Without Remorse

CHAPTER 24

Hellos

'People, that went very well,' Captain Albie announced, finishing his critique of the exercise. There had been various minor deficiencies on the approach march, but nothing serious, and even his sharp eye had failed to notice anything of consequence on the simulated assault phase. Marksmanship especially had been almost inhumanly accurate, and his men had sufficient confidence in one another that they were now running within mere feet of fire streams in order to get to their assigned places. The Cobra crews were in the back of the room, going over their own performance. The pilots and gunners were treated with great respect by the men they supported, as were the Navy flight crews of the rescue birds. The normal us-them antipathy found among disparate units was down to the level of friendly joshing, so closely had the men trained and dedicated themselves. That antipathy was about to disappear entirely.

'Gentlemen,' Albie concluded, 'you're about to learn what this little picnic outing is all about.'

'Ten- hut! ' Irvin called.

Vice Admiral Winslow Holland Maxwell walked up the center of the room, accompanied by Major General Martin Young. Both flag officers were in their best undress uniforms. Maxwell's whites positively glistened in the incandescent lights of the building, and Young's Marine khakis were starched so stiff that they might well have been made of plywood. A Marine lieutenant carried a briefing board that nearly dragged on the floor. This he set on an easel as Maxwell took his place behind the lectern. From his place on the corner of the stage, Master Gunnery Sergeant Irvin watched the young faces in the audience, reminding himself that he had to pretend surprise at the announcement.

'Take your seats, Marines,' Maxwell began pleasantly, waiting for them to do so. 'First of all, I want to tell you for myself how proud I am to be associated with you. We've watched your training closely. You came here without knowing why, and you've worked as hard as any people I have ever seen. Here's what it's all about.' The Lieutenant flipped the cover off the briefing board, exposing an aerial photograph.

'Gentlemen, this mission is called boxwood green. Your objective is to rescue twenty men, fellow Americans who are now in the hands of the enemy.'

John Kelly was standing next to Irvin, and he, too, was watching faces instead of the Admiral. Most were younger than his, but not by much. Their eyes were locked on the reconnaissance photographs - an exotic dancer would not have drawn the sort of focus that was aimed at the blowups from the Buffalo Hunter drone. The faces were initially devoid of emotion. They were like young, fit, handsome statues, scarcely breathing, sitting at attention while the Admiral spoke to them.

'This man here is Colonel Robin Zacharias, US Air Force,' Maxwell went on, using a yard-long wooden pointer. 'You can see what the Vietnamese did to him just for looking at the asset that snapped the picture.' The pointer traced over to the camp guard about to strike the American from behind. 'Just for looking up.'

Eyes narrowed at that, all of them, Kelly saw. It was a quiet, determined kind of anger, highly disciplined, but that was the deadliest kind of all, Kelly thought, suppressing a smile that only he would have understood. And so it was for the young Marines in the audience. It wasn't a time for smiles. Each of the people in the room knew about the dangers. Each had survived a minimum of thirteen months of combat operations. Each had seen friends die in the most terrible and noisy way that the blackest of nightmares could create. But there was more to life than fear. Perhaps it was a quest. A sense of duty that few could articulate but which all of them felt. A vision of the world that men shared without actually seeing. Every man in the room had seen death in all its dreadful majesty, knowing that all life came to an end. But all knew there was more to life than the avoidance of death. Life had to have a purpose, and one such purpose was the service of others. While no man in the room would willingly give his life away, every one of them would run the risk, trusting to God or luck or fate in the knowledge that each of the others would do the same. The men in these pictures were unknown to the Marines, but they were comrades - more than friends - to whom loyalty was owed. And so they would risk their lives for them.

'I don't have to tell you how dangerous the mission is,' the Admiral concluded. 'The fact of the matter is, you know those dangers better than I do, but these people are Americans, and they have the right to expect us to come for them.'

'Fuckin' A, sir! ' a voice called from the floor, surprising the rest of the Marines.

Maxwell almost lost it then. It's alltrue, he told himself. It realty does matter. Mistakes and all, we're still what we are.

'Thank you, Dutch,' Marty Young said, walking to center stage. 'Okay, Marines, now you know. You volunteered to be here. You have to volunteer again to deploy. Some of you have families, sweethearts. We won't make you go. Some of you might have second thoughts,' he went on, examining the faces, and seeing the insult he had caused them, not by accident. 'You have today to think it over. Dismissed.'

The Marines got to their feet, to the accompaniment of the grating sound of chairs scraping on the tile floor, and when all were at attention, their voices boomed as one:

'RECON!'

It was clear to those who saw the faces. They could no more shrink from the mission than they could deny their manhood. There were smiles now. Most of the Marines traded remarks with their friends, and it wasn't glory they saw before their eyes. It was purpose, and perhaps the look to be seen in the eyes of the men whose lives they would redeem. We're Americans and we're here to take you home.

'Well, Mr Clark, your admiral makes a pretty good speech. I wish we recorded it.'

'You're old enough to know better. Guns. It's going to be a dicey one.'

Irvin smiled in a surprisingly playful way. 'Yeah, I know. But if you think ifs a crock, why the hell are you going in alone?'

'Somebody asked me to.' Kelly shook his head and went off to join the Admiral with a request of his own.

She made it all the way down the steps, holding on to the banister, her head still hurting, but not so badly this morning, following the smell of the coffee to the sound of conversation.

Sandy's face broke into a smile. 'Well, good morning!'

'Hi,' Doris said, still pale and weak, but she smiled back as she walked through the doorway, still holding on. 'I'm real hungry.'

'I hope you like eggs.' Sandy helped her to a chair and got her a glass of orange juice.

'I'll eat the shells,' Doris replied, showing her first sign of humor.

'You can start with these, and don't worry about the shells,' Sarah Rosen told her, shoveling the beginnings of a normal breakfast from the frying pan onto a plate.

She had turned the corner. Doris's movements were painfully slow, and her coordination was that of a small child, but the improvement from only twenty-four hours before was miraculous. Blood drawn the day before showed still more favorable signs. The massive doses of antibiotics had obliterated her infections, and the lingering signs of barbiturates were almost completely gone - the remnants were from the palliative doses Sarah had prescribed and injected, which would not be repeated. But the most encouraging sign of all was how she ate. Awkwardness and all, she unfolded her napkin and sat it in the lap of the terrycloth robe. She didn't shovel the food in. Instead she consumed her first real breakfast in months in as dignified a manner as her condition and hunger allowed. Doris was turning back into a person.

But they still didn't know anything about her except her name - Doris Brown. Sandy got a cup of coffee for herself and sat down at the table.

'Where are you from?' she asked in as innocent a voice as she could manage.

'Pittsburgh.' A place as distant to her house guest as the back end of the moon.

'Family?'

'Just my father. Mom died in '65, breast cancer,' Doris said slowly, then unconsciously felt inside her robe. For the first time she could remember, her breasts didn't hurt from Billy's attention. Sandy saw the movement and guessed what it meant.

'Nobody else?' the nurse asked evenly.

'My brother... Vietnam.'

Tm sorry, Doris.'

'It's okay -'

'Sandy's my name, remember?'

'I'm Sarah,' Dr Rosen added, replacing the empty plate with a full one.

'Thank you, Sarah.' This smile was somewhat wan, but Doris Brown was reacting to the world around her now, an event far more important than the casual observer might have guessed. Small steps, Sarah told herself. They don't have to be big steps. They just have to head in the right direction. Doctor and nurse shared a look.

There was nothing like it. It was too hard to explain to someone who hadn't been there and done it. She and Sandy had reached into the grave and pulled this girl back from grasping earth. Three more months, Sarah had estimated, maybe not that long, and her body would have been so weakened that the most trivial outside influence would have ended her life in a matter of hours. But not now. Now this girl would live, and the two medics shared without words the feeling that God must have known when He had breathed life into Adam. They had defeated Death, redeeming the gift that only God could give. For this reason both had entered their shared profession, and moments like this one pushed back the rage and sorrow and grief for those patients whom they couldn't save.

'Don't eat too fast, Doris. When you don't eat for a while, your stomach actually shrinks down some,' Sarah told her, returning to form as a medical doctor. There was no sense in warning her about problems and pain sure to develop in her gastrointestinal tract. Nothing would stop it, and getting nourishment into her superseded other considerations at the moment.

'Okay. I'm getting a little full.'

'Then relax a little. Tell us about your father.'

'I ran away,' Doris replied at once. 'Right after David... after the telegram, and Daddy... he had some trouble, and he blamed me.'

Raymond Brown was a foreman in the Number Three Basic Oxygen Furnace Shed of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, and that was all he was, now. His house was on Dunleavy Street, halfway up one of the steep hills of his city, one of many detached frame dwellings built around the turn of the century, with wood clapboard siding that he had to paint every two or three years, depending on the severity of the winter winds that swept down the Monongahela Valley. He worked the night shift because his house was especially empty at night. Nevermore to hear the sounds of his wife, nevermore to take his son to Little League to play catch in the sloped sanctity of his tiny backyard, nevermore to worry about his daughter's dates on weekends.

He'd tried, done everything a man could do, after it was too late, which was so often the way of things. It had just been too much. His wife, discovering a lump, still a pretty young woman in her thirty-seventh year, his best and closest friend. He'd supported her as best he could after the surgery, but then came another lump, another surgery, medical treatment, and the downhill slide, always having to be strong for her until the end. It would have been a crushing burden for any man, and then followed by another. His only son, David, drafted, sent to Vietnam, and killed two weeks later in some nameless valley. The support of his fellow workers, the way they had come to Davey's funeral, hadn't stopped him from crawling inside a bottle, desperately trying to cling to what he had left, but too tightly. Doris had borne her own grief, something Raymond hadn't fully understood or appreciated, and when she'd come home late, her clothing not quite right, the cruel and hateful things he'd said. He could remember every word, the hollow sound as the front door had slammed.

Only a day later he'd come to his senses, driving with tears in his eyes to the police station, abasing himself before men whose understanding and sympathy he never quite recognized, desperate again to get his little girl back, to beg from her the forgiveness that he could never give himself. But Doris had vanished. The police had done what they could, and that wasn't much. And so for two years he'd lived inside a bottle, until two fellow workers had taken him aside and talked as friends do once they have gathered the courage to invade the privacy of another man's life. His minister was a regular guest in the lonely house now. He was drying out - Raymond Brown still drank, but no longer to excess, and he was working to cut it down to zero. Man that he was, he had to face his loneliness that way, had to deal with it as best he could. He knew that solitary dignity was of little value. It was an empty thing to cling to, but it was all he had. Prayer also helped, some, and in the repeated words he often found sleep, though not the dreams of the family which had once shared the house with him. He was tossing and turning in his bed, sweating from the heat, when the phone rang.

'Hello?'

'Hello, is this Raymond Brown?'

'Yeah, who's this?' he asked with closed eyes.

'My name is Sarah Rosen. I'm a doctor in Baltimore, I work at Johns Hopkins Hospital.'

'Yes?' The tone of her voice opened his eyes. He stared at the ceiling, the blank white place that so closely matched the emptiness of his life. And there was sudden fear. Why would a doctor from Baltimore call him? His mind was spinning off towards a named dread when the voice went on quickly.

'I have somebody here who wants to talk to you, Mr Brown.'

'Huh?' He next heard muffled noises that might have been static from a bad line, but was not.

'I can't.'

'You have nothing to lose, dear,' Sarah said, handing over the phone. 'He's your father. Trust him.'

Doris took it, holding it in both hands close to her face, and her voice was a whisper.

'Daddy?'

From hundreds of miles away, the whispered word came through as clearly as a church bell. He had to breathe three times before answering, and that came out as a sob.

'Dor?'

'Yes - Daddy, I'm sorry.'

'Are you okay, baby?'

'Yes, Daddy, I'm fine.' And incongruous as the statement was, it was not a lie.

'Where are you?'

'Wait a minute.' Then the voice changed. 'Mr Brown, this is Doctor Rosen again'

'She's there?'

'Yes, Mr Brown, she is. We've been treating her for a week. She's a sick girl, but she's going to be okay. Do you understand? She's going to be okay.'

He was grasping his chest. Brown's heart was a steel fist, and his breathing came in painful gasps that a doctor might have taken for something they were not.

'She's okay?' he asked anxiously.

'She's going to be fine,' Sarah assured him. 'There's no doubt of that, Mr Brown. Please believe me, okay?'

'Oh, sweet Jesus! Where, where are you?'

'Mr Brown, you can't see her just yet. We will bring her to you just as soon as she's fully recovered. I worried about calling you before we could get you together, but - but we just couldn't not call you. I hope you understand.'

Sarah had to wait two minutes before she heard anything she could understand, but the sounds that came over the line touched her heart. In reaching into one grave, she had extracted two lives.

'She's really okay?'

'She's had a bad time, Mr Brown, but I promise you she will recover fully. I'm a good doc, okay? I wouldn't say that unless it were true.'

'Please, please let me talk to her again. Please!'

Sarah handed the phone over, and soon four people were weeping. Nurse and physician were the luckiest, sharing a hug and savoring their victory over the cruelties of the world.

Bob Ritter pulled his car into a slot in West Executive Drive, the closed-off former street that lay between the White House and the Executive Office Building. He walked towards the latter, perhaps the ugliest building in Washington - no mean accomplishment - which had once held much of the executive branch of government, the State, War, and Navy departments. It also held the Indian Treaty Room, designed for the purpose of overawing primitive visitors with the splendor of Victorian gingerbread architecture and the majesty of the government which had constructed this giant tipi. The wide corridors rang with the sound of his footsteps on marble as he searched for the right room. He found it on the second floor, the room of Roger MacKenzie, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. 'Special,' perversely, made him a second-line official. The National Security Advisor had a corner office in the West Wing of the White House. Those who reported to him had offices elsewhere, and though distance from the Seat of Power defined influence, it didn't define arrogance of position. MacKenzie had to have a staff of his own in order to remind himself of his importance, real or illusory. Not really a bad man, and actually a fairly bright one, Ritter thought, MacKenzie was nonetheless jealous of his position, and in another age he would have been the clerk who advised the chancellor who advised the King. Except today the clerk had to have an executive secretary.

'Hi, Bob. How are things at Langley?' MacKenzie asked in front of his secretarial staff, just to be sure they would know that he was meeting with an up-and-coming CIA official, and was therefore still very important indeed to have such guests calling on him.

'The usual.' Ritter smiled back. Let's get on with it.

'Trouble with traffic?' he asked, letting Ritter know that he was almost, if not quite, late for the appointment.

'There's a little problem on the GW' Ritter gestured with his head towards MacKenzie's private office. His host nodded.

'Wally, we need someone to take notes.'

'Coming, sir.' His executive assistant rose from his desk in the secretarial area and brought a pad.

'Bob Ritter, this is Wally Hicks. I don't think you've met.'

'How do you do, sir?' Hicks extended his hand. Ritter took it, seeing yet one more eager White House aide. New England accent, bright-looking, polite, which was about all he was entitled to expect of such people. A minute later they were sitting in MacKenzie's office, the inner and outer doors closed in the cast-iron frames that gave the Executive Office Building the structural integrity of a warship. Hicks hurried himself about to get coffee for everyone, like a page at some medieval court, which was the way of things in the world's most powerful democracy.

'So what brings you in, Bob?' MacKenzie asked from behind his desk. Hicks flipped open his note pad and began his struggle to take down every word.

'Roger, a rather unique opportunity has presented itself over in Vietnam.' Eyes opened wider and ears perked up.

'What might that be?'

'We've identified a special prison camp southwest of Haiphong,' Ritter began, quickly outlining what they knew and what they suspected.

MacKenzie listened intently. Pompous though he might have been, the recently arrived investment banker was also a former aviator himself. He'd flown B-24s in the Second World War, including the dramatic but failed mission to Ploesti. A patriot with flaws, Ritter told himself. He would try to make use of the former while ignoring the latter.

'Let me see your imagery,' be said after a few minutes, using the proper buzzword instead of the more pedestrian 'pictures.'

Ritter took the photo folder from his briefcase and set it on the desk. MacKenzie opened it and took a magnifying glass from a drawer. 'We know who this guy is?'

'There's a better photo in the back,' Ritter answered helpfully.

MacKenzie compared the official family photo with the one from the camp, then with the enhanced blowup.

'Very close. Not definitive but close. Who is he?'

'Colonel Robin Zacharias. Air Force. He spent quite some time at Offutt Air Force Base, SAC War Plans. He knows everything, Roger.'

MacKenzie looked up and whistled, which, he thought, was what he was supposed to do in such circumstances. 'And this guy's no Vietnamese...'

'He's a colonel in the Soviet Air Force, name unknown, but it isn't hard to figure what he's there for. Here's the real punchline.' Ritter handed over a copy of. the wire-service report on Zacharias's death.

'Damn.'

'Yeah, all of a sudden it gets real clear, doesn't it?'

'This sort of thing could wreck the peace talks,' MacKenzie thought aloud.

Walter Hicks couldn't say anything. It wasn't his place to speak in such circumstances. He was like a necessary appliance - an animated tape machine - and the only real reason he was in the room at all was so his boss would have a record of the conversation. Wreck the peace talks he scribbled down, taking the time to underline it, and though nobody else noticed, his fingers went white around the pencil.

'Roger, the men we believe to be in this camp know an awful lot, enough to seriously compromise our national security. I mean seriously,' Ritter said calmly. 'Zacharias knows our nuclear war plans, he helped write SIOP. This is very serious business.' Merely in speaking sy-op, merely by invoking the unholy name of the 'Single Integrated Operations Plan,' Ritter had knowingly raised the stakes of the conversation. The CIA field officer amazed himself at the skillful delivery of the lie. The White House pukes might not grasp the idea of getting people out because they were people. But they had their hot issues, and nuclear war-plans were the unholy of unholies in this and many other temples of government power.

'You have my attention. Bob.'

'Mr Hicks, right?' Ritter asked, turning his head.

'Yes, sir.'

'Could you please excuse us?'

The junior assistant looked to his boss, his neutral face imploring MacKenzie to let him stay in the room, but that was not to be.

'Wally, I think we'll carry on for the moment in executive session,' the special assistant to the President said, easing the impact of the dismissal with a friendly smile - and a wave towards the door.

'Yes, sir.' Hicks stood and walked out the door, closing it quietly.

Fuck, he raged to himself, sitting back down at his desk. How could he advise his boss he didn't hear what came next? Robert Ritter, Hicks thought. The guy who'd nearly destroyed sensitive negotiations at a particularly sensitive moment by violating orders and bringing some goddamned spy out of Budapest. The information he'd brought had somehow changed the US negotiating position, and that had set the treaty back three months because America had decided to chisel something else out of the Soviets, who had been reasonable ashell to concede the matters already agreed to. That fact had saved Hitter's career - and probably encouraged him in that idiotically romantic view that individual people were more important than world peace, when peace itself was the only thing that mattered.

And Ritter knew how to jerk Roger around, didn't he? All that war-plans stuff was pure horseshit. Roger had his office walls covered with photos from The Old Days, when he'd flown his goddamned airplane all over hell and gone, pretending that he was personally winning the war against Hitler, just one more fucking war that good diplomacy would have prevented if only people had focused on the real issues as he and Peter hoped someday to do. This thing wasn't about war plans or SIOP or any of the other uniformed bullshit that people in this section of the White House Staff played with every goddamned day. It was about people, for Christ's sake. Uniformed people. Dumbass soldiers, people with big shoulders and little minds who did nothing more useful than kill, as though that made anything in the world better. And besides, Hicks fumed, they took their chances, didn't they? If they wanted to drop bombs on a peaceful and friendly people like the Vietnamese, well, they should have thought ahead of time that those people might not like it very much. Most important of all, if they were dumb enough to gamble their lives, then they implicitly accepted the possibility of losing them, and so why then should people like Wally Hicks give a flying fuck about them when the dice came up wrong? They probably loved the action. It undoubtedly attracted the sort of women who thought that big dicks came along with small brains, who liked 'men' who dragged their knuckles on the ground like well-dressed apes.

Thiscould wreck the peace talks. Even MacKenzie thought that.

All those kids from his generation, dead. And now they might risk not ending the war because of fifteen or twenty professional killers who probably liked what they did. It just made no sense. What if they gave a war and nobody came? was one of his generation's favored aphorisms, though he knew it to be a fantasy. Because people like that one guy - Zacharias - would always seduce people into following them because little people who lacked Hicks's understanding and perspective wouldn't be able to see that it was just all a waste of energy. That was the most amazing part of all. Wasn't it clear that war was just plain awful? How smart did you have to be to understand that?

Hicks saw the door open. MacKenzie and Ritter came out.

'Wally, we're going across the street for a few minutes. Could you tell my eleven o'clock that I'll be back as soon as I can?'

'Yes, sir.'

Wasn't that typical? Ritter's seduction was complete. He had MacKenzie sold enough that Roger would make the pitch to the National Security Advisor. And they would probably raise pure fucking hell at the peace table, and maybe set things back three months or more, unless somebody saw through the ruse. Hicks lifted his phone and dialed a number.

'Senator Donaldson's office.'

'Hi, I was trying to get Peter Henderson.'

'I'm sorry, he and the Senator are in Europe right now. They'll get back next week.'

'Oh, that's right. Thanks.' Hicks hung up. Damn. He was so upset that he'd forgotten.

Some things have to be done very carefully. Peter Henderson didn't even know that his code name was cassius. It had been assigned to him by an analyst in the US-Canada Institute whose love of Shakespeare's plays was as genuine as that of any Oxford don. The photo in the file, along with the one-page profile of the agent, had made him think of the self-serving 'patriot' in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Brutus would not have been right. Henderson, the analyst had judged, did not have sufficient quality of character. His senator was in Europe on a 'fact-finding' tour, mainly having to do with NATO, though they would stop in on the peace talks at Paris just to get some TV tape that might be shown on Connecticut TV stations in the fall. In fact, the 'tour' was mainly a shopping trip punctuated by a brief every other day. Henderson, enjoying his first such trip as the Senator's expert on national-security issues, had to be there for the briefs, but the rest of the time was his, and he had made his own arrangements. At the moment he was touring the White Tower, the famous centerpiece of Her Majesty's Tower of London, now approaching its nine hundredth year of guardianship on the River Thames.

'Warm day for London,' another tourist said.

'I wonder if they get thunderstorms here,' the American replied casually, examining Henry VIII's immense suit of armor.

'They do,' the man replied, 'but not as severe as those in Washington.'

Henderson looked for an exit and headed towards it. A moment later he was strolling around Tower Green with his new companion.

'Your English is excellent.'

'Thank you, Peter. I am George.'

'Hi, George.' Henderson smiled without looking at his new friend. It really was like James Bond, and doing it here - not just in London, but in the historical seat of Britain's royal family - well, that was just delicious.

George was his real name - actually Georgiy, which was the Russian equivalent - and he rarely went into the field anymore. Though he'd been a highly effective field officer for KGB, his analytical ability was such that he'd been called back to Moscow five years earlier, promoted to lieutenant colonel and placed in charge of a whole section. Now a full colonel, George looked forward to general's stars. The reason he'd come to London, via Helsinki and Brussels, was that he'd wanted to eyeball cassius himself - and get a little shopping done for his own family. Only three men of his age in KGB shared his rank, and his young and pretty wife liked to wear Western clothes. Where else to shop for them but London? George didn't speak French or Italian.

'This is the only time we will meet, Peter.'

'Should I be honored?'

'If you wish.' George was unusually good-natured for a Russian, though that was part of his cover. He smiled at the American. 'Your senator has access to many things.'

'Yes, he does,' Henderson agreed, enjoying the courtship ritual. He didn't have to add, and so do I.

'Such information is useful to us. Your government, especially with your new president - honestly, he frightens us.'

'He frightens me,' Henderson admitted.

'But at the same time there is hope,' George went on, speaking in a reasonable and judicious voice. 'He is also a realist. His proposal for detente is seen by my government as a sign that we can reach a broad international understanding. Because of that we wish to examine the possibility that his proposal for discussions is genuine. Unfortunately we have problems of our own.'

'Such as?'

'Your president, perhaps he means well. I say that sincerely, Peter,' George added. 'But he is highly... competitive. If he knows too much about us, he will press us too hard in some areas, and that might prevent us from reaching the accommodation that we all desire. You have adverse political elements in your government. So do we - leftovers from the Stalin era. The key to negotiations such as those which may soon begin is that both sides must be reasonable. We need your help to control the unreasonable elements on our side.'

Henderson was surprised by that. The Russians could be so open, like Americans. 'How can I do that?'

'Some things we cannot allow to be leaked. If they are, it will poison our chances for detente. If we know too much about you, or you know too much about us, well, the game becomes skewed. One side or the other seeks too much advantage, and then there can be no understanding, only domination, which neither side will accept. Do you see?'

'Yes, that makes sense.'

'What I am asking, Peter, is that you let us know from time to time certain special things that you have learned about us. I won't even tell you what, exactly. I think you are intelligent enough to see for yourself. We will trust you on that. The time for war is behind us. The coming peace, if it does come, will depend on people like you and me. There must be trust between our nations. That trust begins between two people. There is no other way. I wish there were, but that is how peace must begin.'

'Peace - that would be nice,' Henderson allowed. 'First we have to get our damned war ended.'

'We are working towards that end, as you know. We're - well, not pressuring, but we are encouraging our friends to take a more moderate line. Enough young men have died. It is time to put an end to it, an end that both sides will find acceptable.'

'That's good to hear, George.'

'So can you help us?'

They'd walked all around Tower Green, now facing the chapel. There was a chopping block there. Henderson didn't know if it had actually been used or not. Around it was a low chain fence, and standing on it at the moment was a raven, one of those kept on Tower grounds for the mixed reasons of tradition and superstition. Off to their right a Yeoman Warder was conducting a bunch of tourists around.

'I've been helping you, George.' Which was true. Henderson had been nibbling at the hook for nearly two years. What the KGB colonel had to do now was to sweeten the bait, then see if Henderson would swallow the hook down.

'Yes, Peter, I know that, but now we are asking for a little more, some very sensitive information. The decision is yours, my friend. It is easy to wage war. Waging peace can be far more dangerous. No one will ever know the part you played. The important people of ministerial rank will reach their agreements and shake hands across the table. Cameras will record the events for history, and people like you and me, our names will never find their way into the history books. But it will matter, my friend. People like us will set the stage for the ministers. I cannot force you in this, Peter. You must decide if you wish to help us on your own account. You will also decide what it is that we need to know. You're a bright young man, and your generation in America has learned the lessons that must be learned. If you wish, I will let you decide over time -'

Henderson turned, making his decision. 'No. You're right. Somebody has to help make the peace, and dithering around won't change that. I'll help you, George.'

'There is danger involved. You know that,' George warned. It was a struggle not to react, but now that Henderson was indeed swallowing the hook, he had to set it firmly.

'I'll take my chances. It's worth it.'

?hhh.

'People like you need to be protected. You will be contacted when you get home.' George paused. 'Peter, I am a father. I have a daughter who is six and a son who is two. Because of your work, and mine, they will grow up in a much better world - a peaceful world. For them, Peter, I thank you. I must go now.'

'See you, George,' Henderson said. It caused George to turn and smile one last time.

'No, Peter, you will not.' George walked down the stone steps towards Traitor's Gate. It required all of his considerable self-control not to laugh aloud at the mixture of what he had just accomplished and the thundering irony of the portcullised stone arch before his eyes. Five minutes later he stepped into a black London taxi and directed the driver to head towards Harrods Department Store in Knightsbridge.

Cassius, he thought. No, that wasn't right. Casca, perhaps. But it was too late to change it now, and besides, who would have have seen the humor in it? Glazov reached in his pocket for his shopping list.