a joint project; Moscow would stop further work on the MiG-37. She would also scrap the Blackjack, the Tupolev version of the American B-1 bomber, and 50 percent of her air-tanker assets, massively reducing the strategic air threat to the West.

“How do we know they won’t build the Backfire somewhere else?” asked Odell.

“We’ll have official inspectors stationed in the Tupolev factory,” Cormack pointed out. “They can hardly start up a new Tupolev factory somewhere else. Right, Lee?”

“Right, Mr. President,” said the Director of Central Intelligence. He paused. “Also, we have assets in the key staff at Tupolev.”

“Ah,” said Donaldson, impressed. “As a diplomat, I don’t want to know.” There were several grins. Donaldson was known to be very straitlaced.

The stinger for America in the air section of the Nantucket Treaty was that she had to abandon the B-2 Stealth bomber, an airplane of revolutionary potential, since it was constructed to pass unnoticed through any radar detection screen and deliver its nuclear bombs as and where it wished. It frightened the Russians very badly. For Mikhail Gorbachev it was the one concession from the States that would get Nantucket through ratification. It would also obviate the need to spend a minimum 300 billion rubles rebuilding from the ground up the Air Defense of the Homeland system, the vaunted Voiska PVO that was supposed to detect any impending attack on the Motherland. That was the money he wanted to divert to new factories, technology, and oil.

For America, Stealth was a $40 billion project, so cancellation would mean a big saving, but at the cost of fifty thousand defense-industry jobs.

“Maybe we should just go on as we are and bankrupt the bastards,” suggested Odell.

“Michael,” said Cormack gently, “then they’d have to go to war.”

After twelve hours the Cabinet approved Nantucket and the wearisome business started of trying to convince the Senate, industry, finance, the media, and the people that it was right. A hundred billion dollars had been cut from the Defense budget.

By the middle of May the five men who had dined at the Remington Hotel the previous January had constituted themselves the Alamo Group at Miller’s suggestion, in memory of those who in 1836 had fought for the independence of Texas at the Alamo against the Mexican forces of General Santa Anna. The project to topple the Kingdom of Sa’ud they had named Plan Bowie, after Colonel Jim Bowie, who had died at the Alamo. The destabilization of President Cormack by a paid-for whispering campaign through lobbies, the media, the people, and the Congress, bore the name Plan Crockett, after Davy Crockett, the pioneer and Indian fighter who also died there. Now they met to consider the report of Irving Moss to wound John Cormack to the point where he would be susceptible to calls for him to step down and depart. Plan Travis, for the man who had commanded at the Alamo.

“There are parts of this that make me squirm,” said Moir, tapping his copy.

“Me too,” said Salkind. “The last four pages. Do we have to go that far?”

“Gentlemen, friends,” rumbled Miller. “I fully appreciate your concern, your aversion even. I ask you only to consider the stakes. Not only we but all America stands in mortal peril. You have seen the terms proposed by the Judas in the White House to strip our land of its defenses and to propitiate the Antichrist in Moscow. That man must go before he destroys this our beloved country and brings us all to ruin. You especially, who now face bankruptcy. And I am assured by Mr. Moss here that, regarding the last few pages, it will never come to that. Cormack will go before that is necessary.”

Irving Moss sat in a white suit at the end of the table, silent. There were parts of his plan that he had not put in the report, things he could mention only in privacy to Miller. He breathed through his mouth to avoid the low whistling caused by his damaged nose.

Miller suddenly startled them all. “Friends, let us seek the guidance of Him who understands all things. Let us pray together.”

Ben Salkind shot a rapid glance at Peter Cobb, who raised his eyebrows. Melville Scanlon’s face was expressionless. Cyrus Miller placed both hands flat on the table, closed his eyes, and raised his face to the ceiling. He was not a man for bowing his head, even when addressing the Almighty. They were, after all, close confidants.

“Lord,” intoned the oil tycoon, “hear us, we pray You. Hear us true and loyal sons of this glorious land, which is of Your creation and which You have vouchsafed to our safekeeping. Guide our hands. Uphold our hearts. Teach us to have the courage to go through with the task that lies before us and which, we are sure, has Your blessing. Help us to save this, Your chosen country, and these, Your chosen people.”

He went on in this vein for several minutes, then was silent for several more. When he lowered his face and surveyed the five men with him, his eyes burned with the conviction of those who truly have no doubt.

“Gentlemen, He has spoken. He is with us in our endeavors. We must go forward, not back, for our country and our God.”

The other five had little choice but to nod their assent. An hour later Irving Moss talked privately with Miller in his study. There were, he made plain, two components that were vital but which he, Moss, could not arrange. One was a piece of high-complexity Soviet technology; the other was a secret source within the innermost councils of the White House. He explained why. Miller nodded thoughtfully.

“I will see to both,” he said. “You have your budget and the down payment on your fee. Proceed with the plan without delay.”

Colonel Easterhouse was received by Miller in the first week of June. He had been busy in Saudi Arabia but the summons was unequivocal, so he flew from Jiddah to New York via London and connected straight to Houston. A car met him on schedule, drove him to the private William P. Hobby Airport southeast of the city, and the Learjet brought him to the ranch, which he had not seen before. His progress report was optimistic and well received.

He was able to say that his go-between in the Religious Police had been enthusiastic when approached with the notion of a change of government in Riyadh, and had made contact with the fugitive Imam of the Shi’ah Fundamentalists when the man’s secret hiding place had been revealed to him by Easterhouse. The fact that the Imam had not been betrayed proved that the Religious Police zealot was trustworthy.

The Imam had heard out the proposal-made to him on a no-name basis, since he would never have accepted that a Christian like Easterhouse should become an instrument of Allah’s will-and was reported to be equally enthusiastic.

“The point is, Mr. Miller, the Hezb’Allah fanatics have so far not attempted to seize the obvious plum of Saudi Arabia, preferring to try to defeat and annex Iraq first, in which they have failed. The reason for their patience is that they feared, rightly, that seeking to topple the House of Sa’ud would provoke a fierce reaction from the hitherto vacillating U.S.A. They have always believed Saudi Arabia would fall to them at the right moment. The Imam appears to accept that next spring-the Diamond Jubilee jamboree is now definitely slated for April-will be Allah’s choice of the right moment.”

During the jamboree, huge delegations from all the thirty-seven major tribes of the country would converge on Riyadh to pay homage to the royal house. Among these would be the tribes from the Hasa region, the oil-field workers who were mainly of the Shi’ah sect. Hidden in their midst would be the two hundred chosen assassins of the Imam, unarmed until their submachine carbines and ammunition, covertly imported in one of Scanlon’s tankers, had been distributed among them.

Easterhouse was finally able to report that a senior Egyptian officer-the Egyptian Military Adviser Group played a crucial role at all technical levels of the Saudi Army-had agreed that if his country, with its teeming millions and shortage of money, was given access to Saudi oil after the coup, he would ensure the reissue of defective ammunition to the Royal Guard, who would then be helpless to defend their masters. Miller nodded thoughtfully.

“You have done well, Colonel,” he said, then changed the subject. “Tell me, what would Soviet reaction be to this American takeover of Saudi Arabia?”

“Extreme perturbation, I would imagine,” said the colonel.

“Enough to put an end to the Nantucket Treaty, of which we now know the full terms?” asked Miller.

“I would have thought so,” said Easterhouse.

“Which group inside the Soviet Union would have most reason to dislike the treaty and all its terms, and wish to see it destroyed?”

“The General Staff,” said the colonel without hesitation. “Their position in the U.S.S.R. is like that of our Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense industry rolled into one. The treaty will cut their power, their prestige, their budget, and their numbers by forty percent. I can’t see them welcoming that.”

“Strange allies,” mused Miller. “Is there any way of getting in discreet contact?”

“I… have certain acquaintances,” said Easterhouse carefully.

“I want you to use them,” said Miller. “Just say there are powerful interests in the U.S. A. who view the Nantucket Treaty with as little favor as they, and believe it might be aborted from the American end, and would like to confer.”

The kingdom of Jordan is not particularly pro-Soviet, but King Hussein has long had to tread a delicate path to stay on his throne in Amman, and has occasionally bought Soviet weaponry, though his Hashemite Arab Legion is mainly Western-armed. Still, there exists a thirty-man Soviet Military Advisory Team in Amman, headed by the defense attaché at the Russian embassy. Easterhouse, once attending the desert testing of some Soviet hardware east of Aqaba on behalf of his Saudi patrons, had met the man. Passing through Amman on his way back, Easterhouse stopped over.

The defense attaché, Colonel Kutuzov, whom Easterhouse was convinced was from the GRU, was still in place and they had a private dinner. The American was stunned by the speed of the reaction. Two weeks later he was contacted in Riyadh to be told that certain gentlemen would be happy to meet his “friends” in circumstances of great discretion. A fat package of travel instructions was given to him, which he couriered unopened to Houston.

Of all the Communist countries, Yugoslavia is the most relaxed in the matter of tourism, so much so that entry visas may be acquired with little formality right on arrival at Belgrade airport. In mid-July five men flew into Belgrade on the same day but from different directions and on different flights. They came by scheduled airlines out of Amsterdam, Rome, Vienna, London, and Frankfurt. As all were American passport holders, none had needed visas for any of those cities either. All applied for and received visas at Belgrade for a week’s harmless tourism-one in the mid-morning, two in the lunch hour and two in the afternoon. All told the interviewing visa officers they had come to hunt boar and stag from the famous Karadjordjevo hunting lodge, a converted fortress on the Danube much favored by wealthy Westerners. Each of the five claimed, as he was issued his visa, that en route to the hunting lodge he would be spending one night at the super-luxury Hotel Petrovaradin at Novi Sad, eighty kilometers northwest of Belgrade. And each took a taxi to that hotel.

The visa officers’ shift changed in the lunch hour, so only one came under the eye of Officer Pavlic, who happened to be a covert asset in the pay of the Soviet KGB. Two hours after Pavlic checked off duty, a routine report from him arrived on the desk of the Soviet rezident in his office at the embassy in central Belgrade.

Pavel Kerkorian was not at his best; he had had a late night-not entirely in the course of duty but his wife was fat and constantly complaining, while he found some of these flaxen Bosnian girls irresistible-and a heavy lunch, definitely in the course of duty, with a hard-drinking member of the Yugoslav Central Committee whom he hoped to recruit. He almost put Pavlic’s report on one side. Americans were pouring into Yugoslavia nowadays-to check them all out would be impossible. But there was something about the name. Not the surname-that was common enough-but where had he seen the first name Cyrus before?

He found it again an hour later right in his office; a back number of Forbes magazine had carried an article on Cyrus V. Miller. By such flukes are destinies sometimes decided. It did not make sense, and the wiry Armenian KGB major liked things to make sense. Why would a man of nearly eighty, known to be pathologically anti-Communist, come hunting boar in Yugoslavia by scheduled airlines when he was rich enough to hunt anything he wanted in North America and travel by private jet? He summoned two of his staff, youngsters fresh in from Moscow, and hoped they wouldn’t make a mess of it. (As he had remarked to his CIA opposite number at a cocktail party recently, you just can’t get good help nowadays. The CIA man had agreed completely.)

Kerkorian’s young agents spoke Serbo-Croatian, but he still advised them to rely on their driver, a Yugoslav who knew his way around. They checked back that evening from a phone booth in the Petrovaradin Hotel, which made the major spit because the Yugoslavs certainly had it tapped. He told them to go somewhere else.

He was just about to go home when they checked in again, this time from a humble inn a few miles from Novi Sad. There was not one American, but five, they said. They might have met at the hotel, but seemed to know each other. Money had changed hands at the reception desk and they had copies of the first three pages of each American’s passport. The five were due to be picked up in the morning in a minibus and taken to some hunting lodge, said the gumshoes, and what should we do now?

“Stay there,” said Kerkorian. “Yes, all night. I want to know where they go and whom they see.”

Serve them right, he thought as he went home. These youngsters have it too easy nowadays. It was probably nothing, but it would give the sprogs a bit of experience.

At noon the next day they were back, tired, unshaven, but triumphant. What they had to say left Kerkorian stunned. A mini-van had duly arrived and taken the five Americans on board. The guide was in plain clothes but looked decidedly military-and Russian. Instead of heading for the hunting lodge, the bus had taken the five Americans back toward Belgrade, then ducked straight into Batajnica Air Base. They had not shown their passports at the main gate-the guide had produced five passes from his own inside pocket and got them through the barrier.

Kerkorian knew Batajnica; it was a big Yugoslav air base twenty kilometers northwest of Belgrade, definitely not on the sightseeing schedule of American tourists. Among other things it hosted a constant stream of Soviet military transports bringing in resupplies for the enormous Soviet Military Adviser Group in Yugoslavia. That meant there was a team of Russian engineers inside the base, and one of them worked for him. The man was in cargo control. Ten hours later Kerkorian sent a “blitz” report to Yazenevo, headquarters of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, the external espionage arm. It went directly to the desk of the Deputy Head of the FCD, General Vadim Kirpichenko, who made a number of inquiries internal to the U.S.S.R. and sent an expanded report right up to his chairman, General Kryuchkov.

What Kerkorian had reported was that the five Americans had all been escorted straight from the minibus into an Antonov 42 jet transport which had just arrived with cargo from Odessa and at once headed back there. A later report from the Belgrade rezident announced that the Americans had returned the same way twenty-four hours later, spent a second night at the Petrovaradin Hotel, and then left Yugoslavia altogether, without hunting a single boar. Kerkorian was commended for his vigilance.

The heat hung over the Costa del Sol like a blanket. Down on the beaches the million tourists were turning themselves over and over like steaks on a griddle, oiling and basting courageously as they tried to acquire a deep mahogany tan in their two precious weeks and too often simply achieving lobster-red. The sky was such a pale blue it was almost white, and even the usual breeze off the sea had sagged to a zephyr.

To the west the great molar of the Rock of Gibraltar jutted into the heat haze, shimmering at its range of fifteen miles; the pale slopes of the concrete rain-catchment system built by the Royal Engineers to feed the underground cisterns stuck out like a leprous scar on the flank of the rock.

In the hills behind Casares beach the air was a mite cooler but not much; relief really came only at dawn and just before sunset, so the vineyard workers of Alcántara del Rio were rising at four in the morning to put in six hours before the sun drove them into the shade. After lunch they would snooze through the traditional Spanish siesta behind their thick, cool, lime-washed walls until five, then put in more labor till the light faded around eight.

Under the sun the grapes ripened and became fat. The harvest would not come yet, but it would be good this year. In his bar Antonio brought the carafe of wine to the foreigner as usual and beamed.

“¿Sera bien, la cosecha?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the tall man with a smile. “This year the harvest will be very good. We shall all be able to pay our bar bills.”

Antonio roared with laughter. Everyone knew the foreigner owned his own land outright and always paid cash on the spot.

Two weeks later Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev was in no mood to joke. Though often a genial man, with a reputation for a good sense of humor and a light touch with subordinates, he could also show a hair-trigger temper, as when preached at by Westerners over civil rights issues or when he felt badly let down by a subordinate. He sat at his desk on the seventh and top floor of the Central Committee Building in Novaya Ploshchad and stared angrily at the reports spread all over the table.

It’s a long narrow room, sixty feet by twenty, with the General Secretary’s desk at the end opposite the door. He sits with his back to the wall, all the windows onto the square being ranged to his left behind their net curtains and buff velour drapes. Running down the center of the room is the habitual conference table, of which the desk formed the head of the letter T.

Unlike many of his predecessors, he had preferred a light and airy decor; the table is of pale beech, like his desk, and surrounded by upright but comfortable chairs, eight on each side. It was on this table he had spread the reports collected by his friend and colleague, the Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, whose plea had brought him unwillingly back from his seaside holiday at Yalta in the Crimea. He would, he thought savagely, have preferred to be splashing in the sea with his granddaughter Aksaina than sitting in Moscow reading this sort of trash.

It had been more than six years since that freezing March day in 1985 when Chernenko had finally dropped off his perch and he had been raised with almost bewildering speed-even though he had schemed and prepared for it-into the top slot. Six years he had sought to take the country he loved by the scruff of the neck and hurl it into the last decade of the twentieth century in a state fit to face, match, and triumph on equal terms over the capitalist West.

Like all devoted Russians he was half admiring and wholly resentful of the West; of her prosperity, her financial power, her almost contemptuous self-assurance. Unlike most Russians he had for years not been prepared to accept that things could never change in his homeland, that corruption, laziness, bureaucracy, and lethargy were part of the system, always had been and always would be. Even as a young man he had known he had the energy and the dynamism to change things, given the chance. That had been his mainspring, his driving force, through all those years of study and party work in Stavropol, the conviction that one day he would get his chance.

For six years he had had the chance, and realized even he had underestimated the opposition and the inertia. The first years had been touch-and-go; he had walked a very fine tightrope indeed, almost come to grief a dozen times.

The cleansing of the Party had come first, cutting out the die-hards and the deadwood-well, almost all of them. Now he knew he ruled the Politburo and the Central Committee; knew his appointees controlled the scattered Party secretaryships throughout the republics of the Union, shared his conviction that the U.S.S.R. could really compete with the West only if she was economically strong. That was why most of his reforms dealt with economic and not moral matters.

As a dedicated Communist he already believed his country had moral superiority-there was for him no need to prove it. But he was not fool enough to deceive himself over the economic strengths of the two camps. Now with the oil crisis, of which he was perfectly well aware, he needed massive resources to pump into Siberia and the Arctic, and that meant cutting back somewhere else. Which led to Nantucket and his unavoidable head-to-head with his own military establishment.

The three pillars of power were the Party, the Army, and the KGB, and he knew no one could take on two at the same time. It was bad enough to be at loggerheads with his generals; to be back-stabbed by the KGB was intolerable. The reports on his table, culled by the Foreign Minister from the Western media and translated, he did not need, least of all when American public opinion might still cause the Senate to reject the Nantucket Treaty and insist on the building and deployment of the (for Russia) disastrous Stealth bomber.

Personally he had no particular sympathy with Jews who wanted to quit the Motherland that had given them everything. There was nothing un-Russian in Mikhail Gorbachev so far as turds and dissidents were concerned. But what angered him was that what had been done was deliberate, no accident, and he knew who was behind it. He still resented the vicious video tape attacking his wife’s London spending spree years before and circulated on the Moscow circuit. He knew who had been behind that too. The same people. The predecessor of the one who had been summoned and whom he now awaited.

There was a knock on the door to the right of the bookcase at the far end of the room. His private secretary popped his head in and simply nodded. Gorbachev raised a hand to indicate “wait a minute.”

He returned to his desk and sat down behind the spare, clear top with its three telephones and cream onyx pen set. Then he nodded. The secretary swung the door wide open.

“The Comrade Chairman, Comrade General Secretary,” the young man announced, then withdrew.

He was in full uniform-he would be, of course-and Gorbachev let him walk the full length of the room without salutation. Then he rose and gestured at the spread-out papers.

General Vladimir Kryuchkov, Chairman of the KGB, had been a close friend, protégé, and like-thinker of his own predecessor, the die-hard ultraconservative Viktor Chebrikov. The General Secretary had secured the ouster of Chebrikov in the great purge he had conducted in the fall of 1988, thus ridding himself of his last powerful opponent on the Politburo. But he had had no choice but to appoint the First Deputy Chairman, Kryuchkov, as successor. One ouster was enough; two would have been a massacre. There are limits, even in Moscow.

Kryuchkov glanced at the papers and raised an eyebrow. Bastard, thought Gorbachev.

“There was no need to beat the shit out of them on camera,” said Gorbachev, as usual coming to the nub without preamble. “Six Western TV camera units, eight radio reporters, and twenty newspaper and magazine hacks, half of them American. We got less coverage for the Olympics in ’80.”

Kryuchkov raised an eyebrow. “The Jews were conducting an illegal demonstration, my dear Mikhail Sergeevich. Personally, I was on vacation at the time. But my officers in the Second Chief Directorate acted properly, I believe. These people refused to disperse when commanded and my men used the usual methods.”

“It was on the street. That’s a Militia matter.”

“These people are subversives. They were spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. Look at the placards. That’s a KGB matter.”

“And the full turnout of foreign press?”

The KGB chief shrugged. “These weasels get everywhere.”

Yes, if they are rung up and tipped off, thought Gorbachev. He wondered whether this might be the issue over which he could secure the ouster of Kryuchkov, and dismissed it. It would take the full Politburo to fire the Chairman of the KGB, and never for beating up a bunch of Jews. Still, he was angry and prepared to speak his mind. He did so for five minutes. Kryuchkov’s mouth tightened in silence. He did not appreciate being ticked off by the younger but senior man. Gorbachev had come around the desk; the two men were of the same height, short and stocky. Gorbachev’s eye contact was, as usual, unflinching. That was when Kryuchkov made a mistake.

He had in his pocket a report from the KGB’s man in Belgrade, amplified with some stunning information gleaned by Kirpichenko at the First Chief Directorate. It was certainly important enough to bring to the General Secretary himself. Screw it, thought the bitter KGB chief; he can wait. And so the Belgrade report was suppressed.

Irving Moss had established himself in London, but before leaving Houston he had agreed on a personal code with Cyrus Miller. He knew that the monitors of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade constantly scanned the ether, intercepting billions of words in foreign telephone calls, and that banks of computers sifted them for nuggets of interest. Not to mention the British GCHQ people, the Russians, and just about anyone else nowadays who could rustle up a listening post. But the volume of commercial traffic is so vast that unless something sticks out as suspicious, it will probably pass. Moss’s code was based on lists of salad produce prices, passing between sunny Texas and gloomy London. He took down the list of prices off the telephone, cut out the words, retained the numbers, and according to the date of the calendar, deciphered them from a one-time pad of which only he and Cyrus Miller had copies.

That month he learned three things: that the piece of Soviet technology he needed was in the last stages of preparation and would be delivered within a fortnight; that the source he had asked for in the White House was in place, bought and paid for; and that he should now go ahead with Plan Travis on schedule. He burned the sheets and grinned. His fee was based on planning, activation, and success. Now he could claim the second installment.

There are eight weeks in the autumn term at Oxford University, and since scholars seek to abide by the precepts of logic, they are called First Week, Second Week, Third Week, and so on. A number of activities take place after the end of term-mainly athletic, theatrical, and debating events-in Ninth Week. And quite a few students appear before the start of term, either to prepare their studies, get settled in, or start training, in the period called Nought Week.

On October 2, the first day of Nought Week, there was a scattering of early birds in Vincent’s Club, a bar and haunt of undergraduate athletes, among them the tall thin student called Simon, preparing for his third and last term at Oxford under the year-abroad program. He was hailed by a cheerful voice from behind.

“Hallo, young Simon. Back early?”

It was Air Commodore John De’Ath, Bursar of Jesus College and senior treasurer of the Athletics Club, which included the cross-country team.

Simon grinned. “Yes, sir.”

“Going to get the fat of the summer vacation off, are we?” The retired Air Force officer smiled. He tapped the student’s nonexistent stomach. “Good man. You’re our main hope to knock seven bells out of Cambridge in December in London.”

Everyone knew that Oxford ’s great sporting rival was Cambridge University, the needle match in any sporting contest.

“I’m looking to start a series of morning runs and get back in shape, sir,” said Simon.

He did indeed begin a series of punishing early-morning runs, starting at five miles and pushing up to twelve as the week progressed. On the morning of Wednesday the 9thhe set off as usual by bicycle from his house off the Woodstock Road in the southern part of Summertown in north Oxford, and pedaled for the town center. He skirted the Martyrs’ Memorial and Saint Mary Magdalen Church, turned left into Broad Street, past the doors of his own college, Balliol, and on down Holywell and Longwall to join the High Street. A final left turn brought him to the railings outside Magdalen College.

Here he dismounted, chained his bike to the railing for safety, and began to run. Over Magdalen Bridge across the Cherwell and down St. Clement’s at the Plain. Now he was heading due east. At six-thirty in the morning the sun would soon rise ahead of him and he had a straight four-mile run to get clear of the last suburbs of Oxford.

He pounded through New Headington to cross the dual-carriageway Ring Road on the steel bridge leading to Shotover Hill. There were no other runners to join him. He was almost alone. At the end of Old Road he hit the incline of the hill and felt the pain of the long-distance runner. His sinewy legs drove him on up the hill and out into Shotover Plain. Here the paved road ran out and he was on the track, deeply potholed and with water from the overnight rain lying in the ruts. He swerved to the grass verge, delighting in the springy comfort of the grass underfoot, through the pain barrier, exulting in the freedom of the run.

Behind him the unmarked sedan emerged from the trees of the hill, ran out of pavement, and began to jolt through the potholes. The men inside knew the route and were sick of it. Five hundred yards of track, lined with gray boulders, to the reservoir, then back to blacktop road for the downhill glide to Wheatley village via the hamlet of Littleworth.

A hundred yards short of the reservoir the track narrowed and a giant ash tree overhung the lane. It was here the van was parked, drawn well onto the verge. It was a well-used green Ford Transit bearing on its side the logo BARLOW’S ORCHARD PRODUCE. Nothing unusual about it. In early October, Barlow vans were all over the county delivering the sweet apples of Oxfordshire to the greengrocers. Anyone looking at the back of the van-invisible to the men in the car, for the van was facing them-would have seen stacked apple crates. That same person would not have realized the crates were really two cunning paintings stuck to the inside of the twin windows.

The van had had a puncture, front offside tire. A man crouched beside it with a wrench, seeking to free the wheel which was raised on a jack. He bowed over his work. The youth called Simon was on the verge across the rutted track from the van and he kept running.

As he passed the front end of the van two things happened with bewildering speed. The rear doors flew open and two men, identical in black track suits and ski masks, leaped out, hurled themselves on the startled runner, and bore him to the ground. The man with the wrench turned and straightened up. Beneath his slouch hat he, too, was masked, and the wrench was not a wrench but a Czech Skorpion submachine gun. Without a pause he opened fire and raked the windshield of the sedan sixty feet away.

The man behind the wheel died instantly, hit in the face. The car swerved and stalled as he died. The man in the backseat reacted like a cat, opening his door, bailing out, rolling twice, and coming up in the “fire” position. He got off two shots with his short-nosed Smith & Wesson 9mm. The first was wide by a foot, the second ten feet short, for as he fired it the continuing burst from the Skorpion hit him in the chest. He never stood a chance.

The man in the passenger seat got free of the car a second after the man in the back. The passenger door was wide open and he was trying to fire through the open window at the machine gunner when three slugs punched straight through the fabric and hit him in the stomach, bowling him backwards. In five more seconds the gunman was back beside the driver of the van; the other two had hurled the student into the rear of the Transit and slammed the doors, the van had rolled off its jack, done a fast-reverse into the entrance of the reservoir, hauled a three-point turn, and was headed back down the lane toward Wheatley.

The Secret Service agent was dying, but he had a lot of courage. Inch by agonizing inch he pulled himself back to the open car door, scrabbled for the microphone beneath the dash, and croaked out his last message. He did not bother with call signs or codes or radio procedure; he was too far gone. By the time help came five minutes later, he was dead. What he said was: “Help… we need help here. Someone has just kidnapped Simon Cormack.”