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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just following orders, Charlie.”

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

“I’m just the pilot.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Politburo member was ill. Okay. Which one?

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A diamond. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, Charlie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you implied it.”

Saul shrugged. “True, but–”

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

“I can’t talk about it.”

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

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

“Ain’t no such thing.”

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

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

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

“You’re a doll.”

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

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

Charlotte turned slowly and saw Stone.

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

“Hello, Charlie.”

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

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

Saul, nodding, departed with a broad smile.

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

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

“So?” Stone asked.

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

“Been here long?”

“You mean the party, or the country?”

“Both.”

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

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

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

“You want a drink or something?”

“I’ve given up alcohol. And coffee.”

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

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

“I like your lipstick.”

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

“I gave it up.”

“Really? When?”

“I don’t remember,” Stone lied.

When you left, Stone thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was more.

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

And the President had accepted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t understand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is he on any medications?”

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

“No, that’s fine. Thank you.”

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

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

“Feeling any better?” Stone asked gently.

“A little. Mostly just weak now.”

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

“The party …?” Alfred Stone began.

“Uneventful.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

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

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

Stone nodded.

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

Stone, reluctant to press him, nodded again.

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

“There was another reason?”

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

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

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

“What did he want you to do?”

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

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

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

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

His father frowned. “No, she wasn’t.”

“How do you know?”

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

“But now–?”

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

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

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

“You took the Fifth to protect Lehman.”

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

“But you took the fall for him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you Mr. Stone’s son?”

“Yes.”

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

“Sure.”

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

“I think his father died after a stroke.”

“Is he taking any medications?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Has he been under any stress lately?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “I am.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who wrote that?” Fyodorov asked.

“Nekrasov. Who Is Happy in Russia?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, scratch that idea.”

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

“This morning? My God!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ansbach glanced at Stone sharply. “Chemicals?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

“What are you saying?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Stefan Kramer returned to the free world – if, he mused, Moscow could really be considered “free” – he found that the world had gotten even more terrible during the four months he had been in Lefortovo Prison.

The food stores were even emptier, street crime was on the increase, people complained more bitterly than usual. He rented a room in a communal apartment with five people he barely knew, so that when he wanted a good meal he would visit his father’s apartment, where Sonya, his father’s lover – there was no other word for it; they weren’t married – would always prepare a fine dinner of chicken and potatoes and a good hot solyanka soup.

Stefan didn’t quite know what to make of Sonya. She was in her early sixties, with a kind face that appeared to have once been beautiful. Stefan thought of her as his mother; his real mother had died when he was a child.

There was something about Sonya – a dignity, a gravity, a gentleness – that set her apart from all the world-weary Russian women of her generation. She demanded nothing of life; she seemed to draw her oxygen only from helping others. Sometimes her timidity broke Stefan’s heart.

Yet at times she seemed aloof, utterly private, impossibly remote. Then she would be distracted, her attention elsewhere, and she’d glance suddenly, sharply, at Stefan, as if she had no idea who he was, what she was doing here.

At dinner one night, barely a week after Stefan’s release from Lefortovo, Sonya set down a plate of soup and placed her hand over Stefan’s.

“Your brother has been arrested,” she said, giving a sad glance at Yakov, who sat in pensive silence.

“Avram? What for?” Stefan could hardly believe it. Avram, the quiet, diligent, law-abiding researcher at the Polio Institute did not have it in him to do anything that might get him arrested.

For a moment, it looked as if his father’s ruined face would contort into a cry of anguish.

“They say he wrote a letter to the Kremlin protesting their refusal to let us emigrate,” Yakov replied. “They say he wrote a viciously anti-Soviet letter.”

“What? That’s insane. That makes no sense.”

“I know,” his father said sadly.

“It’s a lie,” Sonya put in quietly. “They must have set him up. It has to be a setup to keep you from emigrating.”

“Where is he?” Stefan asked.

Sonya looked at Yakov, who suddenly bowed his head and held a crumpled napkin to his eyes, which brimmed with tears. He was unable to speak.

“He’s in a psikhushka,” Sonya said, putting her arms around Yakov’s shoulders. A psikhushka – a Soviet psychiatric hospital-prison, the terrible place from which few ever emerged with their minds intact. “They just put him in yesterday.”

“I thought they weren’t putting political prisoners in those places,” Stefan said.

“Well, they are,” his father said.

“We’ve got to do something!” Stefan shouted suddenly.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Yakov said, looking up at his son.

Sonya shook her head dolefully, wanting to say more, but keeping her silence.

The pain exploded into a million shards, a million needles, a million stars. Stone pulled the alcohol-soaked gauze pad away from the long gash on his right cheek, then switched off the medicine-cabinet light. It was garishly bright. He had been hurt more badly than he’d realized: his face and hands were cut in a dozen places, and there was a painful contusion at the back of his head.

He would be all right, though. Even now the pain was beginning to subside. He walked slowly into his bedroom, collapsed on the bed, and examined the outside of the envelope Saul Ansbach had sent him.

The envelope. It had been slid underneath his apartment door, waiting for him when he returned, a voice from the grave.

A few minutes earlier, bleeding and out of breath, he had telephoned the New York Police Department and reported Saul’s murder, then hung up before the call could be traced. It made no sense to get involved at this point.

Saul, his old friend. Murdered. Stone bit his lower lip.

The man who had chosen the shadowy world of intelligence over the safe and bland and tranquil and orderly world of corporate law.

Whoever murdered Saul must have … must have not wanted him investigating…. What were his words on the machine? This is serious fucking business, Charlie. And: I don’t trust the phones…. Who was he afraid of? It didn’t make sense for the CIA to kill their own, especially one so important in the organization. Did it?

How long, Stone wondered, before I’m linked as well? How long before it’s not safe for me here?

He slid a finger under the flap of the manila envelope and tore it open. He pulled out a black-and-white, eight-by-ten glossy photograph.

Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting on a bench, conferring gravely. Around them people rushed by, blurred. Russians: Stone recognized the hats, the shoes, the clothing. The woman, too, was a Russian, a beautiful woman with delicate features, her glossy black hair in a loose chignon. Speaking to her, in earnest conversation, was someone Stone recognized well; it looked like a picture of himself. It was Alfred Stone, meeting with a Russian woman.

Could this be Sonya Kunetskaya?

Charlie turned the photo over and saw that it was stamped property FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION CENTRAL FILE 002–324.

There was one more item in the envelope, a small note that bore the letterhead of Sheffield & Simpson. The scrawled, almost illegible handwriting was Saul’s, evidently dashed off in great haste. Words and phrases were underlined, sometimes double-underlined.

The day after his late-night garage meeting with Fyodorov, Stefan learned from his father that they would be allowed to visit Avram, Stefan’s older brother, at the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry, in which he was imprisoned. Rarely are psikhushka patients permitted to see anyone from the outside world, but Stefan and his father did not question this unusual good luck.

Instead, they were, both of them, filled with a corrosive anger at the capriciousness of Soviet justice, which could place Avram, a healthy and happy man, into a mental hospital. The world believed that this sort of thing didn’t happen anymore in Moscow, in these days of glasnost and Gorbachev, but apparently they still could.

“Please,” Sonya said, standing at the doorway, watching Yakov and Stefan leave. “I want to see Avram.”

But Yakov insisted that she stay behind – that she not be too closely associated with the Kramer family – and he refused to relent.

So she bit her lower lip and nodded, and watched these two men she loved so fiercely make their way down the dank stairwell. She wanted to call after them, yet she caught herself just in time, and she listened as the echo from their footsteps grew softer and then disappeared.

They drove for a few minutes in silence, Stefan poking at a place in the old Volga’s door where the padding had spilled out from a tear in a seam. “I hope they shave off Avram’s stupid beard,” Stefan joked weakly. “It’s always looked awful.” Avram, older by twelve years, was a tall, handsome, strapping man, but Stefan had always teased him about his beard, which made him look like a Talmudic scholar.

Stefan looked over at his father, who was not laughing. Yakov’s sensitive eyes were filled with pain, accentuated by the horrible scarred flesh that surrounded them.

It had happened in the gulag. A handsome and vivacious boy, Yakov had joined the army during World War II, or the Great Patriotic War, as it was officially known; and, with millions of his peers, he had fought with great ardor to defend his homeland against the Nazis. He had been captured by the Germans and spent two years as a prisoner of war, until he was liberated by American troops and immediately returned to the Soviet Union – not to a joyous reception but to a labor camp. Stalin did not trust the Soviet POWs. He believed they had been brainwashed by the Nazis or by American intelligence and convinced to return to Russia as spies. So he imprisoned the lot of them.

Vikhorevka Prison Camp, near Irkutsk, was a hellhole, and Kramer had grown steadily more disillusioned with the system that could have done such a thing to him. Some of his friends had been broken by their years in the camps, but not Kramer; he had established a friendship with some others there, an Estonian and a Lithuanian who shared his hatred for the Kremlin. Still, the two Balts kept their mouths shut, while Yakov began to speak out. Some of the other prisoners – thugs whose fury at being jailed made them hate people like Yakov, who dared to speak out – began to resent him. Their reaction was twisted but not uncommon.

One day, a couple of his fellow prisoners, granted the soft chore of cleaning duty, stole a jar of potent muriatic acid. And, in the middle of the night, they tossed it into Kramer’s face.

Luckily, it had missed his eyes, but it brutally disfigured the right side of his face so badly that he would always resemble a monster more than a human being. There was no one in the camp trained in medicine, so he was treated with rags and alcohol, and his pain, which was unspeakable, grew worse. In time, the horrid red ropes of his facial skin blanched to a more tolerable white.

Even after he and the other prisoners were released by Khrushchev in 1956, Yakov Kramer was consigned to live with a hideous reminder of his stay in the gulag.

Many people found it impossible to look him in the face. He managed to get a job as a technical writer, and eventually was hired at Progress Publishers, where he indexed books. Kramer was given a cubicle far removed from the other workers, because his boss anticipated that the others would prefer not to have to look at him. His boss was right.

Stefan’s father was a man of tremendous, though banked, anger. Now he sat at the wheel of the car in dark fury.

“We’ll get him out,Papa,” Stefan said, although neither one of them believed it.

The old woman who had once been the personal secretary to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lived in a tiny but immaculate ranch-style house with a perfectly manicured hedge in front and a lawn that resembled Astro-Turf. East Neck, New Jersey, was all even, broad streets lined with neat little square houses of tan stone and precise squares of lawn, which residents doubtless found homey. Stone found it depressing.

An odd place for such a person to live. Russian émigrés of recent vintage mostly coalesced in large cities, congregating in their own bustling, colorful Little Russias or Little Odessas. After a generation or two, once assimilated, they tended to live in cities and new suburbs, where the population turns over with some frequency. Not in tidy, middle-American spots like this, where all the neighbors have known one another for decades. Clearly, Anna Zinoyeva had chosen to distance herself from her compatriots.

Stone had arrived the night before and spent the evening in a motel where the beds had Magic Fingers massage vibrators built into the box springs. Early the next morning, he took a cab and got out several blocks from Zinoyeva’s street. He walked slowly toward the house, watching carefully. Nothing. After what had happened to Ansbach, he’d take no chances.

Checking the street once more, he felt satisfied. In a quick motion he climbed the low porch and rang the bell.

Anna Zinoyeva, a diminutive woman whose wispy white hair barely covered her scalp, answered the door. She used a metal walker.

Behind her, easily visible from the doorway, was a tiny sitting room furnished with a few straight-back upholstered chairs and a brown-tweed sofa. Even from here, everything about the room seemed to have been frozen in the late 1950s.

Her eyes squinted, giving her a slightly Asiatic appearance. Stone thought of her old boss, Lenin, whose eyes were also somewhat Asian.

“Irene Potter?” Stone asked, using her deep-cover name.

“Yes?”

“Anna Zinoyeva,” Stone said calmly.

The old woman shook her head. “You are mistaken,” she said in broken English. “Please go away from here.”

“I’m not here to harm you,” Stone said as gently as he could. “I need to talk with you.” He handed her a letter he had typed earlier in the day, on Central Intelligence Agency stationery he had once gotten from Saul. It requested, in bland bureaucratic language, a routine update of her file, a perfectly normal, straightforward questioning. The letter, signed by a fictitious “Assistant Records Chief,” requested her to speak to one Charles Stone.

Surely it had been years, even decades, since anyone from the American intelligence community had bothered to talk to her; her guard would be down.

She held the letter a few inches from her eyes, gray with cataracts, scrutinizing the text, the signature. It was obvious that she was almost blind. In a few moments, she looked up.

“What do you want from me?”

“Just a few minutes of your time,” Stone said cheerily. “Didn’t you receive a call?”

“No,” she said warily. She shook her head again. “Go away from here.” She made a feeble attempt to raise her walker, to ward off this unwelcome intruder.

Stone pushed his way into the house. The woman cried out: “Go! Please!”

“It’s all right,” Stone said gently. “It won’t take more than a few minutes.”

“No,” Anna Zinoyeva said. “They promised me … They promised me no one would ever talk to me again! They said I would be left alone!”

“This won’t take long. A mere formality.”

She seemed to hesitate. “What do you want from me?” the old woman repeated unhappily, stepping aside to let Stone in.

In the end, it was Stone’s gentle manner that allayed her suspicions. Sitting on the plastic-slipcovered sofa, she smoothed her faded house dress with gnarled yet somehow delicate hands, and told her story, haltingly at first, then as fluently as her poor English would allow.

She had come to work for Lenin when she was just nineteen – her father had been a friend of Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, one of Lenin’s closest friends – and she had never been more than a secretary in its strictest definition. She typed copies of Lenin’s voluminous and seemingly endless correspondence and did other paperwork in Lenin’s office in the Kremlin, from 1918 on, when the headquarters of the Soviet government was moved from Petrograd to Moscow. In 1923 she moved from Lenin’s Kremlin office to Gorky, where Lenin was eventually to die.

Several years after Lenin’s death, she asked permission to emigrate to the United States, and since it was still the 1920s and it was still possible to emigrate – and since she had served her country so honorably – she was given an exit visa. As one of the youngest secretaries on Lenin’s staff, she had rarely been entrusted with anything of great importance or secrecy, she said. This was not to say that she didn’t hear or see things. She did.

After she had been talking for half an hour or so, the suspicious squint in the eyes was replaced by a gaze that was in turn gentle and defiant.

“Twenty-three years I hear nothing from the great American intelligence,” she said mischievously. She shook her head at the hopeless crudeness of her benefactors. “Nothing. Now you are so very interested in me.”

“As I said, it’s routine. We’re filling in the blank spaces in your file.”

For an instant, it looked as if she didn’t understand, until she said, “And we must not have blank spaces,” and smiled playfully. Fleetingly, the wizened face was transformed into that of a coquette of seventeen.

“It won’t take much more time.”

“I don’t have much time left,” she said equably, without a trace of self-pity. “Soon you will be able to stop sending me your enormous checks and draining treasury.”

“It’s not much,” Stone agreed. The Agency was notoriously cheap with defectors.

“In Russia, they would give me very big pension because of my work for Ilyich,” she scolded, frowning in mock-disgust. “Sometimes I wonder why I left.”

Stone gave a nod of rueful sympathy, and then began: “If you can help–”

“Listen,” she said, and leaned her head close to his, as if confiding a great secret. “I am old. More than sixty years ago, I come to this country. If the great American intelligence still did not get from me all what little I know, it can’t be important.” She lifted her head and cocked it to one side, then smiled. “Do not waste your time.”

“Even if it concerns the Lenin Testament?”

The old woman was suddenly alert, and it took her several seconds to regain her poise. Then she smiled slyly. “Are you here to talk over old history with me? There are books you can read. Everyone knows about the Lenin Testament.”

“The one I mean is another Lenin Testament.”

“Is there another?” she asked, feigning boredom and shrugging. She clutched an empty teacup on the table beside her as if preparing to sip, then set it back down on the saucer with a clatter.

“I think you know.”

“I think I do not,” she replied steadily.

Stone smiled and decided to call an end to the fencing. “It came up in the course of a routine check through the files,” he said.

He waited for her to respond, and when she didn’t, he asked casually, “They did poison him, didn’t they?”

For a long time, she did not reply. When she finally said something, it was almost inaudible. The refrigerator in the kitchen next door switched on with a hum and a gurgle.

“I think yes,” she said. Her brio had given way to solemnity.

“What makes you think it?”

“Because – because he wrote letter about this, and he gave it for me to type. He tells me to make two copies. One for Krupskaya, his wife. The other …” She broke off and looked down at the floor.

“But the other copy – who was the other for?”

She waved her hands hopelessly in small circles. “I don’t know.”

“You know,” Stone said.

There was a beat of silence, and he continued: “Your contract with us requires you to be cooperative. It’s entirely within my power to cut off all financial support. …”

She replied hurriedly, her words spilling out now in a torrent: “Oh, it’s so long ago. It’s not important. A foreigner … Lenin was afraid his house was filled with … intrigue. Oh, I think he was right. Everyone, every gardener and cook and chauffeur, was OGPU. The secret police.”

She was speaking faster now, and Stone didn’t understand fully what she meant to say. “Why?” he said. “Why did he give a copy to a foreigner?”

“He was afraid of Stalin – of what he might do to Krupskaya. He wanted make sure one copy is brought out of country.”

“Who was the foreigner?”

She shook her head.

“You know, don’t you?” Stone said tranquilly.

Her hesitation was unbearable. “Tall, handsome American. Businessman. An American he sees several times before his death. Is not important.”

“Winthrop Lehman.”

A pause, and then: “He saw Lenin many times,” she said ruminatively, squinting her eyes. “Lehman.”

“Did he see Lenin at Gorky?”

“Yes. Winthrop Lehman.”

“What did the letter say? It had to do with the poisoning, didn’t it?”

“No, not quite,” she said. Now she spoke very slowly again. “He writes a – a draft – before he went to Gorky. Already ill. Says many bad things about Soviet state. Said it was a terrible mistake, it is becoming a police state. He said he … like Dr. Frankenstein, is creating a terrible, terrible monster.”

Stone waited for more, but there was no more.

“That’s a complete condemnation of the Soviet Union by its founder,” Stone said quietly. The words sounded obvious and foolish. “Lehman has it.”

“Once he demand to return to Moscow. We tried stop him, but he insisting. ‘Hurry!’ he was shouting to the chauffeur. When he got to Moscow, he went to his office in the Kremlin.”

“Did you go with him?”

“No. I hear later. He look in his desk and find a secret drawer was opened. He is looking for a document. He is furious, is shouting at everyone. Never find it. But he … How do you say? He – re-create from memory.”

“Dictated it to you,” Stone said. “That’s the one you made two copies of.”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a copy?”

“No, of course not. I think lost now.”

“What about Krupskaya’s copy?”

“They must take it from her.”

“And Lehman’s copy?”

“I don’t know.” The adjacent kitchen gave off the aroma of chicken soup, heavy with garlic.

Stone inhaled the comfortable yet forlorn smell of the house and looked around the room. How did she know they had poisoned Lenin? he wondered.

“Who did it?” he asked.

“Please don’t dig it up,” she pleaded. “Please don’t dig up the past. Let people believe Ilyich died peacefully.”

“They did an autopsy, didn’t they? I seem to remember–”

“Please.” She made a tiny gesture with her hands that signaled acquiescence. “Yes, they did. The day after he die, ten doctors examine the body. Open him up and look at organs and find nothing wrong. They open his skull.” She frowned, pursed her lips in distaste, and continued: “Brain is…” She grimaced, flashed a set of cheap dentures that were stained bright yellow. “Solid. Cal-calcified.” As she spoke the word, she gestured with her forefinger. “Metal instruments are ringing when they strike brain.”

“Arteriosclerosis. They didn’t look for poison?”

Stone had switched to Russian; the old woman would no doubt find it much more comfortable. Indeed, she looked up with relief.

“No, but why would they?” she said.

“They had no reason to believe he’d been poisoned.”

“Do you know that Lenin’s personal doctor. Dr. Guetier, refused to sign the autopsy report? He refused! He knew Lenin had been poisoned. This is a matter of the historical record!”

Stone stared.

She nodded slowly, significantly. “I think he knew.”

“But who? Who poisoned him?”

“One of the servants, I think. They were all working for the OGPU. Stalin wanted Lenin out of way so he could take over the country. Why are you asking me this again? Why do you ask again?”

“Again?”

“You asked me all about this in 1953.”

“Nineteen fifty-three?” A bus roared by on the interstate two blocks away. “Who asked you about this in 1953?” Stone asked.

Anna Zinoyeva regarded him for a long moment with her gray-clouded eyes as if she didn’t believe him. Then she got up, slowly, supporting herself with one hand on the aluminum walker, the other on the arm of the couch. “I used to read the newspapers,” she said defiantly. “I was always very good with faces. Ilyich always complimented me for this.” She made her way to a walnut-veneered sideboard and opened the cabinet, removing a heavy green-leather-bound scrap-book, which she set on top of the sideboard’s highly burnished surface. “Come,” she said.

Stone walked over to the sideboard. She was turning the pasteboard pages slowly, as if they were made of lead, until she found the page she wanted. “Here,” she said, her face almost touching the page.

She indicated a page on which was mounted an unevenly cut, brownish clipping from a Russian-émigré newspaper published in New York, the Novoye Russkoye Slovo. Only the year – 1965 – was visible; the month and day appeared to have been lost to a sloppy job of scissoring.

“I recognize the face, too,” Stone said, trying to conceal his shock. The photograph was of William Armitage, a career State Department employee who the article announced was being named an undersecretary. Armitage, Stone knew, was now the Deputy Secretary of State: a powerful and highly placed man in the administration.

Bill Armitage, whom Saul Ansbach had spoken with, perhaps only hours before his death.

“This is the man who talked to you?”

“Yes, him. This Armitage.”

Stone nodded. A renegade organization, Saul had believed. How high up did this thing reach? “What did he want to know from you? Why was he interested – in 1953 – in something that happened in 1924?”

The old woman scowled as if Stone had missed her point entirely, her expression asking how simple-minded he could be. “He was interested in what had just happened. The threats.”

“Threats?”

She raised her voice. “The threats! Yes, the threats.” Her eyes shone with fear.

“Who threatened you? Not our agents, I hope.”

“The Russians.” Tears had come to her eyes. “You know all this already! Don’t …”

“Why did they threaten you?” Stone asked softly.

“They …” She shook her head again, a slow motion that shifted the course of the tears running down her cheeks. “They were looking for Lenin’s Testament, and they were sure I had it. They tore my house apart, told me they would kill me. I told them I didn’t have it….”

“Who were they?”

“Chekists. Beria’s men.” She sounded as if she were speaking to a simple child. The forerunners to the KGB. Of course. “I was so frightened. They used the word ikonoborchestvo.”

“Iconoclasm,” Stone translated. The smashing of an icon.

“Yes. They said, ‘You and your bloody Lenin will be the first to go. Your bloody icon.’ ”

Stone nodded. Yes, anti-Leninists: an old and virulent underground strain in the Soviet Union. “And this American, this Armitage – what did he want, exactly?”

“He wanted to know what they told me. I told him that they just wanted some document from me that I didn’t have.”

“You didn’t tell him everything,” Stone said without accusation, understanding.

“For a long time, he didn’t believe me. Then he told me I must never say anything to anybody about what happened, about these Chekists. That very bad things might happen to me if I said anything. This is why I’m surprised you are asking me again about this.”

“He wanted to protect a secret,” said Stone.

“He wanted silence,” she agreed. “He wanted me not to say a word about these Russians. You’re nodding. You must understand.”

“But the Russians could have gotten this document from Winthrop Lehman, couldn’t they?”

The old woman’s mouth trembled open slightly as her eyes un-seeingly searched Stone’s face. “No,” she said. “I heard …”

“What?”

“I was told … they didn’t need to, because Stalin had a … a control over him. Or maybe they couldn’t, because they had some kind of – arrangement with him. I don’t know.” Her attention seemed to be fading. The woman was tired; her face had grown ashen.

“Arrangement?”

“Stalin– Stalin was so evil. He found a way to control this man, this Lehman.”

Cowering against the Frigidaire, my mother, her tears turning her eye makeup into blue streams, is shouting: “I didn’t make you go to prison! Be angry at him, don’t be angry at me!”

Yes.

If Stalin was controlling Lehman …, Stone thought, astonished. Could it be? The adviser to Roosevelt and Truman, the man who had sent Alfred Stone to prison – was this the secret Lehman went to such lengths to conceal? Was it conceivable that Lehman had been in the employ of the Soviet government? “What kind of control?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t know! I have no great secrets. I was only a secretary. Surely you must understand far more than me.”

“Yes,” Stone admitted, tasting the fear again.

There was a shout from some children playing down the block, then the sudden acceleration of a car that badly needed a new muffler, and then quiet, in which Stone could hear his heart thudding.

He thought: I don’t think these Americans wanted anyone to know that they – whoever they are or were – were trying to overthrow the Soviet government.

He looked around at the gloomy little room, then at the old woman, whose deep-set eyes – eyes that had once gazed upon a man of history – had clouded with age and now were heavy with weariness. He thought: And now they’re trying once again. The car with the bad muffler started up another time, raced by, and then there was nothing but silence.

Very early in the morning, the limousines and sedans arrived at the secluded Maryland estate one after another, at precise five-minute intervals. At twenty minutes before seven, the last car, a gray Cadillac limousine, proceeded down the private, tree-lined roadway, through the scrolled iron gates that opened automatically.

It stopped a few hundred feet short of the main house, a sprawling Victorian mansion, and then maneuvered slowly into the wooden structure that appeared, from the outside, to be a large shed. When the limousine was inside and the doors had closed behind it, the steel platform that was the floor immediately hummed to life, dropping slowly and evenly. Within a minute, the floor had lowered seventy-five feet, into the pitch-dark chasm beneath the ground. Then the limousine pulled straight ahead to the oblong alcove whose walls were constructed of concrete finished in some sort of clear resin, joining the four other cars parked there, pulling up neatly alongside a black Saab turbo.

Fletcher Lansing, the last to arrive, got slowly out of the car with a nimbleness that belied his age. He was one of the great figures of the foreign-policy establishment, a close adviser to John Kennedy, one of what a journalist had once called “the best and the brightest.” Lansing, his creased mouth firmly set beneath his prominent, thin nose, passed through an arch into the conference room, where the others were already seated, sipping coffee.

“Good morning, sir.” This came from the Director of Central Intelligence, Ted Templeton. Like William Casey before him, Templeton was a veteran of the OSS, but, unlike Casey, he was career CIA, a large, rangy man with a thick head of gray hair, large ears, pouches under his eyes. He owed his job, the directorship, to Lansing, who had lobbied for him over more than one supper with the President in the White House residential quarters.

But Lansing, whose face was grim, gave only a curt nod to Templeton, and then to the others at the round black-marble-topped table. There was Ronald Sanders, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence: forty-six, a former Notre Dame football quarterback, and a career CIA man as well. To his right was Evan Wainwright Reynolds, considered the chief architect of the National Security Agency and, though long retired, one of its founders, a vigorous, slender man in his early seventies who rarely spoke.

And to his left, finally, was the youngest man present, Roger Bayliss of the National Security Council. Bayliss, in his late thirties, wore a charcoal-gray Italian sharkskin suit. His career – his very position in the White House – had been maneuvered by the other men in this room. He owed everything to them. As the youngest, he was the secretary, and he took notes on a yellow legal pad, writing with a Montblanc ballpoint pen. Bayliss would have much preferred to use his Compaq laptop, but no outside electronic equipment was permitted in this ultrasecret enclave.

Bayliss watched pensively. He jiggled his right knee up and down, a nervous tic that afflicted him at times of great tension. He inspected a chipped thumbnail. It was time for one of his several extravagances of vanity, a manicure. He thought fleetingly of the woman with whom he’d spent last night, a blonde named Caryn. She was a congressional staffer, of course, and she’d been a firebrand in bed, and Bayliss was still a bit sore. She was naturally impressed that he was on the National Security Council – most women were – but if she had any idea of what was about to happen in Moscow, and of Bayliss’s role in it all …

He glanced around at the room as Fletcher Lansing examined his notes. Everyone waited apprehensively for him to begin.

What bad news could there possibly be?

The extreme security precautions – this subterranean, electronically secure conference room beneath a private estate whose existence was unknown even to the most senior members of the American intelligence community – were deemed by the five men a necessity. They were known (the term had been coined by Fletcher Lansing, whose affection for Latinisms was legendary) as the Sanctum Sanctorum, an ultrasecret group of past and present intelligence officials that met infrequently – perhaps once in two or three years – to make decisions that, they were convinced, would soon alter the world’s fate.

Bayliss’s knee kept jiggling, up and down, up and down, with the rapidity of a hummingbird’s wings. He studied Fletcher Lansing, the old spymaster who had created the Sanctum, with surreptitious intensity.

What was wrong?

Bayliss, an only child who had grown up watching his parents closely, unnervingly, prided himself on his unusual perceptiveness. He had come to realize that there was often some kind of benign pathology in those who were drawn to intelligence work. Part of the lure, of course, was nothing more than insider-itis, that old Washington disease that makes a person ravenous with a desire to be inside the nucleus of power. Once you get to the office early in the morning, and you’re the first one to pore over the overnight cable traffic, you’re hooked, you’re infected.

But Lansing, Harvard and Harvard Law School (Law Review, of course), Supreme Court clerk, Secretary of the Navy, then one of the founders of the CIA – had forsaken the overt insider world of diplomacy and politics and statesmanship for the secret world, and that was because of another chromosome in his character genome, Bayliss believed.

Men like Lansing – and usually they were men – relished the secret exercise of power, out of the daylight, away from public scrutiny. Where else but in the world of intelligence could you plot against an opponent you had never met? They were the éminences grises, power-players with an abnormal attraction to secrecy, who never got credit because they never wanted any. And Bayliss, who was not without a measure of self-knowledge, recognized this same streak in himself.

Lansing belonged to a whole generation of aristocratic leaders, like Dean Acheson or Winthrop Lehman or Henry Stimson or Henry Cabot Lodge, whose time had passed. The crafty old pterodactyl, an illustrious servitor of presidents who were not as well born as he, considered himself, by now, one of the wise men, in an age when American foreign policy was like a fine old Bentley being driven ruinously, with a new, inexperienced president taking the wheel every few years, destroying the clutch while he learned to drive. A clutch could be replaced; world peace was far more fragile.

Yes. Bayliss knew that the Sanctum’s operation was, in a sense, the last spasm of an old order never to be witnessed again, and he was proud to be part of it.

For the time had come. Never before in the history of the Soviet Union had such an opportunity presented itself. It would never come again.

The intelligence out of Moscow was clear: Gorbachev was about to be ousted. Talk of a coup was everywhere.

Fletcher Lansing had put it well at the Sanctum’s last meeting, a mere two weeks ago. “The world we created is no more,” he had said. “Nothing looks the same. Everyone seems to think that the Russians have overnight turned into teddy bears. But even if a snake sheds its skin, it’s still a snake.” Lansing was no crazy right-winger, Bayliss knew, but he was a veteran of the Cold War. He’d been present at the creation of the postwar order, and he knew how easily America, childlike and optimistic in many ways, could have its head turned by changes that were only ephemeral. “So, while we Americans are dazzled and mesmerized by the changes in Moscow, we all forget the long view. Fail to realize that Gorbachev can’t last, and that when he’s gone it will be too late.” Seven decades of hard-line Soviet elements will be just waiting in the wings to reclaim what they believe is rightly theirs. They’ll not give up their power without a fight.

The Soviet empire was on the verge of collapse, spinning out of control. Its republics were seceding; its economy was crumbling. Now that the Berlin Wall had toppled, Moscow had lost its satellites forever.

The question was, when?

Because everyone knew what would happen when it did. When the shit hit the fan, as Ted Templeton so colorfully put it. The intelligence from the Kremlin was clear: Gorbachev’s days were numbered. It was only a matter of time before he was out.

And then, a new, undoubtedly neo-Stalinist leadership would wrest control, put the lid on all of Gorbachev’s feeble attempts at reform. Throughout the Soviet empire, there would be a crackdown that would make Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 seem like a playground. The leadership – which would need a way to unify the Soviet peoples – would require an enemy once again. An outside threat.

Their old archenemy: the West.

And what was the White House doing? Standing by idly, passively. America, the headless horseman.

Decades of superpower struggle, countless billions of dollars, thousands of lives, had been squandered on containing Communism, and now the White House stood by, blindly fatuous, shuffling their feet, not knowing what to do. We were, as usual, backing the wrong horse.

The Sanctum had the only solution, the only thing that would bring the world, once and for all, the peace it so desperately thirsted for.

And it would happen in a matter of weeks.

For they were about to catapult an American agent-in-place – a “mole,” as the British novelist John Le Garre had termed it – to the top of the Kremlin. The leadership of the Soviet Union. For years, such a thing had been a subject of fanciful speculation in the government and out, a pipe dream, the stuff of spy thrillers, but now it was indeed about to happen. Only now, in fact, could it happen.

And only the men in this room knew it.

The existence of this mole was utterly secret to the American government, to the intelligence community at large, even to the White House: a secret to everyone but the few men in this chamber.

For, Bayliss knew, thus it had to be. The Sanctum group had first met in the early 1950s, convened by Lansing and Reynolds, to run the mole, M-3. The task required inviolable secrecy, and Lansing and his colleagues – who were, of course, in a position to know – realized that the intelligence and foreign-policy establishments were no longer reliable.

With the rise of the Soviet mole Harold “Kim” Philby virtually to the top of the British spy network, and the increasingly frequent leaks since that time, followed by the Senate investigations of the CIA during the seventies – and so on and so on – the group’s secrecy became imperative. They could trust no one. Presidents and Secretaries of State came and went, and none of them had ever been informed of the Sanctum’s – or M-3’s – existence.

At last, after decades of planning, the time was at hand. So what, Bayliss wondered with growing alarm, was the hitch?

Fletcher Lansing cleared his throat and began with some preliminaries. Whatever the bad news was, Lansing was holding off. Bayliss, who had developed the fine art of listening while thinking of something else entirely, began to think of the mind-boggling operation that was now about to change the world.

He knew that, over the years, the United States had cultivated several deep-penetration agents in Moscow, generally Soviet citizens sympathetic to the American side. One of the earliest, in the 1950s, had been code-named “Major B.” There had been others, from Colonel Oleg Penkovsky of the GRU, to Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Popov of Soviet military intelligence, to the weapons expert A. G. Tolkachev at the Moscow Aeronautical Institute. Each was discovered by the Soviets, each arrested.

Yes, there were others still in place, but each of these was small-fry compared with the asset the Sanctum group had run all these years.

To preserve and promote M-3, the Bay of Pigs operation had been scrubbed – and not even John Kennedy was told why. Likewise, data that American intelligence had on Nikita Khrushchev’s unstable power base, right down to the hour he’d be thrown out of the Politburo, were information that not even Lyndon Johnson had had.

There were jokes in Washington, of course, that America couldn’t wish for a “mole” that could do any more than Mikhail Gorbachev already had. But what these pundits didn’t know was that Gorbachev had made M-3’s rise to power virtually inevitable. Only amid such turmoil in the Kremlin would M-3 be able to seize power.

Bayliss felt he knew the importance of M-3 almost better than anyone in the Sanctum.

After all, he had been chosen as the Sanctum’s contact with M-3’s intermediaries. This contact had begun only a few weeks earlier, when the channel had been activated after decades of dormancy. The postcard that was slipped into his car by Aleksandr Malarek, the Soviet Embassy’s first secretary, contained a microdot, an entire document reduced to the size of a typewriter’s period.

Malarek was known to be KGB, but none of his KGB colleagues knew of his work in behalf of M-3. For M-3 would have nothing to do with KGB channels.

Bayliss remembered the last meeting of the Sanctum, when Lansing and Templeton had told him he was to coordinate arrangements with Malarek.

“You’re aware of how careful you must be,” Lansing admonished.

“Certainly, sir.” Can they see me swallowing? Can they see how terrified I am?

“If you be somehow connected to this – if you be caught – you’ll undoubtedly be put on trial for treason.”

“Yes, sir.”

“On the other hand,” Lansing continued, “if we are, all of us, successful …” His voice trailed off as he looked around the table at the rest of the Sanctum group. “If we succeed, you’ll have been instrumental in changing history forever.”

Yes, Bayliss had thought. Forever.

Lansing, finished with his introductory remarks, now spoke in a voice that trembled with anger.

“The situation,” he rasped, “is unforgivable.” He struck the black marble table with a tight, liver-spotted fist, looked around at the bunker-like walls of the chamber, and then continued. “We have had our moles before. But nothing compared with M-3.”

Now the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Ronald Sanders, interrupted softly. “Little damage has been done. Nothing irrevocable.”

“Blood has been shed!” Lansing shouted, his voice cracking. Bayliss had never seen him so angry, never seen him shed his facade of patrician reserve. “The blood of innocent men. The blood of men who have served this country loyally.”

“Only that which was necessary,” CIA Director Ted Templeton objected. Their voices were curiously dead in the soundproof, surveillance-proof chamber. “Saul Ansbach all but did himself in, raising alarms. We couldn’t know how much he knew. I hated to allow it – Saul was once a friend of mine.”

“But the others!”

“All of the sanctions have been carried out with scrupulous care. That was our agreement with Malarek’s people.” Templeton sighed noisily. “Nothing traceable.”

Sanders, who had been nervously shifting in his chair, put in, a touch defensively: “Only one section of the Agency was involved in looking into this HEDGEHOG business. Parnassus. But Ted put a halt to it.” He unconsciously addressed his remarks to the grand old men, Lansing and Reynolds.

Templeton nodded. “It’s a good thing we were able to blow that chauffeur’s cover. Jesus, I didn’t know he was–”

“Gentlemen,” Lansing interjected, “we are in a profession where blood is shed all the time to protect the blood of the greater masses. But I am disturbed by the extent of this, by the elimination of innocent men. Frankly, it violates everything I’ve ever stood for. But, morality apart, these sanctions strike me as highly dangerous. If any of them were ever traced, by KGB, by any other interested party–”

“Impossible,” Templeton said. “The Sekretariat are highly trained. Extremely sophisticated. As long as we keep hands off, they’ll do the job invisibly.”

“But will they finish the job?” Evan Reynolds’s remark was little more than a whisper, but instantly everyone at the table turned his way. He had voiced, if crudely, exactly what was on the mind of every man in the room.

There was a beat of silence before Bayliss mustered the courage to speak up. “Can we be absolutely sure this is the right person?”

“Roger,” Templeton said with a dismissive shake of the head, “my people have voice prints that match precisely the voice on the tape taken from Lehman’s basement telephone. That, plus the tap on his phone, confirms that he’s the one who’s been stirring matters up. There’s no question.”

“But I thought you were assured Parnassus was–” Reynolds objected.

“All but one,” Templeton said. “This one has kept prodding, for personal reasons that we couldn’t have foreseen.”

“I should think the subject must be dealt with delicately,” Lansing said.

“Why?” Reynolds asked sharply. “If he has possession of the document, of the – the file, he may compromise the entire operation. Decades of cultivation. My life’s work, for God’s sake. We have no choice. But if he has copies concealed, then what?”

Templeton explained his plan, and when he was done, he could see the shock on the faces of the men around the table. There was a long silence, broken only by the most senior man at the table.

“Jesus God,” Lansing breathed. “Jesus God, help us.”

Washington is a city of foundations. Any number of organizations, from the most venal lobbying organizations to the most selfless nonprofit consumer groups, like to call themselves “foundations,” because the name is at once neutral and dignified.

After a tedious nine-hour drive during which he stopped only once, Stone was back in Boston.

Alfred Stone was in his hospital room, fully dressed, sitting up in a chair. The bed was made.

“You,” he said, startled, when Charlie entered. “I called you in New York, even at – at your place of work. Where the hell have you been?”

“Sorry.”

“I was just about to call a taxi. This morning they decided to let me check out. Would you mind taking me home?” He glanced around the hospital room with distaste. “We had enough of this place.”

It was just after nine o’clock at night.

Finally, it was the visit to the Serbsky Institute that turned Stefan Kramer and his father into terrorists.

The mental deterioration of his brother, Avram Kramer, was, however, only the last straw. Sometimes Stefan believed that his family had been singled out by fate for a miserable existence. Driving home that night from Serbsky, Stefan’s father told him the full tale of his own private nightmare, his own imprisonment, for the first time.

He’d been captured by the Germans while fighting in the Great Patriotic War. In another country, in another time, he would have become a war hero; in Russia he was a traitor for having been so valorous and so foolhardy as to be captured.

In the camp he saw horrors that hardened him for the rest of his life.

One of his campmates, who’d been arrested for unspecified “anti-Soviet agitation,” refused to sign a confession, and so the authorities had inflicted on him one of the most famous cruelties. They had removed his pants and undershorts and seated him on the floor, while two sergeants sat on his legs, and the interrogator had placed the toe of his boot atop the poor man’s penis and testicles and had begun to press, slowly.

The man confessed within five seconds, just before he would have passed out.

Another prisoner had been wounded as seriously when an iron ramrod had been heated red-hot and placed against his anus, and had he not shouted out his guilt they would have plunged it in as far as it would go; even so, his anal membrane hemorrhaged and bled for days.

But Yakov Kramer had been spared – until the two zeks, political prisoners, had splashed acid in his face.

Yet not until later did his loathing for the Soviet system harden. It was the day when he’d first learned, some weeks after the fact, that Stalin had died. All the prisoners had been roused, as usual, at four o’clock, trundled off to the mess hall for “black cabbage soup,” which was made of nettles and was utterly unpalatable, and then sent off to the clay pit, where they dug clay to be made into bricks. On this shift they had more or less been left alone: the supervising guard stood idly by some distance away.

As he dug, Kramer looked at his fellow inmates. Their shaven heads were gray, and their miserable darting eyes had sunk into their heads, surrounded by a brownish discoloration. They looked like walking cadavers, and Kramer knew that he was so ugly no one could even bear to look at him.

Kramer struck up a conversation with a man who had recently come in from Moscow. What was it like there now? Yakov wanted to know. Was it worse, even, than before the war?

And the Muscovite had told him a story that had made the rounds in Moscow. It seemed that a Moscow district Party conference had taken place, at the end of which the secretary of the Party had called for a tribute to the late great man, Comrade Stalin, and of course everyone had stood and applauded. They beamed and stretched out their hands in the Russian manner and clapped loudly. And the ovation went on, and on. Five minutes, then ten minutes had gone by, and the members of the audience were so weakened they feared they would drop. Yet they could not stop clapping. The KGB was in attendance, and they were watching the audience carefully for signs of slackening enthusiasm. The audience continued to clap, weak and in pain, desperately. Finally, a local factory manager, who was standing at the front of the room with the Party leaders, took it upon himself to sit down, and with tremendous relief the rest of the room followed. And that night the factory manager was arrested. Well, this story was so widely told in Moscow, the man said, that it had to be true.

Kramer, listening aghast, threw his shovel deep into the earth and waited for a moment while the guard passed. “Stalin’s dead,” he muttered, “but his wardens live.”

That day, he vowed that, if ever he got out of there alive, he would never forget what had been done to him and to his brethren who had died in the prisons and the camps, and he would see to it that Russia never forgot, either….

In 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev gave his famous “secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing Stalin, millions of zeks were suddenly released, Yakov among them. He later became friendly with a small group of zeks who had also survived what he’d been through. They helped one another adjust to life outside the camps, watching one another grow and raise children and still sustain within themselves a deep hatred for the system that had done to them what it had done.

The others seemed to get more and more embittered. They talked, increasingly, of terrorism – of stirring things up, venting their hostility, blowing something up.

One day in the early 1960s, a member of his group – Kramer wanted no part of it – decided to set off a bomb. Through a friend at the scientific-instruments factory where he worked, the man was able to get the components for a crude TNT bomb, and left it in a valise on Gorky Street. The bomb was even more powerful than they’d expected, and several innocent bystanders were badly hurt. He had slipped a letter to an American wire-service reporter, who published the barely literate broadside against the Soviet government.

This had happened decades ago. The amazing thing was that the man had never gotten caught.

“But sometimes,” Yakov said, concluding his story, “things can go right.”

“Yes,” his son replied. His eyes seemed vacant. “Sometimes they can.”

That night, Stefan decided to become a terrorist, and, late into the evening, father and son devised a campaign of terror designed to free Avram.

Stefan came over to his father’s apartment and sat at the kitchen table. Sonya was out for the evening, visiting a friend, which was fortunate: Yakov insisted that she not be involved.

“Nothing else will free Avram,” Stefan said. He was tall and lanky and wore a sweatshirt whose frayed sleeves were too short. He pulled at them nervously.

“But we can’t demand Avram’s release,” his father objected. “The authorities will know immediately who’s behind the terror. They’ll connect it right away to us–”

“No. That’s the beauty of my plan. We’ll demand the release of all political prisoners held in the Serbsky Institute. There are dozens of them – no one will suspect us.”

“Yes,” Yakov said, thinking aloud. “And we make the appeal private – a letter directly addressed to Gorbachev only. Yes. Release these people, and the violence stops. If you don’t, we threaten to go public with our demands. And the Kremlin will have to give in to protect themselves – it’s a matter of pure self-interest.”

“But why should the letter be private?”

“So the Kremlin can agree to our demands without losing face. Without appearing to be weak. Without fearing they’d be encouraging other acts of terrorism.”

“I see,” Stefan said, pulling again at his sleeves.

“But do you know anything about making bombs?”

After a moment’s pause, Stefan replied, “Yes. I do. I mean, not a tremendous amount – but I learned a bit in prison–”

Yakov gave a short, bitter laugh. “Your time there wasn’t altogether wasted. But without the equipment–”

“I can get it.”

Yakov shook his head.

“The question is,” Stefan said, “where do we do it?”

“We’ve got to attract maximum attention,” his father said. “Our government is skilled at covering things up, making them disappear, denying they ever happened. It’s got to be in public. A symbolic target.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Red Square, or the metro, or Central Telegraph.” he replied. “Such as one particular Kremlin leader with a particularly odious reputation.”

“Borisov,” Stefan suddenly exclaimed.

Borisov, the Central Committee’s head of the Administrative Agencies Department, was known as one of the most notorious apparatchiks in the immense Soviet nomenklatura, the privileged class. More than anyone else in the Soviet power structure, he had urged the widespread use of psychiatric hospitals to quell dissent. And now, after most of the psychiatric prisoners had been released, Borisov was agitating to restore this insidious form of punishment. People believed he was as close to a fiend as anyone alive, now that Stalin was dead.

“Borisov,” his father agreed. “Takoi khui!” he added. The prick.

“We’ll find out where he lives,” Stefan said. “That shouldn’t be hard to do.”

“Stefan,” Yakov said, involuntarily placing a hand up to the striated mass of scar tissue that disfigured his nose, his lips, and part of his eye. “What are we doing? I’m too old for this.”

Stefan compressed his lips. He suddenly went cold; he felt goose-flesh on the back of his neck. “It’s my job,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

Suddenly the door to the apartment opened, startling the two men.

It was Sonya. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m interrupting you two.”

“No, my dear,” Kramer said gently. “We were just finishing up.”

One of the pieces of the explosion landed on the sidewalk very near Andrew Langen, a second secretary in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, who was in truth employed by the Soviet Russian Division of the Directorate of Operations of the Central Intelligence Agency. Langen knew very little about explosives, but he had recently attended an Agency seminar on terrorism, and he was quick-thinking enough to pick up this peculiar bit of detritus and take it to work with him. In the process, he gave himself quite a painful burn on his left hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve heard it,” Charlotte said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The editor shrugged again.

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

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

Then she looked again.

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

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

She all but stopped breathing.

Alfred Stone. That dear, sweet man. No.

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

Charlie. It wasn’t possible.

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

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

Charlie Stone.

He was innocent. He had to be.

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

Hadn’t it?

Surely this was no coincidence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had, after all, escaped.

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

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

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

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

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

It would get him through again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet he had to return to Boston.

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

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

He had to return to the scene of the nightmare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first shot missed.

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

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

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

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

His picture was on the front page.

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

“Can I help you?”

The clerk was a teenage girl, chewing bubble gum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malarek shrugged again, his expression unreadable.

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

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

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

Who could he call?

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

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

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

“Christ, where the fuck are you?”

“Peter, you know I can’t–”

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

“I didn’t do it. You know that.”

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

“Peter, I need your help.”

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

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

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

“Who?”

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

“Uncle?”

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

“Trace?”

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

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

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

“What do you know about it?”

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

“I was drugged.”

“So I hear.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How the hell do you know all this?”

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

“Let me call you back.”

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

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

“So what do I do?”

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

“I don’t have anywhere to go.”

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

“I’ll see.”

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

“Why?”

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

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

“Forget about it, Charlie.”

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

“I’m sorry–”

“What do you mean, sorry?”

“There’s rumors.”

“About me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identification!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stone looked down and kept going.

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

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

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

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

“Please leave at once,” the man said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right. What’s your name?”

“Charles Stone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gorbachev replied with poise. “Meaning?”

“I mean, a coup.”

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

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

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

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

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

Gorbachev had reason to be fearful.

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

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

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

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

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

“Meaning?”

Pavlichenko only shrugged.

“How high?”

“You mean, in the West?”

“I mean here.”

“Sir?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Such as?”

Pavlichenko shrugged.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll break your camera.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All right,” she said dubiously.

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

Charlotte smiled. “You’re forgiven.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you have her address?”

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

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

The babushka shrugged. “I’ll see.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One of his assistants?”

“Yeah. A guy.”

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

“Right. That was it. Thanks.”

“Would you like to speak with him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s the number, sir?”

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

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

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

“You should probably contact the business office–”

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

“Seventy-nine Upper Hawthorne.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The soldiers would die.

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

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

Stefan could not kill them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell is this?”

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

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

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

“I told you not to come here!”

“Now I see why,” Stone replied.

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

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

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

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

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

“Morton Bloom called me–” Stone began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was only one word: “Sekretariat.”

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

He nodded.

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

“Your most important assignment,” the chief murmured.

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

“No,” he gasped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just give me time, she told herself defiantly.

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

Then a woman’s voice answered.

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

A long pause. “Yes, this is she.”

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

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

“I can’t say over the phone.”

“Who is this?”

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

“I–I’m not – Who are you?”

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

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

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

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

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

There had to be a solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Paula,” Stone said quietly.

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

“Charlie Stone.”

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

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

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

“You eat yet?”

“No,” Stone said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stone looked down at his Scotch glass, nodding.

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

“Great.”

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

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

“You like it, Paula? Your job?”

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

“Too much work, probably.”

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

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

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

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

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

“And?”

“And I lost.”

“I’m sorry.”

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

“Yeah, she is.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Paula, this is wrong.”

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

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

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

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

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

Stefan Kramer was about to set off their last bomb.

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

“As long as I’m careful–”

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

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

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

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

“I just don’t know,” his father said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The driveway could use another blacktopping, he thought.

Harold Bidwell’s estate, outside of Indianapolis, was generally considered the finest in the area, a handsome Georgian house set back a good distance from the main road. At precisely eleven o’clock in the morning, the front-door bell rang.

The uniformed butler opened the door and saw that the person who had rung the doorbell was a postman.

“Harold Bidwell?” the postman asked.

“This is his residence,” the butler said. He was a balding, bespectacled, portly man in his fifties whose mustache was flecked with gray.

“Certified letter,” said the postman.

“I can sign for that, thank you,” the butler said. The mailman, a young man with dark hair, stepped into the foyer and handed the butler the envelope on a clipboard.

The butler took it, leaning over to write. “I don’t see,” he muttered, “where I’m supposed–”

But he did not finish the sentence.

He gagged on the wire that the postman had slipped around his neck and had swiftly tightened. The butler’s tongue lolled out, his eyes bulged in an expression of sheerest terror, his face a beet red, his entire face contorted in a scream that would never come. His glasses clattered on the marble floor.

The postman closed the front door behind him and dropped the corpse on the floor as he entered the house.

Upstairs, Harold Bidwell was sitting in an armchair, where he had been sitting for a very long time in his silk dressing gown, terrified. It had been over half an hour since Warren Pogue had called, and he had been unable to stop trembling.

The channel was corrupted. How could it be?

Now the phone was ringing, and Bidwell reached over to get it, but then he heard a noise from the hallway, a rustling of some kind.

“Rico,” Bidwell called out.

It was not Rico. It was a man with dark hair wearing navy-blue pants and a light-blue shirt – a U.S. mailman. What was he doing in the house?

“What the–” Bidwell began.

The mailman had a revolver and was pointing it at him. “Don’t move,” the intruder said. He had a foreign accent that Bidwell couldn’t identify. “Please stay right where you are and you won’t get hurt.”

“What do you want?” Bidwell asked desperately. “Take whatever you want. Just take it – please don’t shoot me.”

“I want you to take these pills,” the mailman said, coming nearer.

The hand that wasn’t holding a gun was extended, two tablets in the flat of his palm.

“No!”

“Don’t worry,” the young man said. “These are just Demerol. Just a nice tranquilizer. I don’t want to have to shoot you.”

Bidwell was shaking his head violently. “Don’t. Please. Don’t.”

The gun was now at his head. “Swallow these,” the man said quietly. “I want you to be very calm. Open your mouth.”

Bidwell did as he was told. The man placed the two tablets on his tongue. “It’s poison,” Bidwell managed to say as he swallowed. “Where’s Rico?”

“It’s not poison,” the man said reassuringly. “I just want you to be very quiet. A pleasant narcotic. Now, please open your mouth. I want to make sure you’ve swallowed them.” He inserted several fingers into Bidwell’s mouth, moved them around, and was satisfied. “These will take effect quite soon. Now I want you to open your safe. While you’re still alert.”

“I don’t have a safe,” Bidwell protested.

“Come with me, please,” the intruder said, his gun still at Bidwell’s temple. Bidwell got to his feet. The man slowly walked the judge over to the one of the built-in bookcases behind the desk and pulled at a row of books, which came open in one segment, exposing the dial of a safe. “Please don’t lie to me. I also know what’s inside, and if need be I can open it myself. Please. Save me the bother.”

Bidwell spun the dial, his fingers trembling. His first attempt failed; the safe remained locked.

“Don’t make another mistake,” the young man cautioned. “I’m perfectly aware that if three attempts fail the safe’s lock is electronically frozen for an hour. Please, get it right.”

Bidwell spun the dial once again, this time opening it.

“Thank you,” the man said. He reached into the small safe, past the jewelry, and extracted a large, bulging manila envelope. “The gold and diamonds I leave to your heirs,” he said. “This is all I want.”

Bidwell now knew. “You!” His lips formed the words slowly now. “You’re … one …” A thought occurred to him suddenly, and he narrowed his eyes. “My heirs?”

“I think it’s time for a bath. Judge Bidwell.”

Bidwell could only shake his head slowly, his eyes wide with terror.

The young man escorted the judge out of the room and into the hall, the gun always at the old man’s temple. The bathroom was directly ahead.

Bidwell suddenly reached out a hand and pressed the oak door frame of the bedroom as they passed.

The young man smiled and did nothing. “I’ve disabled the burglar alarm,” he said. “That won’t work.”

They had reached the bathroom, which seemed terribly bright to Bidwell now, its overhead light shining glaringly on the white-and-black tiles. The young man guided Bidwell over to the toilet seat and sat him down on the closed lid. Bidwell’s eyes began to droop.

Then the man in the mailman’s uniform went over to the marble bathtub with its gold-plated fixtures and turned on both taps to full force. The water gushed out, splashing into the tub, filling it quickly.

Bidwell’s eyes were now almost closed. “What do you want with me?” he moaned, his voice almost inaudible under the roar of the water. “I’ve kept the secret. I’ve never said a word. You’re all madmen. I never said a word.”

The bath was now half full, and the young man began removing Bidwell’s clothes, starting with his silk dressing gown, unknotting the tie. In a short time, Bidwell was naked.

“Into the tub,” the young man said.

Bidwell slowly, slowly climbed into the tub. He whimpered softly. “The water’s cold!” he rasped.

“Now lie down.”

Bidwell lay down in the tub. His eyes were devoid of expression.

The young man rolled up his sleeves, took a large natural sponge from the bathroom vanity, and placed it over the old man’s face, depressing until Bidwell’s head was fully submerged, and the last bubbles of breath stopped.

“It’s so easy to fall asleep in the bath,” he said aloud.

As the phone rang, its reassuring tone crackling over the speaker, Pogue frantically increased the pitch on the propeller, downshifting to increase power at fewer engine revolutions. No luck. The plane was overheating.

Now the engine was slowing, and now, with a silence that terrified him, it stopped. Absolute, horrible silence. The plane began to sink. He tried the starter, but it would not fire up.

The phone was ringing. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Pick it up, you son of a bitch. Pick it up.

He began to talk aloud, to the unhearing handset. “Please, God,” he repeated several times. His limbs were frozen in fear. “Please, God.”

The phone continued to ring blandly. Where was Bidwell?

There was a wooded area below him. He thanked God for that; he could be over a city instead, and that would be that. The plane began to glide. Below him he saw a highway, where he could attempt an emergency landing.

In about sixty seconds, he would be on the ground, and he prayed to God that the landing worked.

He let the handset drop to the floor.

The operator’s voice came over the box: “Sir, I’m sorry. Your party doesn’t seem to be answering.”

His thoughts raced. What had happened? He had been thorough in his preflight check. It was impossible.

There was the highway, perhaps two hundred feet below. It would happen. He was safe.

He did not count on a crosswind.

He gasped, and then let out a long, shrill scream of terror.

The wind, without warning, carried the plane to the right, directly into the path of a bridge over the highway, into the concrete abutment, where it exploded into a ball of fire.

In the instant before he was killed, he suddenly understood why, why this had to happen now.

The fog had gotten so dense that Stone could not see even twenty feet ahead. His body weak, his limbs trembling from fear, he ran without once stopping. He could not blot out the horrifying image of his attacker’s body, sprawled in the alley a few blocks from Warren Pogue’s house.

He took a circuitous route to Paula’s apartment to make sure he was not followed. But visibility was so poor that anyone who might have been trying to follow Stone would have lost him in a second anyway.

It was a Saturday, which meant that Paula only had to work a half-day. She was home when Stone arrived, and she immediately took in his torn clothes.

“Oh, Christ, Charlie. What the hell happened?”

Stone told her.

“Oh, my God. You goddamn killed a man.”

“Everything came to the surface, Paula,” Stone whispered. “My father – everything–”

“We gotta get you out of here, out of Chicago.”

“We? No, Paula. I don’t want you to get involved any further.”

“I’m not involved.”

“Bullshit, Paula!” Stone exploded. “I should never have put you in danger in the first place.”

“Charlie–”

“I was extremely careful to make sure no one saw me arrive, yesterday or today. No one knows I’m here. No one can connect you to me. As long as we keep it that way, you’re safe. Now, I’m going to get a plane out of here – I’ve got to get to a guy in Paris. He may be the only one who can help me. You know I’m grateful for everything you’ve done, and–”

“Stone,” Paula said, her voice rising with anger. “You’re not flying anywhere tonight,” Paula said. “The airports are closed. Fogged in.”

“Jesus Christ. I can’t stay in the city! They’re sure to find–”

“My parents live in Toronto. We can drive there and you can fly out. Shit, it’s an okay drive. Anyway, from Canada it’s probably safer, don’t you think?”

Stone spoke slowly, thinking aloud. “It’s common knowledge that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has some sort of computer to check on people leaving and entering. People have been nabbed on the spot, at gunpoint. But most people don’t know that Canada’s not on our computer. …”

“There you go.” She gave a slight smile. “Anyway, don’t forget, they’re not after me.”

“Paula,” Stone said, “as long as you’re seen with me, you’re in real danger.” He shook his head, then bit his lower lip. “I won’t take that chance. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

“Don’t condescend to me, damn it,” Paula snapped. “I’m fully capable of making my own decisions, you get it? You fucking show up on my doorstep, now you’re stuck with me.” She slipped an arm around his waist and continued, sweetly, “Anyway, Stone, I know how to take care of myself. I don’t plan to die. I’ve got too big a caseload.”

“Paula–”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday. I can take a personal day on Monday, if I have to. If we leave now, we can be in Toronto by late tonight.”

Stone grinned at her enthusiasm, in spite of himself. “Now, I need to take a look at a map.”

“You got it.”

“Hey, you know something, Singer? Underneath that facade of grim professionalism there’s a real live human being.”

“Thanks,” Paula said sarcastically, poking him in one buttock with her fist. “Fuck you very much.”

They drove in Paula’s white Audi Fox along 1-94 and then north on 1-96 along the great expanse of Lake Michigan. Bruised and wounded from the fight in the alley, he found driving tiring and painful, so she drove, and soon he was fast asleep.

After a few hours, Paula woke him up.

“Where are we?” he mumbled.

“You asked me to wake you when we got into Michigan. You’re a barrel of fun as a traveling companion. I’m almost falling asleep at the wheel here, and I can’t put the radio on for fear of waking the wounded. We’re just north of a place called – what the hell is it? – Millburg. State of Michigan.”

“What time is it?”

“Four-thirty. Afternoon, not morning.”

“Thanks.”

“Why’d you want to get up now, anyway?”

Stone pulled a map from the map holder and examined it for a moment. “We need to make a detour.”

“What for?”

“Let’s stay on 96 for a while. Don’t make the turnoff here.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m a smart woman. Stone. I can deal with complicated situations.”

Stone was silent, studying the map. “I’ll explain later. I promise. Just keep going north. Fifty or sixty more miles. Okay?”

“This isn’t the way to Toronto.”

“I know.”

“You’re wide awake enough to talk?”

“Yeah. Just barely,” Stone said.

She paused, then said: “Let’s hear it. What’s going on?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure it out,” was all Stone allowed himself to say.

A little over an hour later, they came to Haskell, a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan, just over the line that divides Van Buren County from Allegan County. On the outskirts of town was a small general store appended to an old-fashioned Good Gulf filling station.

“Pull over here, please,” Stone said. “I need to get a few things.”

Paula looked at him quickly, shrugged, and steered the car into the station.

A few minutes later, he returned to the car with a pack of Merit cigarettes, a box of Ohio Blue Tip strike-anywhere matches, and a roll of toilet paper. “I forget, do you smoke?” he asked, lighting a cigarette.

“No,” she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “I didn’t know you did.”

“I used to, and I do now.”

“Toilet paper?”

Stone smiled cryptically, went around to the trunk, and pulled out a small, cheap suitcase he had picked up in Chicago that morning, which contained a few items of clothing and a backpack. He took off one of his shoes and pulled a concealed wad of bills from its lining. Then he returned to the front seat and pointed to a spot on the map. “This is about five miles north of here,” he said. “I’ll meet you there in, let’s say, two hours.”

“What the hell is this, Charlie?”

“Stop off somewhere for dinner. Take your time. Read. I’ll meet you in two hours.”

“How are you going to get there? On foot?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be there. Be patient if I’m a little late.”

Haskell was a minuscule town on the shore of Lake Michigan whose livelihood seemed to come from fishing and related industries all having to do with the lake. There was hardly any “downtown,” except a White Castle burger joint, a bar, a bank, and a couple of buildings that seemed to hold offices of various kinds. Directly down the hill from the main drag. Stone could see a timber jetty.

He stopped a passerby and asked about accommodations in the town. He was directed to a small, comfortable-looking clapboard inn called, unsurprisingly, the Haskell Inn. Stone introduced himself by his real name and shook the proprietor’s hand. He registered as Charles Stone, using his credit card. Most of the rooms were vacant, the innkeeper said; he could have his choice.

Drawing on a cigarette, Stone said, “Whatever’s comfortable. I’m a smoker, obviously, so if you’ve got a smoker’s room or something …”

“Nothing like that,” the innkeeper, a small balding man, said. “You’ve got your pick, just about. Just don’t smoke in bed. That’s our one hard-and-fast rule.”

“Don’t worry,” Stone assured him. He looked around the inn, taking in the worn Oriental rugs and the cherry paneling. “The place looks great.”

“Thanks,” the innkeeper said, genuinely pleased. “You in town on business, Mr. Stone?” It was clear from the way he asked it that the possibility of such a thing was remote.

“No. Pleasure. Getaway, really. I’ve been going through some rough times these past few weeks.”

“Here to escape,” the balding man said, nodding.

“Basically. When I was a boy, my father and I used to go fishing around here. Is there a place in town that rents fishing boats?”

“There isn’t a town on the lake that doesn’t. Sure. Capp’s.”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I’ll just check in and maybe even go out for a spin tonight. See if I can get a boat.”

Capp’s Boat Rental was located in a small shack on a small wooden pier. The owner, a rough-hewn, large, red-faced man, seemed to be closing up for the day. Stone, toting the backpack, introduced himself, also by his real name, and told him what he wanted.

“Sure, we got fishing boats,” the owner said. “Look, what do you want? We got everything from a sixteen-foot skiff to a one-hundred-eleven-foot boat. Fifty-three-foot Weejack, holds twelve guys. Thirty-six-foot Nauti-Buoy.”

“Just something small, for myself. Motorized, of course.”

“How about a Hawk?”

“How big is it?”

“Twenty-six-foot. Sport fisherman. Holds six; nice and comfortable for one. Just you?”

“Right. How much?”

“Fifty bucks a day.” The price seemed to have been set on the spot. He added hastily, “Of course, we supply everything. Rod and reel, bait, even lures. I mean, you probably got your own equipment, but we supply it anyway.”

“Sounds just fine. I’ll take it out now. Is that all right?”

“Tonight? No way, José. You gotta be out of your mind. It’s dark already.”

“I know that.” Stone explained about what a difficult past few weeks he’d had, how he desperately needed to go out for a spin, even if a brief one. A hundred dollars an hour wasn’t so bad, now, was it?

Reluctantly, the owner took Stone down to the pier. The Hawk was old and not in the best repair, but it would do. Stone checked to make sure there was an inflatable life raft and life jacket, then examined the rusty metal tackle-box. “Everything’s here,” Stone observed.

“I don’t like to rent at night,” the owner said truculently.

“I thought we discussed that.”

“I don’t know you from Adam. These boats belong to friends of mine. I got a responsibility to make sure they don’t get stolen.”

“But they’re all insured. They have to be.”

“I want a deposit.”

Stone pulled another hundred-dollar bill from his wallet. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“There’s gas in the tank?”

“Three-quarters full, I think.”

Stone unscrewed the gas cap to look inside.

“Hey,” the owner said suddenly. “Careful with that butt, guy. Gas is flammable, you know.”

“Sorry,” Stone said, tossing the cigarette into the water. “Boy, you got enough gas in there to get to Canada and back,” he joked. He slipped the rope off the steel post at the end of the jetty, got on board, and turned the ignition switch. It started right up. The boat rumbled beneath his feet. He removed his backpack and put on the orange life jacket.

“I’ll be back in an hour or so,” Stone yelled to the owner as he lit another cigarette.

He ran the boat at top speed, bouncing over swells on the lake’s surface, and made several large circles, enjoying the powerful little boat’s speed. In a few minutes, he was out of sight of shore. He steered the wheel to the right, moving parallel with the shoreline until he approached a dark patch of woods looming perhaps five hundred feet off, and then he shut off the engine.

The sudden quiet was almost palpable. He could hear the distant croak of a few bullfrogs. The water here was deep, Stone noted, and not stagnant, yet the shore was quite close. He could not be seen from any point on the shore.

He threw the life raft onto the water and watched it drift about, tethered to the boat by a thin rope. After grabbing the oars and setting them by the stern, near the floating life raft, he unzipped his canvas backpack and took out the roll of toilet paper and the matches. He unscrewed the gas cap and began unrolling the toilet paper into the tank, then jammed the rest of the roll into the tank’s opening. It fit snugly. He took a cigarette from the pack and lodged it into the roll so that it stuck out like an accusing finger, tobacco end out.

Then he pulled the cigarette out and, with one of the matches, lit the cigarette, drawing on it until it glowed bright red in the darkness. He wedged it back into the toilet-paper roll with the burning end away from the gas tank.

Leaving the backpack on board, he climbed over the edge while holding the oars, lowered himself into the icy water, and got onto the raft. His wounded arm made him nearly scream out in pain. After a shaky start, during which he almost landed head first in the water, he managed to row the raft quickly, and quietly, away from the boat. Because he was favoring his left arm, this proved to be more difficult than he’d anticipated. A few minutes later, he felt the scrape of sand; he had reached shore.

He pulled himself up, shivering from the cold in his soaked jeans and sweatshirt, and pulled the stopper from the raft to let the air out. If his calculations were accurate, he had only about ten or fifteen minutes to walk, during which he would probably catch a bad cold. His left arm throbbed.

Suddenly there was a terrific explosion, a low boom, and a great flash of light. He glanced around quickly and saw that the Hawk was now a ball of flame, illuminating the surface of the lake in bright, festive orange.

He accelerated his pace, trudging through the woods with the oars and the deflating rubber raft all clutched beneath his right arm. Even running did not warm him; he could feel himself shivering, the discomfort of the cold battling with the throbbing of his left arm in the pain centers in his brain.

Two hundred feet ahead or so, he saw Paula’s white Audi under a highway arc lamp, parked next to a picnic table. The dome light was on, and Paula was reading. He ran as fast as he could for the warmth of the car.

Weakly, Stone opened the door, startling Paula. She stared at him in disbelief.

“I need to put some stuff in the trunk,” Stone said.

“What the hell–?”

I no longer exist, he thought. But he said nothing.

From the window of the Director’s seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters in Langley, all you could see was forest, miles of the rolling Virginia woods. A splendid view, Roger Bayliss thought. It was marred only by a small round plastic device resembling a hockey puck, affixed to many windows in the CIA, which emits an ultra-high-pitched sound to foil laser surveillance of room conversations.

Director Templeton sat at his large contemporary white-marble-topped desk. Roger Bayliss stood, pacing nervously back and forth before the window. In front of Templeton’s desk was the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence, Ronald Sanders.

Next to him sat the senior agency psychiatrist, a sixty-two-year-old man named Marvin Kittelson. Kittelson, who knew everything about Charles Stone except why he was being pursued, was small and wiry with a deeply lined face. He had a gruff, coarse manner, which was somewhat muted in the director’s presence. A former navy lieutenant, he had received his psychiatric training at the University of California at Berkeley, and later made a name for himself at the Agency as head of the Technical Services Staff’s behavioral-sciences division. His expertise was in personality assessment; during times of crisis, Templeton – and the President – had called upon Kittelson to provide assessments of various world leaders, from Gorbachev to Castro to Qaddafi. Within the Agency, Kittelson was widely considered a genius.

“Our initial strategy failed miserably,” Templeton said. “It’s obvious now, with hindsight, that we should have moved in on him sooner, rather than using him to lead us to others.”

His three listeners nodded agreement, and Templeton continued. “Now the trail’s gone cold.” He addressed Bayliss directly. “Your strategy to abduct him was clearly misconceived.”

Bayliss looked suitably chastened. “The man’s far more agile, far more clever than we’d anticipated.”

“Stone’s a goddamned wild card,” Templeton barked. “Some kind of fucking lunatic. Instead of turning himself in, giving it up, he’s persisting.” He shook his head and scowled. “I just don’t understand it.”

“Ted, don’t forget how long Edwin Wilson eluded us,” Sanders put in. Edwin P. Wilson was by now a legendary case in CIA annals: a renegade CIA agent, con man, and illegal arms dealer to Muammar Qaddafi, who had managed to escape a CIA manhunt for four years.

“But Stone’s a goddamned amateur!” the Director said. “I don’t care if he’s the smartest analyst we have, he’s just not trained as a field operative!”

“He’s an amateur, yes,” said Sanders, “and he’s alone and outnumbered. But he’s resourceful and as strong as a goddamned ox. And he’s desperate.”

Unlike Templeton and Sanders, the Agency psychiatrist knew nothing of Bayliss’s attempt to entrap Stone, and he was savvy enough not to probe things that weren’t his affair. He smiled neutrally.

“Our people are plugged into every domestic and just about every foreign airline’s computers,” the Director said, exasperated. “If his name appears on any airline anywhere in the Western world, we’ll nab him in a second. And we’ve got his name on TECS.” The Treasury Enforcement Communications System is the national computerized system for tracking all persons who pass through U.S. ports of entry and departure.

Templeton turned to Kittelson. “Marvin, let’s hear from you. The man has managed to elude not just our field personnel but the Russians’ as well. It just doesn’t make any goddamned sense.”

“It makes a good deal of sense, Mr. Director,” Kittelson replied, pulling several sheets of notes from a manila file folder. “May I say, you folks, with your computers and your fancy software and your high-tech surveillance devices, you forget one thing.”

Templeton’s scowl lengthened. “Such as?”

“The human factor. I’ve gone through everything he’s written, every analysis of Soviet politics he’s ever done for Parnassus and before, and it’s clear he has a chess-player’s mind. It’s brilliant stuff. Really shrewd.”

“We know that,” Sanders interjected. “But that hardly explains–”

“You have professionals following this man,” Kittelson persisted with a shrug. “But, precisely because he’s an amateur, he doesn’t observe the laws that professionals do. He doesn’t follow predictable behavior patterns. Unlike most amateurs, though, he persists, as you say, with a vehemence that’s striking. You might say he’s ruthless.”

Bayliss nodded.

Kittelson continued: “I’ve put together a full profile on the man, and everything in his makeup, everything in his personal history, suggests that he’s become extremely dangerous.”

Ronald Sanders, the former Notre Dame quarterback, expressed his derision by sighing noisily. “Marvin,” the Director cut in, but Kittelson kept speaking.

“What I’m suggesting is this. He’s something of a loner with a strong drive for perfection, an abhorrence for self-pity. It’s logical that his coping mechanism to defend against the traumas he’s recently suffered was, in effect, to decompensate.”

“Explain,” Templeton said.

“I believe Stone’s exhibiting a ‘pathological grief reaction.’ I see this quite often among our Clandestine Services personnel. It’s an occupational hazard; it presents in those who tend to enter such lines of work.”

“All right,” the Director prompted.

“What you’re really saying,” Sanders remarked with a dismissive shake of his head, “is that this guy’s a nasty piece of work.”

“He’s become highly unpredictable and therefore dangerous,” Kittelson said with some irritation. “Rather than succumbing to grief, he calculates and exacts revenge. He may have trouble distinguishing reality from fantasy, and so he masters his considerable resources to fight. Only by acting out his rage can he cope with his grief. Look, I’ll tell you this. If I were to make up a textbook profile of the genesis of a human killing machine, I couldn’t do any better.”

One of the three telephones on Templeton’s desk rang, and Templeton picked it up at once. He listened, grunted, and hung up.

“Well, Marv, you’re right. Stone is out of control.”

“What are you talking about?” Bayliss demanded.

“They just found one of our people dead in Chicago, in the Rogers Park area.”

Bayliss whirled around, suddenly understanding. “The files Armitage tried to get!” So Stone actually had gone to visit this retired FBI agent.

“Roger,” Templeton ordered, “contact Malarek. I want maximum force on this. Stone’s obviously in the vicinity.” He got up from his chair, looked at the two men, and then murmured: “I think the trail has finally gotten warm.”

Wrapped in a blanket, Stone fell asleep almost immediately. Paula put the heat up full blast, and gradually Stone’s chills melted away. They took 196 north to Grand Rapids; there they got on 96 and took it across Michigan, skirting Lansing, and into Detroit, where Paula stopped briefly at a Ramada Inn for coffee. It was close to midnight when they arrived at the border crossing at Windsor, Ontario.

“Wake up, Charlie,” Paula said. “Time to become Patrick Bartlett.” She had borrowed some credit cards and a birth certificate from one of her neighbors, identification enough for the lax Canadian border guards. Stone knew it would be foolish to use his own, and he wanted to avoid showing his forged passport until it was absolutely necessary.

The passing was brief and perfunctory. The immigration agent glanced at Paula’s and Stone’s IDs and asked what the purpose of their visit was.

“We’re visiting my mother,” Paula explained. That was that, and they were over the border.

“Do you think they’d really have put your name on some kind of computer?” Paula asked when they were safely down 401.

“Yes,” Stone said groggily. “By now I’m almost certain they’re watching every border crossing.”

Within a day, his “death” would undoubtedly be reported to the Haskell town police. The owner of Capp’s Boat Rental would probably remember the man named Charles Stone, would remember most of all that he had told the fellow not to smoke around gasoline. The innkeeper would remember Stone, too. The accidental death would be quickly investigated, and just as quickly set down in the police logs. But would it be believed by his pursuers? Probably not forever. Stone would know soon enough, but for the time being he considered that he had some breathing space.

“Charlie,” Paula said, an hour after they had crossed the border.

“Yes?”

“Listen, I wanted to tell you something. About our – making love and all that.” She was visibly embarrassed, and she spoke slowly. “I know we shouldn’t have done it, so don’t think I’ve got the wrong idea, okay?”

Stone nodded.

A long moment passed; then Paula continued: “But I just wanted to tell you. I haven’t made love with anyone in, like, a year.”

Stone nodded again.

“This isn’t easy for me to talk about, okay?”

“Take your time,” Stone said gently.

There was another lull, and then: “You know how I went after that rapist, that case I told you about? I mean, the guy was guilty as hell, and I guess anyone would be mad, especially a woman. But – Jesus, Charlie, I was attacked last year.”

“What do you mean, attacked?”

“I mean, nothing happened. Thank God. But it was close. I was coming home from work really late one night, in that shitty neighborhood.” She fell silent, and then continued. “The guy was scared off by a passerby, thank God.”

“Paula–”

“You know, I took a martial-arts class after that, so I could defend myself, but that was the easy part. The hard part was, you know, dealing with sex.”

“I understand–”

“No, listen. I just wanted to say …” She didn’t finish the thought, but Stone understood, touched by this rare display of Paula’s tenderness.

The Tastee Do-Nut shop on Elm Street in Haskell, Michigan, is legendary for its glazed buttermilk doughnuts. Its coffee is less than legendary, but no one ever complained about it to the Tastee’s owner, Millie Okun.

At a little after ten in the morning, precisely half of a buttermilk doughnut sat uneaten on a plate in front of Randall Jergensen, Haskell’s chief of police and one of its two police officers. Chief Jergensen had already had three of them; besides, he was deeply involved in the Haskell Mercury’s lively report of the all-county basketball championship game last night.

Chief Jergensen was a large-framed, large-bellied man with a round face and a chin that barely demarcated his face from the ample folds of his neck. He was forty-seven, and he had been divorced for almost three years from his wife, Wendy. He thought about her every day and then immediately praised the Lord that he lived alone.

“Millie,” he said from behind the Mercury, not looking up. “How ’bout a refill?”

“Coming right up, Randy,” Millie Okun said, sweeping the glass coffee pot from the Bunn-O-Matic and lofting it over to Chief Jergensen’s mug.

At that moment. Randy Jergensen’s squawk box went off.

“Shit,” he said, and eyed the fresh coffee longingly.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The President had assembled his chief foreign-policy advisers in the Cabinet Room to make the final preparations for the Moscow summit.

Present, along with Secretary of State Donald Grant, Director of Central Intelligence Theodore Templeton, National Security Adviser Admiral Craig Mathewson, and Roger Bayliss, were sixteen staff members of the National Security Council.

Only about half of the people in the room had been invited to Moscow – a list the President had drawn up with Admiral Mathewson – and so there were, of course, some bruised egos. The hierarchy had become clear early in the administration. There were those who were going to Moscow, and those who weren’t. To Bayliss, it was that simple.

And then, about halfway through the meeting, came an unexpected remark from the President concerning the outbreak of terrorism in Moscow, a remark that instantly filled Bayliss’s stomach with acid.

“I’m told by some pretty reliable sources,” the President said casually, “that there’s more to this terrorism than meets the eye.”

Bayliss’s glance moved from the President to the Secretary of State to the Director of Central Intelligence. Oh, Christ. Was it out?

There was a beat of silence, until it became clear that the President was addressing Ted Templeton.

Bayliss felt momentarily dizzy.

Had the President somehow learned – impossible as it seemed – about the existence of the Sanctum? The possibility was always there; presidents always had their own private networks. If he did, there was little doubt he’d hit the ceiling. An intelligence operation of this magnitude kept secret from him! No matter that the result of the conspiracy would be greeted by the President – and the world – with jubilation. He’d certainly disapprove of the committee’s conspiratorial methods, and then it would all be over. Decades and decades of work, of careful preparations – obliterated.

But he couldn’t possibly know. No committee in the history of American intelligence had ever been as invisible as Sanctum.

“As you know,” the President said, “I’m hardly a coward. I’ve traveled places, taken risks that made my Secret Service people go out of their skins.”

The working group, knowing how gregarious and outgoing the President was, murmured appreciatively.

Trouble, Bayliss thought.

“Well, I got some information this morning,” the President continued, nodding toward CIA Director Templeton, “information that frankly concerns me. About the terrorism in Moscow. Ted?”

Bayliss understood at once. Templeton looked embarrassed, chastened – like a schoolboy caught by the teacher passing a note. Somehow the President had gotten information from the CIA that didn’t come from Templeton. The President must have another channel. And Templeton was no doubt embarrassed that there was information he was withholding from the President.

Yes. The President had somehow learned that the bombs in Moscow weren’t just homemade things cooked up in a couple of dissidents’ garages. They were made of American explosives, American plastique. Understandably, the President found that alarming.

“Yes, Mr. President,” Templeton said, clearing his throat and brushing back his gray hair from his large square forehead. His face was flushed. “One of our assets in Moscow managed to turn up a few fragments of two of the bombs that went off recently. Our forensics people have determined that the plastique was American in manufacture.”

Anxiously, Bayliss watched. Templeton was squirming. Sometimes Bayliss wished Sanctum had found it acceptable to inform the President of their maneuverings. Times like this, especially, when there was a risk that the President might just call the summit off. But of course that mustn’t happen. Nothing at all must be allowed to alert M-3’s Politburo colleagues. Nothing must make them suspicious.

The President nodded. He was in his silent, uncommunicative mode, which all of his aides found most baffling – did it signal anger? boredom? contentment?

“Mr. President,” Templeton continued, “I’m not concerned.”

“You’re not?”

“No, sir. It’s clear that the Russian terrorists must have gained access to American material. Maybe some of them are ex-soldiers who served in Afghanistan and managed to get their hands on American materiel captured during the war.”

The President nodded.

“If I thought there was anything of serious concern,” Templeton said, “I would certainly have brought this matter up sooner.”

“Remarks?” the President suggested to the rest of the National Security Council.

“Yes.” It was the Secretary of State. “I wouldn’t send the President into the middle of a war zone. And I certainly can’t countenance your going to Moscow at this time, Mr. President. I have the feeling Moscow is ready to explode, and I think it would be foolhardy for you to go. I think we should cancel.”

“You do?” the President said.

“I have to agree,” his national-security adviser said. “I don’t know how much protection we can offer over there. Maybe we should run it by Secret Service.”

The President nodded and cupped his chin in his fist.

For the next twelve minutes, Bayliss sat uncomfortably in his seat, watching the debate.

“If I may, Mr. President,” Templeton at last put in. “I’ve already expressed my opinion that Kremlin’s security has matters well in hand. But there’s another factor to consider: Gorbachev’s position.”

“Meaning?” the President asked.

“He needs all the support he can get right now,” Templeton explained. “If you cancel the summit meeting, I’ve no doubt his prestige within the Soviet leadership will plummet. And then – well, then we’ve got real troubles.”

“All right,” the President said abruptly. “We’re going to Moscow. Now, let’s move on.”

Templeton had won him, and the rest of the NSC, over. He’d been brilliant, Bayliss thought. It was all over now; the President’s mind had been made up.

I hope, Bayliss told himself silently as the meeting proceeded, I hope that in fact nothing does happen during the summit. Virtually unthinkable, though. M-3 had been extraordinarily careful for decades.

Yet the man would have to be even more careful. The man called M-3, together with the group that called itself the Sanctum, was about to change the world forever.

Minutes later. Stone was seated in the front seat of an old black Russian automobile, a Volga, whose windshield bore a blue Intourist-insignia decal. The taxi ride from the airport to the hotel was provided by Intourist free of charge, and was not optional.

The driver said nothing as they motored down a stretch of highway lined with scrubby woods and an occasional placard marked with red-and-white Cyrillic lettering. In a little over half an hour, they were on Tverskaya Street, formerly Gorky Street, one of Moscow’s main thoroughfares, and then, when the Kremlin loomed just up ahead, they turned right and pulled into a parking space in front of the National Hotel.

The hotel dated from before the Revolution, one of very few remaining pre-Revolutionary hotels in Moscow, where, Stone remembered once reading, Lenin had lived in 1918 for several months while his rooms at the Kremlin were being restored.

From the street, it was a plain-looking building of brown stone. Russians in fur hats and shapeless coats strode past briskly. The driver pulled the taxi up to the front of the hotel and shut off the motor.

“Wait,” Stone said.

The driver turned around questioningly.

“Where can I change money?” Stone asked in Russian.

“The Intourist office on the next block.”

“Is it still open tonight?”

“For another hour.”

“Take me there, please.”

The driver shrugged, started the car up, and maneuvered back around to Tverskaya Street.

When Stone had changed some of his cash into rubles, he returned to the taxi and paid him. “All right, I’m all set. I’ll walk to the hotel.”

The driver furrowed his brow. “Do what you want,” he said, pulling away from the curb.

Stone stood on Tverskaya Street for a few minutes until a gypsy cab, no doubt identifying Stone as a foreigner, came to a halt. The car was also a Volga, but this one looked at least twenty years old.

Stone got in and gave the address.

The cab drove past the Kremlin, on Marx Prospekt, and then on to Kalinin Prospekt, across the Moscow River at the Hotel Ukraine, to Kutuzov Prospekt. Stone looked out the window at the sights they passed: seeing Moscow for the first time, after hearing about it for so long, was somehow like visiting the set of a movie you have seen many times before.

The city had an air of unreality, larger than life, drabber and grayer than he had expected, the streets broader and ill-lit. They approached a massive ecru stone building. In front, a uniformed guard stood in a booth. He exchanged a few words with the driver, and then the driver turned around. “He says I’ve got to let you out here.”

Stone got out and paid the driver; then, once again checking the address he had written down, he found the right entrance number, and the apartment number.

There was no doorbell; he knocked.

She opened the door.

He was not prepared for her beauty. Certainly he had thought about her quite a bit in the last few, desperate weeks, remembering what she looked and sounded like in New York, wondering whether she would shut the door on him, just as she had hung up when he’d called from Toronto.

But he had not remembered how astonishingly alluring she was. Her blond hair shone in the dim light from the hallway; her high cheekbones were even more finely sculpted than he remembered.

“Charlotte, I need your help,” he said.

The Director of Central Intelligence, Ted Templeton, was the first to speak. He looked purposefully around the black marble table, first at the younger members of the Sanctum – his deputy, Ronald Sanders, and Roger Bayliss of the National Security Council – and then, a respectful smile on his face, at the older members: Evan Reynolds and Fletcher Lansing, the legendary ones, the best and the brightest.

“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is what would possess him to go to Moscow. Of all places.”

Fletcher Lansing immediately raised his still-strong chin, and interrupted. Lansing’s voice was hoarse, his elocution precise and mid-Atlantic. Bayliss was reminded of movie actors of the 1930s. “Out of the frying pan–” Lansing began.

“In heaven’s name, why would this surprise you?” asked Evan Reynolds irritably. “It seems perfectly logical to me. His trail seems to lead right there – as if he intends to find the evidence that might exonerate his father and himself. That’s not worth discussing.”

“I hope it’s personal,” Lansing said. “Unless he’s really gone rogue – defected to the Russians, selling what he knows …”

“If the man is in the Soviet Union,” Reynolds said, “it’s all the more urgent – imperative, in fact – that he be found and neutralized at once.”

Bayliss found himself glancing around the chamber; he could not help thinking, even at this time of great tension, that he was overdressed. It made him feel all the more out of place. Most of these men had on the almost worn-out, fashionless blue suits of old money. Whereas Bayliss was wearing a charcoal-gray Italian sharkskin suit that looked quite as expensive as it was, a yellow-and-blue-striped silk Metropolitan Club tie, and an elegant pair of snakeskin loafers as thin as tissue paper. He was perfectly aware that he looked like a young man on the make.

And he reminded himself, as he did often, why he was there, why he’d been invited to serve on this super-secret committee: he was one of the few members of the National Security Council who received not only the NID, the top-secret National Intelligence Daily, but the far more secret PDB, the President’s Daily Brief, ten pages of the choicest intelligence – which very few in Washington were privileged to see. The committee needed a man in the White House. They also needed someone to serve as a link to Malarek, M-3’s man in Washington.

That they now had. And more: Bayliss had set things up so that the American Flag Foundation bugged the White House’s unsecured lines (to make sure no secrets had been leaked) and, more important, kept Malarek under close telephonic surveillance. Never take chances.

Now Bayliss knew what they were about to ask. Three minutes later, it came.

Fletcher Lansing glanced briefly at Bayliss, then looked away. “Mr. Bayliss will have to contact Malarek. M-3’s people can do the job.”

“No,” Bayliss said hoarsely.

There was a long, shocked silence. Bayliss reddened visibly. “You want me to order Charles Stone’s death,” he said.

“We want you to inform M-3 that Stone is in Moscow, assuming his people don’t know.” Lansing spoke softly. “That’s all.”

Bayliss could feel four pairs of eyes on him. “There’s too much I don’t know,” he said haltingly. “I know you – we – have been running a mole. Okay. But how sure can we be about this … this M-3 …?”

This was, Bayliss knew, a shocking violation of Sanctum protocol. You didn’t ask questions, call into doubt the wisdom of the elders.

The long silence was punctuated by the hum of the ventilation equipment.

“I don’t think he needs to know the details,” Sanders said, hunching his shoulders as if he were still quarterbacking his college football team.

“He’s in this with us,” Fletcher Lansing said. “A very valuable member of the team, I might add. Ted?”

“M-3 is the Agency’s greatest secret since the days of Bill Donovan,” Templeton said. “Bigger, even. Too big even to be entrusted to the Agency’s own personnel. His name is Andrei Pavlichenko.”

Bayliss’s eyes widened. “Oh, my God.”

“The Pavlichenko file is so ultrasecret,” Sanders put in, “that it’s not even referred to on the most highly secret, limited-access computers within the Agency.”

Templeton continued: “Pavlichenko was a young, rising star in the Soviet intelligence service in 1950 when he was approached by one of our people.”

“How the hell did you manage to press him into service?” Bayliss asked. “What did you get on him?”

Lansing gave Templeton a significant glance, and nodded.

Templeton nodded in return, and said: “We learned that he’d been concealing his background. His parents were deported, murdered, by Stalin’s people, and he was raised by a relative. Never would have been let within a thousand yards of the Lubyanka if anyone knew it. So this guy works his way up, I mean fast, and soon he’s the chief assistant to Beria, Stalin’s boss of the secret police. With our help, obviously.”

“That means he’s secretly a Ukrainian sympathizer,” Bayliss said. “In essence, an enemy of the state.”

The elderly Evan Reynolds replied: “It’s not the first time someone like that has made it into the upper echelons of the Soviet leadership. Don’t forget about Petro Shelest, who masqueraded as an unshakable supporter of Russian dominance over his own Ukrainian people, a dedicated member of the Politburo. Only later was he uncovered as a secret Ukrainian nationalist.”

“But, Ukrainian or not,” Lansing interjected, “the point is that he’s fiercely opposed to the whole damn Soviet system – a system that murdered his family. That’s what we can count on.”

“And you gave Pavlichenko chicken feed,” Bayliss said, using the intelligence jargon for genuine but minor secrets provided to nourish moles.

“Morsels, table scraps here and there,” Templeton said. “Not so much that it would draw suspicion to him, but enough to make him look awfully impressive. We’d tell him how a president was thinking on something, as long as it didn’t harm our interests. And, once in a while, bigger stuff, too. Advance warning on several air strikes in Vietnam. We’ve even had to blow some of our intelligence operations. Even Bay of Pigs, when we saw it was destined for failure …”

“Enough to give him a boost up the ladder,” said Fletcher Lansing, “without damaging our own interests in any serious way. Just enough to make him seem terrifically shrewd.”

“And how do you know this guy isn’t going to turn out as bad as Beria?” Bayliss asked.

Lansing interlaced his fingers and made a tent. “We don’t assume the power struggle will be bloodless, Mr. Bayliss. It’s not like electing a president, you know. But we admire his vision: we have, in the past, been in touch with him through intermediaries. In the last few years – since his elevation to the Politburo – Pavlichenko has evidently deemed it unwise to allow any communications whatsoever.”

“His vision?” Bayliss asked.

“Do you know about Kyivan Rus’?” Lansing said. “You are a Soviet specialist, are you not?”

“I was a Soviet-affairs specialist in graduate school,” Bayliss said. “Not Russian.”

Lansing shook his head in mild disapproval. “It’s hard to know anything worthwhile about the Soviet Union and not know Russian history intimately. In the eleventh century, what is now Russia was then a political entity, a nation-state, known as Kyivan Rus’, ruled by Prince Yaroslav, also known as Prince Yaroslav the Wise. It was the first Russian state. Kyiv, in those days, was the seat of Russian power – you know, of course, that Kyiv is the capital of the modern-day Ukraine.”

“That I do, sir,” Bayliss retorted.

“Well. Kyivan Rus’ maintained close and friendly ties with the heads of the European nations; it was a decentralized, loosely held federation of areas. There was much trade. It was the birthplace of the Russian enlightenment.”

“I see,” Bayliss said, as the significance of Lansing’s history lesson began to dawn on him.

“Pavlichenko,” Lansing resumed, “as a fervent Ukrainian patriot whose parents were taken away from him and murdered by Stalin’s forces, has all his life cherished a vision of tearing down the old and starting over. He sees himself as – well, I suppose, a modern Yaroslav the Wise.”

“But Gorbachev’s already making serious changes,” Bayliss objected.

Templeton spoke, sighing petulantly as if Bayliss were a tiresome child. “Gorbachev, as we’ve discussed a thousand times, is short-term. He can’t last – won’t last. And then – a matter of months, maybe weeks – his enemies do away with him, and we’ve got a right-wing, neofascist Soviet leadership that will be dangerous. We can’t take that chance. We can’t put our eggs in that basket.”

Bayliss nodded, transfixed.

“But if we give Gorbachev a chance–” Bayliss began.

The Director of Central Intelligence cleared his throat. “Roger, Gorbachev has had it. It’s time to put our man in. If we wait any longer, history will pass us by. And then we’re back to the Cold War.”

“But how, exactly, does Pavlichenko plan to seize power?” Bayliss asked.

“We don’t know, Roger, and frankly we don’t care. But all the signals are that it will happen soon, probably within six months. Sometime after the Moscow summit. Now, some of us will be going to Moscow in a matter of hours. While you’re there, get a good look around you, because things are going to be different when you return on the TWA Washington-Moscow shuttle. Next time our President goes over there, I predict, he’s going to be negotiating with a different man.”

Bayliss nodded. “I’ll contact Malarek,” he said, “the moment I leave.” He nodded again, swallowing, and smiled at the rest of the Sanctum. “Thank you. I appreciate it.” He shot his cuffs, felt his chest tighten. “Thank you.”

Charlotte gasped.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered harshly, her face burning with anger. “What’s happened to you?”

“I need you, Charlotte.”

“God damn you. God damn you. What did you do? For Christ’s sake, what did you do?”

Stone tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away, glowering.

“The place looks great,” Stone said gently, looking around at her living room. The apartment was furnished in her simple but elegant taste, spare but neatly arranged, the pale-peach couch and chairs complemented by the ocher Oriental rug. “Sort of like the place where we spent our honeymoon. Only you forgot the heart-shaped bidets.”

Charlotte didn’t laugh. She looked back at him, forlornly.

“Why did you hang up on me?” he asked.

“Jesus! We can’t talk here!” She pointed a finger toward the ceiling. He watched her, taking in her fragrance, her poise.

He found himself marveling, as he so often had in the past, that he was married to this woman. He felt a spasm of guilt, too, that he could ever have hurt her.

“Where can we talk?”

“Let’s go for a walk,” she said icily.

She put on her coat, and they walked out of the building, toward the street, passing the stout uniformed guard, who nodded at Charlotte without smiling, looking closely at Stone.

She strode confidently. This was, in many ways, her city, and Stone could sense it immediately in the way she navigated purposefully, yet unthinkingly. The time apart had done good things for her. She seemed to possess an inner calm, a confidence she’d never had before. He wondered whether she had closed him out. Whether it was too late.

The streets were cold, with a few drifts of discolored snow, remains of a recent snowfall that had melted and then refrozen. Several of the buildings were festooned with long red banners proclaiming the Revolution Day ceremony that was to take place in two days.

“You must have a million things going on,” Stone said as they went down the street. “With the summit, I mean.”

She seemed relaxed to be able to talk about her work: it was safe, neutral. But at the same time, she seemed reserved. Was it resentment? Or something else? “The President’s party arrives tomorrow,” she said. “There’s really not much to say about that – we’ll shoot tape of the arrival at the airport, I’ll do a stand-up. There aren’t that many press conferences or briefings. Then, the day after tomorrow, we’ll get some footage of the whole shebang, the President standing next to Gorbachev up on Lenin’s tomb. Great photo opportunity, as the politicians say.”

Watching her, he was momentarily overcome with affection, and he slipped an arm around her. She seemed to stiffen.

“Charlotte, why did you hang up on me?”

“Come on, Charlie. They tap correspondents’ phones.”

“You were protecting me.”

She shrugged. “Least I could do.”

He told her what had happened, virtually everything – from Alfred Stone’s murder to the frenzied chase in Paris. Charlotte interrupted only to tell him about Sonya.

Stone stared. “So she is alive.” He shook his head, smiling, elated to see his hunch confirmed.

“And now I know what she was concealing,” Charlotte said. She felt alternating waves of love and anger. He had a claim on her, knew her as no one else did, and yet he seemed impossibly distant. Even in a few short weeks, he had changed: he’d become weary, scarred, cautious, constricted.

He told her about Dunayev, the NKVD defector in Paris, and the defector’s story about the Katyn Forest Massacre and the network of Old Believers. Charlie was exhausted, but the story tumbled out, urgently and even coherently.

They were at the deserted banks of the Moscow River. Charlotte had listened for twenty minutes, occasionally interposing a question.

She took his hand and gave it a quick squeeze; he held on with a strength and firmness that she found comforting. She felt something down below, a surge, a warmth and a weakness that arose, she knew, from aching to make love to him, and that confused her hopelessly.

Now she turned and faced him. “I didn’t believe you at first, you know.”

“I understand. It sounds crazy, I realize.”

She stared ahead at the Stalin Gothic hulk of the Hotel Ukraine. “It really did. First your father. And then, yesterday morning, I read a news item that came across the Associated Press wire.” She paused, not knowing how to say it, and then she blurted: “Charlie, Paula Singer is dead.”

Stone was leaning against a low concrete wall, and for a moment, Charlotte thought he hadn’t heard her, or maybe didn’t understand, but then he seemed literally to crumple, to slide to the ground, his head buried in his arms.

“No,” he said, his voice muffled. “I was so goddamned careful. I was … She must have done something to …”

And Charlotte, unable to stand there any longer, sank to the ground and put her arms around him.

Stone watched, as if through a scrim, Charlotte cross the street to a phone booth.

He felt a lump rise in his throat, a rush of love for her. Some minutes earlier, Charlotte had told him about what Paula had discovered just before her death.

Her information was vital. Now everything was beginning to make sense.

His attacker in Chicago was connected to an organization that did the dirty work the intelligence agencies were prohibited from doing.

Did that mean that the Agency had gone after him, one of their own? What else could it mean?

And then Charlotte had revealed the leak she’d gotten from a source in the KGB that the CIA was behind the bombings in Moscow.

Another piece of the pattern. But now she needed to know more from Sergei. Was there anything else her source had discovered?

She had to contact Sergei directly. A terrible risk – a quick phone call very late at night – but she’d be as careful as she could be. They had no choice.

He could see her hang up the phone and make another call, gesturing as she spoke, her motions agitated, distraught. Then she hung up again, this time with great force.

And called out to him.

“Charlie!” She was now running across the street toward him. Her voice was high and frantic. “Oh, God.”

“What is it?”

“He’s dead.”

“Who?”

“Sergei. Oh, God. My source. I called his private number at work – he works late at night. Normally I only have to say a word or two, so it’s safe – but someone else answered the phone. So I did something I’ve never done before: I called him at home. And his wife answered. I told her I was a colleague of his from Latvia, to explain my accent, and she told me he was dead. Killed in an explosion at the lab.”

“When?”

“I don’t know.” She had begun to cry. “It must have just happened. But I said I wanted to go to the funeral, you know – I didn’t know what else to say – and she said the body had already been cremated without her knowing. One day he was there; the next day she had his ashes in an urn.”

“Executed,” Stone said tightly.

Charlotte suddenly threw her arms around Stone, squeezing him tightly. He could feel her tears hot against his neck, her breathing heavy. “He was caught in it,” she said. “The same thing that killed Paula.”

Stone held her for a long time. At last he spoke. “I don’t want you involved.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Yeah. Yeah, you have a choice. I’m cornered; I have to fight. And, sure, I want your help, your contacts, your brain. But I don’t know what I’d do in your place.”

“Oh, hell, sure you do,” she shot back angrily. She gripped his shoulders as if to shake him, but only stared intently into his eyes. “No, Charlie. Damn it, I don’t think I do have a choice. After what happened to your father – well, that changed everything for me. Everything’s changed. What kind of person do you think I am, that I could possibly turn away from you now?”

He moved his face close to hers, and then kissed her.

“I love you,” he said.

She looked at him, startled. Then she pulled away from him and dabbed at her tears with the back of her hands. “So what are we going to do?”

He bowed his head, and then looked up at her. “Listen, Charlotte …”

“Charlie,” she said brusquely, suddenly all business, as if the moment had not passed between them. “What are we going to do?”

After a pause, he replied: “Lehman’s daughter is one of the keys. I may be able to force her to reveal more than she wants. More likely, I can use her to get to others who can help.”

She nodded.

“But the first order of business is to try to get to whoever’s the head of this Old Believer network.”

“For what?”

“Because we – I – need help. I can’t be in this alone any longer.”

“But you don’t have a name. You don’t have anything.”

“That’s why I need you.”

“But you can’t just walk around talking to Russians and asking them if they happen to know anyone who was sent up for a secret court-martial during World War II, and then, if they do, if they happen to know the name of the man who terminated the court-martial. Charlie, that’s the sort of thing that’s not public. Sure, Moscow’s admitted its guilt in the Katyn Forest Massacre – but I’d be shocked if the records aren’t locked up. This is a nation where just about everything is a state secret.”

“There has to be some way.”

“Who do you think this guy is? Some sort of dissident, maybe – someone like Andrei Sakharov was, who’s well connected? Maybe a Party leader who was once thrown out of office, now in disfavor, nursing his grudges?”

“Anything’s possible. But there have to be records. At Parnassus, they always kept us insulated from sources and methods; I wouldn’t know. But you know this city better than anyone, and if you can’t – What?”

Her eyes were wide, and she was suddenly smiling broadly. “Records,” she said under her breath. “Yes.” She reached over and kissed him briefly on the cheek. “I think there’s a way. I can try tomorrow, first thing.”

“Charlotte, if you can, that’s tremendous. But there’s just no time.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“If anyone can do it, you can.”

“Well. Tomorrow afternoon, the President’s arriving. I can ask my producer to attend the briefings for me; there’s not going to be anything big happening, anyway. It’s unusual, but she’ll do it.”

They had turned around and were heading back in the direction of Charlotte’s apartment building.

“We need to put together the pieces,” Stone said. “What do we know? That the CIA, or maybe some faction of it, is involved in backing, or initiating, a wave of terrorism in Moscow. Linked to an impending coup, in which their asset, M-3, will seize power. Yes?”

Charlotte nodded, listening intently. “Yes. And the wave of terrorism is causing the same sort of havoc that the release of the Lenin Testament might have done a few decades ago.”

Stone spoke rapidly now, his words flowing into hers. “We know this M-3 was linked to Beria and to Lehman, through Lehman’s daughter somehow. But I still don’t get it.”

“So what’s being planned? What sort of incident, if there’s going to be an incident?”

“Maybe it’s some sort of armed action, a military assault. Every indication tells us it will take place on Revolution Day, during the summit.”

“When the President of the United States is there, right?” Charlotte said. “So that, if something happens, maybe it will be seen as directed against the President? Is that possible?”

“Yes. That makes a lot of sense.”

“If there’s an attack on the Soviet leadership, it will have to be coordinated by someone who’s got the power to do so, right?”

“Of course. Someone in control of the army, maybe, or the air force. A general.”

“Like who?”

“M-3 could be any one of twenty or thirty people,” Stone said quietly. “Any of whom is in a position to coordinate a seizure of power. Could be anyone, from the Politburo to the army to … yes.”

“Huh?”

“In 1953, Beria planned to be absent on the day of his planned coup, probably to marshal his forces. If he was on the scene, he couldn’t seize the others, so he had to absent himself.”

“So?”

“Okay. What if M-3, whoever he is, really is planning a coup on Revolution Day. Wouldn’t he, too, be absent?”

“Possibly, Charlie, but by the time we see who’s absent at the ceremonies, obviously it’ll be too late.”

He smiled. “Maybe not. Listen to this. Revolution Day is the biggest state ceremony the Soviet Union has. The biggest deal by far. You don’t miss it unless you’re on your deathbed. I remember seeing footage of Leonid Brezhnev up there on Lenin’s tomb, about to totter over. People say he was out in the cold so long up there that he caught a cold and died. If you’re absent, it’s a sign that you’re out of power, so no one just happens to stay home.”

“So far I follow you.”

“Okay. If the Politburo gets wind that someone important isn’t at the ceremonies, they’ve got to be suspicious, maybe send someone to check on the man’s whereabouts. Right?”

“You’re the expert, Charlie. I just report the stuff.”

“So what would you do if you wanted to be absent on such an important day believably?”

“Get sick. Really sick.”

“Suddenly?” Stone prompted.

“Probably not. Ah, I see. God, you’re good. I’d have been sick for a while, so when I sick out, no one blinks an eye.”

“Exactly.”

“And how does this help us?”

“You’re the reporter. All I ever did was analyze the information. You tell me.”

“Medical records,” Charlotte said.

“Yes!” Stone almost shouted. “Do you remember when Yuri Andropov was dying, only the world was told he had a cold?”

“And he really had kidney failure,” Charlotte said. “But the word was out on that.”

“This is a city of rumors; rumors is how information is spread.”

“Yes, Charlie. Yes, I have a source.”

“Who?”

“One of my predecessors had a source in the Kremlin Clinic. A doctor who treated Yuri Andropov. And – because he believed that openness was the only right thing – he leaked information about the state of Andropov’s health.”

“And this source has access to the medical records of the leadership,” Stone whispered. “But how do you get to this guy?”

“Come on, Charlie. Give me credit. I’m not the best-connected journalist in Moscow for nothing. Do you think I wouldn’t get to meet the guy?”

“You’re amazing.”

“You know I want to do whatever I can to help,” she said. “For the memory of your father. And, damn it, for you, too.”

He bent toward her and kissed her, and, to his surprise, she kissed back. Then abruptly she stopped.

Stone spoke first: “Someday you’ll find it possible to forgive and forget.”

She looked at him penetratingly and did not reply. Her eyes had filled with tears.

His words were now choked and awkward. He moved his face slowly, slowly toward hers, and all the while he looked directly in her eyes. Softly and tentatively he touched his lips to hers, waiting for a response, and when one came, after a moment’s hesitation, he was instantly aroused, and his heart felt like it was being squeezed.

“Hey,” he managed to whisper, “you need a little sugar?”

The Kremlin Clinic, a five-story classical building of red granite adorned with fake Greek columns and a cupola, sits behind a high iron fence in the center of Moscow, near the Kremlin and across the street from the Lenin Library. It is here that members of the Soviet nomenklatura, the elite, receive medical treatment. Everything is high-security here, and the doctors are carefully vetted – so carefully, in fact, that many of the most talented specialists are disqualified on the grounds of ethnic background or suspected unreliability. For this reason, the Kremlin Clinic, which is run by the Fourth Administration of the Ministry of Health, may have the best and most expensive equipment and pharmaceuticals but often doesn’t provide the best health care. Many of the physicians are in fact of mediocre talent.

But there is the occasional exception. Aleksandr Borisovich Kuznetsov, a specialist in internal medicine at the Kremlin Clinic, was in his late forties. He was skilled and quick-thinking, and that was more than the majority of his colleagues were, but at the same time he was self-effacing, so he rarely excited enmity.

A mere ten years after finishing his internship at a hospital in Leningrad, he had been chosen to serve at the Kremlin Clinic, to minister to the most powerful men in the land. He knew this was an enormous honor, and his generous salary reflected that – because privilege always went hand in hand with money in Russia. He also knew that he had been selected not for his medical expertise but for what people thought was his political reliability – his father had served in a minor position in the leadership under Stalin, and the mere fact that he had survived for so long was testimony to his father’s orthodoxy.

But Aleksandr Kuznetsov was not quite who his Party comrades thought he was.

He loved the practice of medicine, and although his friends and colleagues looked upon him as a good Communist, he had nothing but contempt for what remained of Soviet Communism. For reasons of pure science, and because he believed in doing one’s best to cure even the loathsome, he was an outstanding doctor in the clinic, really above reproach, but there were days when he would not have been unhappy if the Politburo and Central Committee oafs he looked after all perished at once.

And then there would be days when he’d joke with the frail, aging men, sitting naked on the examination table, and feel nothing but pity for them.

Kuznetsov had been in this hospital, across from the Lenin Library, for eight years, and before that he had been at the more gracious installation at Kuntsevo, where he had been among the team of doctors who took care of the dying Yuri Andropov. Through close and trusted friends in whom he had confided his dissatisfaction with things – although even with close friends he was circumspect – he had met a few Western correspondents, and when Andropov’s kidneys first began to fail, he had gotten the word out to them.

He had thereby, quietly, become one of the foreign correspondents’ “sources” in the Kremlin Clinic, though probably not the only one. He did it not because he wanted to hasten Andropov’s death, far from it, but because he deplored the secrecy that shrouded the health care of men at the very top. The Russian people, he felt, must always know what was going on with their leaders. Far too often they were kept in the dark, and this only gave rise to awful rumors. He remembered when Konstantin Chernenko died, and the Politburo – desperate to select a leader and settle the succession issue – withheld the news for three days. Secrecy was for the birds.

But, even so, Charlotte Harper’s request was a little unusual. Late last night, after midnight, she had called, pretending to be his cousin Liza from Riga. She had called him by his nickname, Sasha. This prearranged signal was intended to explain, to anyone who might be listening, the origin of her non-Russian accent. She spoke Russian excellently, almost as a native, but there was still a trace of an accent. No matter; there were dozens of accents in the Soviet Union. “So we’re going to meet tomorrow at five at the Tretyakov Gallery,” she had said. It was a signal that took him a few moments to remember: it meant they would meet at seven in the morning near the Leninsky Prospekt metro station, which was remote and safe enough.

This time, she wasn’t asking him to find out the status of some leader who was dying. She wanted him to look through the medical records of each of the members and candidate members of the Politburo, nineteen men and one woman, to see if any of them had a history of some serious medical condition that wasn’t publicly known. It was an odd request, but it would not take much time, and so he had agreed.

Yes, he said, he could do it safely, without arousing too much suspicion, if he had a good enough pretext.

He would try.

The young man spoke as if wrenched by emotion. He spoke directly at the camera. The unseen KGB technician had pulled in for a tight close-up.

From this close, the men watching the screen could see that the young man spoke under extreme duress.

“I furnished the terrorist groups with equipment,” the man was saying. He paused often. There was a twitch in one of his eyes.

“How did you get this equipment?” The voice came from off-camera.

“The American Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council,” the man replied. His left eye twitched uncontrollably. “They provided me with the explosives and other equipment.”

“So you were working as a pawn of American intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you agree to such a heinous crime against the peoples of the Soviet Union?”

The young man’s face was wracked with indecision, his left eye twitching madly, his eyes watering. Finally, he shouted: “It’s a lie! You made me do it! I followed your orders! I will not be party to this horror, this deceit. You will not force me to speak untruths!”

He broke down crying, bowing his head, and then looking back up at the camera, his eyes red and swollen. Now he spoke quiedy: “I am not a criminal.”

The voice came from off-camera, metallic and brusque: “Do you remember what Czar Ivan the Terrible did to the architects whom he commissioned to build Saint Basil’s Cathedral?”

The man had now turned his head and was looking at his unseen inquisitor. “I don’t–”

The voice came back sharply: “You don’t remember the history of your own country. Ivan did not want his architects ever to build anything to approach the beauty of Saint Basil’s.”

A dreadful realization came over the young man. “Oh, God, no. Please, God, no.”

“You remember.”

“No. Please, no!”

“Ivan had their eyes gouged out. You remember now.”

“Please, don’t. Please, please!”

The men watching the video screen were transfixed.

“Would you like to repeat your confession more persuasively now?” the off-camera voice said. An unseen hand gave the young Russian a tissue. The man dabbed at his eyes, and looked up, swallowing. “Yes.”

He spoke his confession again, this time with far more conviction.

“Thank you,” came the voice.

The young man began to weep. Suddenly, however, there was a loud crack and a red spot the size of a coin appeared on his forehead. The blood began to stream out: the confessor had been shot through the head, from behind. He slumped to one side, grotesquely.

And the video monitor went dark.

“Excellent,” Pavlichenko called to one of the twelve men who sat around the table in the subbasement of the Lubyanka. “I want this edited immediately. Just keep the confession.”

The head of the Fifth Chief Directorate was the first to speak. “This man, Fyodorov. Do we have footage of him meeting with the terrorists?”

“Yes,” replied another voice, that of the chief of Moscow’s police force. “He met them in a deserted garage we provided for him, where he stored the plastique and so on.”

“And the terrorists,” came another question, “which of them are alive?”

“The ones who killed my friend Sergei Borisov,” said Andrei Pavlichenko. “A decision I had to make, incidentally, to be sure I was seen as uninvolved. Who also set off the bombs in the metro and the Bolshoi. When it is all over, they will be put on trial, blamed for the final act of terrorism, which they did not commit, and then executed. We will have our scapegoats, and they will not be alive to contradict us.”

Pavlichenko did not need to explain that one of the terrorists, an old zek named Yakov Kramer, had been known to KGB for some time, ever since friends of his had, in the early 1960s, set off a bomb on Gorky Street. Ordinarily, Pavlichenko – then a ranking KGB officer – would have ordered the men rounded up. But instead he decided to do nothing, knowing that the day would come when they could be useful.

As they had been. One of the zek’s sons was arrested and put in a cell at Lefortovo with the unfortunate fellow Fyodorov. The recently deceased Fyodorov, the bomb expert who taught young Kramer all about the manufacture of bombs, and planted the idea in his head. Then the zek’s other son was placed in a psychiatric hospital. The scheme worked as Pavlichenko’s people had determined it might, based on a thorough psychological profile. The Kramers were turned into terrorists. And, of course, it was a simple matter to intercept their notes to Gorbachev.

Terrorists linked, all of them, through the daughter of the American aristocrat Winthrop Lehman. The powerful and wealthy Winthrop Lehman, desperate to have his beloved daughter released from Russia before his death. And thus driven to cooperate with American right-wing fanatics bent on destroying the leadership of the Soviet Union.

Or so Pavlichenko wanted it to appear.

“Sir?”

The men looked up and saw a KGB internal guard standing at the doorway.

“Yes?” Pavlichenko said.

“Comrade Bondarenko,” the guard announced.

“Let him in.”

Ivan Bondarenko of Department Eight, Directorate S (Illegals) of the First Chief Directorate, charged with responsibility for “direct action” or “wet affairs,” entered the room.

Without taking a seat, he said, short of breath: “I have reason to believe the American rogue agent is in Moscow.”

“What?” gasped Pavlichenko.

“The Soviet visa office in Paris checked photographs,” Bondarenko said, and stopped to catch his breath before he went on. “It seems that, incredible as it may sound, Stone has entered Moscow under a false name, using a visa he managed somehow to get quickly. The laser-optical scan of immigration documents, collated with the prints Sanctum supplied us, confirms it.”

“Probably connected in some way with the arrival of the Americans,” Pavlichenko said levelly, getting up from the table. “Now, I want all of you to call upon all of your resources to stop this man before he unravels our plan. Alive or dead, I don’t care. He’s come right into our backyard. We will find him. The fool probably doesn’t realize that he’s stepped into a bear trap.”

Dr. Aleksandr B. Kuznetsov returned to the clinic immediately after meeting Charlotte and her friend, apprehensive about what he had found, wishing he hadn’t found it at all.

He walked down the corridor to his office, passing the nurses’ station. “Hey, darlings,” he called out. The nurses liked him a lot, he knew, because he was one of the few physicians who bothered to talk to them. “Why so glum? Don’t tell me your husbands are neglecting you! The fools don’t know what they’ve got, right?”

He flashed an endearing smile, and knew something was wrong. The two nurses looked at him differently, fearfully.

“Buck up, kids,” he said.

They smiled wanly.

Puzzled, he rounded the corner to his office and opened the door. When he saw the uniformed KGB guards, he suddenly understood.

The night had gotten frigid, the roads slick with ice. Stone, driving Charlotte’s Renault, had found the driving difficult. Moreover, many of the roads were blocked in preparation for the next day’s ceremony, which had taken over the city entirely, as do all state occasions in Moscow. Much of the center of the city had been cordoned off for security reasons. Banners were going up all over the city, large triumphal posters of larger-than-life socialist workers boasting of factory quotas overfulfilled.

After meeting with Paradiso, Stone and Charlotte had returned to her apartment, where together they drew up a plan. They agreed it was important that Charlotte go about her work normally, partly to avoid attracting any suspicion, which might expose Stone’s presence in the city to anyone who was looking.

Charlotte had gone over to her office to put together a story, to which she would have to add only footage of the President arriving at Vnukovo Airport. Later, as soon as she could, she would finish her search for the name of the man who was said to lead the Old Believers network. Perhaps there was a way, she said, refusing to tell Charlie exactly what that way might be. But Stone could call her later, and learn what she’d found, if anything.

The three Spetsnaz munitions experts stood on a vast field of dirt, watching a stone pyramid a quarter of a mile away in the darkness. It was a small building constructed of large blocks of granite. This was the fourth trial, and each had been completely successful.

“An amazing replica,” the first said.

“Yes,” the second replied. “Precisely the same exterior and interior dimensions. Even the stone has been chosen to duplicate the weight of the original.”

The field the three men stood on was about twenty-five miles directly south of Moscow, just outside of Podolsk: a military proving ground that had been taken over from the Red Army by the Spetsnaz in 1982. Once it had been a military airfield; now it was used exclusively for Spetsnaz testing of explosive devices.

All three had flown down on a GRU helicopter, and all would return to Moscow as soon as the final test was completed, in the early hours of Revolution Day. They stood in silence, watching.

Then there was a terrific, dreadful rumble, a great thunderstroke, a flash of white light, a whoosh. The stone structure was blown apart from within, and in a split-second nothing was left standing. The ground shook, but there was nothing to be seen except a pattern of grayish rubble scattered for hundreds of feet.

“Our man does good work,” the third one said, and the tiniest smile lit up his face.

Bone-tired, scraped and bloodied, Stone drove the truck as far into the city as he dared, for a chicken truck in the center of the city was sure to be conspicuous. He had pulled off Prospekt Mira onto the ring road, Sadovaya-Spasskaya, and from there managed to find a telephone.

No one seemed to be around; in fact, the streets were completely deserted. No, not quite deserted: there was one militiaman patrolling.

He closed the booth’s door, inserted a coin, and dialed Charlotte’s apartment number. No answer again.

He tried the office number. It rang five, ten times.

“Yes?” A male voice.

“I’m looking for Charlotte,” Stone said. “This is a friend.”

There was a long pause.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. Her cameraman, perhaps? “Charlotte was supposed to be back here six hours ago. I have no idea where she is. Which is a bitch, because we’ve got a whole hell of a lot of work around here.”

Stone hung up and leaned against the glass side of the booth. They had gotten her; they had probably come to get him, and taken her instead.

It was half past midnight, but it was time to wake up a very old man and force him to help.

The alley gave Stone an idea. Every hotel he’d ever seen had a service entrance, and Russian hotels could be no exception: they could hardly unload sacks of potatoes and crates of eggs in the front.

At the back of the National Hotel was an alley where great dumpsters of trash were kept, stinking messes of decaying food. He saw at once that the kitchen workers in the hotel had to walk by the dumpsters on their way into what the Russians would call the chyorni khod, the back entrance. Even at this hour of the morning, the door was in use, and it banged loudly as night-shift employees came in and out.

Stone walked briskly, angrily. If you can’t look like a Russian, at least look like a foreigner so purposeful that no one would dare to question you. Wearing only one boot. Stone knew he could not help attracting attention.

Yet no one did question him; who would enter a hotel through the kitchen?

Once inside. Stone saw that the lobby was out of the question, but, like all hotels, the National had a back stairway, used mostly by the maids and the dezhurnayas, the women who keep the keys on each floor. Outside of one room, someone had left a pair of shoes to be polished overnight, and Stone, feeling a bit guilty, took them. The fit was not great, but it would do.

On the second floor, he easily found the Lenin Suite, marked with a brass plaque. In recent years, the Lenin Suite has been given to honored guests of the state not quite august enough to be housed at Lenin Hills or within the Kremlin.

There didn’t appear to be a guard in sight.

The old man, wrapped in a silk robe, had been sleeping. He opened the door after Stone had knocked for quite a while, and stared at the younger man.

He did not seem to register surprise.

Driving a rusty white stolen Volga, which he had hot-wired near Manezhnaya Square, Stone left Moscow’s city limits and headed southwest, in the direction of Vnukovo. He recognized the area’s name: it was where many of the Soviet elite had their dachas. He left the highway and entered a dark, densely wooded area, poorly lit, and then pulled into a narrow road that had been cut into a deep forest, a winding road beside a ravine. The Soviet elite’s dachas were in some of the most rugged, unspoiled terrain in the Soviet Union.

That Valery Chavadze was the head of an anti-government network boggled the mind. He was one of the old guard, a bulwark of the old order. Even until the 1980s, this old Stalinist holdover had still been attending Politburo meetings. There were unsubstantiated rumors that he had been influential in ousting Khrushchev.

That was what he wanted the world to think.

The world considered Valery Chavadze the very essence of the long-lived, recalcitrant Soviet leadership. But could it be that at the same time this man was a secret traitor to his own government, a dissident within the inner sanctum?

And would Chavadze have the power to block whatever it was that was surely about to happen in – what was it? – maybe eight hours?

He thought again, as he had done constantly in the last few hours, about what Lehman had told him, and he did his best to banish it.

He thought, too, of what he could not tell Lehman. The old man, dying by his own hand, would not want to hear the ultimate irony: that, after decades of careful preparation, he would not free his daughter. Pavlichenko’s final masterstroke was a cruel and devious one.

He remembered Yakov Kramer’s enormous fear.

It is extremely easy to construct a bomb. That most people are ignorant of the technique is testimony not to its difficulty but to the simple fact that few people are so inclined.

The explosives expert from the GRU had begun to make the bomb that would, he believed, avenge the murders of his parents. How strange were the twists of fate!

He labored, in the small laboratory that the Sekretariat had provided for him, late at night, for reasons of secrecy: he wanted none of his colleagues to have an inkling of what he was working on.

At this hour, much of the Aquarium was dark. He worked at a black-topped counter, without emotion.

What was peculiar was that all of the equipment with which he had been provided was American-made. The GRU’s explosives technology was every bit as sophisticated as anything made by the Americans; there was no need to use imported technology; but he did not question his orders.

Using an array of jeweler’s tools, which he took from cases on the counter, he carefully connected two lengths of wire to a small black electronic detonator, manufactured by a California company. Next he began to attach the detonator to an electrical blasting cap and a nine-volt transistor-radio battery.

Electrical blasting caps contain small charges that are detonated by means of an electrical current. Emanating from the cap were two wires, six feet long. He screwed one of the blasting cap’s wires to the detonator; the other wire he connected to one terminal of the small battery. He pushed the blasting cap into a two-and-a-half-pound block of plastic explosive. It was not critical where in the block the blasting cap went.

The explosive, he noticed, was a white C-4, manufactured in the United States. He recognized the label and the serial number: it was made by the Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee. He wondered idly how the Sekretariat had managed to get its hands on CIA plastique. And why.

The other wire emanating from the blasting cap he did not connect to the unused battery terminal; that would have detonated the explosion right there and then. No, this would happen when the time came, when he was ready to set the timer.

When the plastic bomb went off, the pressure in the chamber beneath Lenin’s mausoleum would instantly increase to such an extent that the three grenades he would place around the room would go off, thereby detonating the cloud of gas. He had determined that three grenades would be enough, but they would have to be a special sort of grenade that creates an explosion at an extraordinarily high temperature.

He needed white-phosphorus grenades. These, too, had been provided for him, and they were American-made. For unfathomable reasons of bureaucracy, the Soviet Army does not make them. The Sekretariat had, however, gained access to a significant supply of American M-15 grenades, smooth-bodied cylinders a bit smaller than beer cans.

He unscrewed the normal grenade fuses and then replaced them with snap-diaphragm concussion-detonation switches to which he had affixed blasting caps. These concussion switches, which are shaped like small orchestra cymbals, go off when subjected to great pressure.

Finally, he attached to the valve of the ten-kilogram cylinder of propane gas a second valve, a time-release one. Valves like these are sold through catalogues by any number of industrial-controls companies. A time-release valve may be used, for instance, to turn on a gas furnace in an office building at five o’clock in the morning, so that the place is warm by the time the employees arrive at nine.

All he would need was about two minutes in the basement of Lenin’s tomb. He would turn on the propane cylinder and set the time-release valve to begin releasing the gas at eleven in the morning on Revolution Day. Within ten minutes, the gas cloud would be big enough, rich enough with oxygen. Ten minutes, he calculated, was the proper interval. If the plastic bomb went off five minutes too soon or five minutes too late, the whole scheme would fail.

He finished making the bomb at exactly twenty minutes past four in the morning. The whole assembly fit rather neatly in the satchel, and he was quite proud of his handiwork. It would, he was certain, do the job.

Slumped in the car. Stone would not allow himself to rest. Charlotte was gone. She was not in her office, not in her apartment. Stone had called repeatedly from phone booths. No answer.

And then he knew where she would be, if she had not been arrested.

During their many talks in the last few days, she’d mentioned a hiding place in Moscow, a hotel called the Red Star in the center of the city where someone she knew worked at the desk. Once, she said, she’d met there with one of her sources who needed absolute anonymity. He knew intimately how her mind worked. If she had to hide, Stone felt sure, that’s where she’d be.

Chavadze’s driver pulled the black Volga into a side street very near Dzerzhinsky Square, and Stone cautiously got out. He entered a small, dimly lit building whose peeling sign was marked with a simple red star.

A middle-aged man with gray-peppered black hair and large pouches under his eyes was working at the front desk.

“I’m looking for someone,” Stone said.

The man looked at him sternly for a moment, then smiled. “Ah, I think I may know a friend of yours,” he said.

“Charlie?” It was Charlotte’s voice. She appeared from a side room, running toward him, her arms outstretched.

“Oh, thank God,” Stone said, embracing her.

As the chauffeur drove seventy miles an hour, Charlotte sat in the back seat of the Volga, clutching Stone. “When I left my apartment to go to the office,” she explained, “I saw a paddywagon, one of the white vans that had once taken me away, and I knew it was no coincidence. So I wheeled around and ran as fast as I could. The Red Star was the only place I could think of to hide.”

Stone was sitting next to her, and he kissed her. “I’m glad you’re all right,” he said. “We need you. I need you. Badly.”

“Thanks,” she said softly. “But Lehman–”

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“He knew he was never going to make it out of Moscow. I went to see him, asked his help. He took something.”

“Took something? What are you saying?”

“He killed himself. He died right in front of me.”

“Lehman’s dead?”

Stone took Charlotte’s hand and squeezed hard. “Once he meant a great deal to me,” he said, and stopped, but something in his voice indicated to her that there was something else.

“What is it, Charlie?”

“Later.”

Charlotte suddenly looked up at the road and addressed the driver: “I know a shortcut that’ll save us ten minutes. Ten minutes we’re going to need.”

The driver shook his head, unused to being ordered about by a woman. “You want to drive?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Just do what I tell you, okay? I know all the side streets of this goddamned city.” More quietly, she added: “I knew someday it’d come in handy.”

Shortly before seven o’clock on the morning of Revolution Day, two men from the GRU were driven to the side of Lenin’s mausoleum.

Red Square was dark and deserted, with a lone militiaman walking across the cobbled expanse, several more sentries scattered at the perimeter. The two uniformed honor guards stood unmoving in front of the entrance to Lenin’s mausoleum.

The younger man, carrying the bomb apparatus in a green military-issue gym bag, was wearing the vivid blue uniform of the Kremlin Guard. As he and his senior officer walked around to the rear entrance, the guard saluted. A security check, the guard would think. That was all.

“Good morning, sir,” the guard said.

“Good morning,” the older GRU man said. “Is the basement arsenal open?”

“No, sir. You gave orders that no one be allowed in. It is locked.”

“Who has the key?”

“Solovyov, sir.”

“He’s downstairs?”

“Yes, sir.”

They entered, and one level down came upon the next guard, who bolted to attention.

“Please give me the key to the arsenal,” the senior man ordered.

“Yes, sir,” the guard said, and removed a key from a large ring attached to his belt.

The two men entered the arsenal, closing the door behind them.

“Get to work,” said the colonel general. His voice echoed against the concrete walls. The explosives expert set down the bag and removed its contents: the plastic bricks, the canister of gas, the blasting caps and grenades and batteries, and the many yards of wires. His face betrayed no emotion as he put the canister upright on the floor in the center of the room and began placing the grenades along the periphery.

He adjusted the gas-release valves. Finally, he switched on the black electronic detonator and punched in 11:10 a.m., then made the last electrical connection.

“It’s all ready,” he announced. “Right now it’s twelve minutes after seven. The Politburo assembles atop the mausoleum at ten o’clock. At eleven, the gas will begin to be released from the tank. It will slowly fill the room with an oxygen-rich, highly combustible cloud. At ten minutes past eleven o’clock precisely, the plastic charge will be detonated, and the cloud will explode. And the structure will be destroyed.”

“Very good.” The older man walked across the room, inspected the wiring closely, glanced at the connections to the plastic explosive, a grayish brick wrapped in clear plastic, and paid particular attention to the time-release valves attached to the propane tank. At last he looked up. “Everything is perfect,” he said. He looked around the chamber for one last time. “Everything is perfect.”

It was seven-fifteen.

The chairman of the KGB reached for the pistol he had concealed in the large front pocket of his hospital robe. “Where are we?” he asked the driver warningly.

The orderly sitting next to the driver answered. “Outside Moscow, sir.”

“What’s going on?” He curled his forefinger around the trigger. The charade was no longer necessary, so he struggled at the straps, trying to free himself. “We’re not in Kuntsevo,” he said, drawing the gun from his robe and pointing it at Stefan, “and I suggest you take me there immediately.”

But Stefan Kramer and a close friend, Zhenya Svedov, the son of one of Yakov Kramer’s fellow prisoners, swung themselves out of their seats and were immediately joined by a third, who leaped out from beneath a stretcher behind the front seat: Charles Stone was out of the ambulance, slamming the doors behind him.

Pavlichenko sat up and fired a shot, spider-webbing the windshield.

“I don’t suggest you fire again,” Stone spoke in Russian, in a clear, strong voice. He and the two others had spread themselves out at a distance around the vehicle: Stone aiming his Glock on one side; Stefan on the other, aiming a revolver his father had kept since World War II. The chairman of the KGB could see at once that he was outnumbered, and for a moment he froze.

Stone watched Pavlichenko, who seemed relaxed and confident, his gun casually pointed, as if this whole thing were but a brief interruption that would soon be over.

Ilya M. Rozanov, a Kremlin Guard, would have greatly preferred to be out there, in front of the mausoleum, taking part in the changing of the guard. But he had done his time a few months ago, changing the guard in the dark of night, marching in the bitter cold and standing ramrod-straight before the tomb’s entrance for almost an hour and not flinching.

It was too bad he could not have had that proud assignment today. It was the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the biggest holiday of the year, when all of Russia – all of Stavropol, his home town – would be watching Lenin’s mausoleum on their TV sets. And the world, too: for the first time ever, the news said, the President of the United States of America would join the Politburo atop the tomb to pay honor to the Revolution.

But there were worse assignments than patrolling the back of the mausoleum.

It even had its thrills. He was able to see the members of the Politburo emerge from the bowels of the mausoleum and march around to the front to take their places on the reviewing stand. He even thought he might have glimpsed the American President!

True, he had hoped to see them walk right by him, through the door in the Kremlin wall, past all the graves, but for some reason they had chosen to take the underground route. Still, he was able to make out some of the dignitaries standing in the Important Persons area on either side of the tomb.

The Kremlin Guard, of which this man was a member, was sometimes known straight-facedly as the Palace Guard, the Okhrana. In their smart, well-pressed blue uniforms and karakul hats, they were the cream of the crop, the guards in the position of highest trust in the nation’s capital.

It was bitter cold, and Rozanov would have liked to warm up in the basement arsenal of the mausoleum when his shift ended, but for some curious reason the arsenal had been off-limits for the last few days.

There had been a lot of talk about it, and his superior officer, the Kremlin commandant, who was a KGB man, was furious. Why in hell had Pavlichenko gone and done such a thing as ordering the arsenal closed? Security precautions, Pavlichenko had said! But his boss, the Kremlin commandant, had lasted through four KGB chiefs and far more general secretaries, and he resented this intrusion into what he considered his domain. The arsenal was always in use on these state occasions – for gathering and giving orders, for storing ammunition, all that sort of thing. And now the guards had to gather to receive their orders outdoors, next to the Kremlin wall. It was unheard of.

But the guard cared for one reason: it meant that the only place he could warm his hands was in the bathroom several levels below ground, under the mausoleum. An inconvenience. The politics of it he couldn’t care less about.

He waved at another guard to signal that the next shift was up, and he walked to the back door of the mausoleum. He could hear the endless speech of whoever was talking, followed by the unison cheers, echoing in the square.

And then, as he entered the mausoleum and walked toward the staircase that went down to the bathroom, he noticed something peculiar. The odor of gas: an overpowering stench. The farther down the stairs, the stronger the smell got. It seemed to be coming from the arsenal, and he wondered if anyone else had sensed it. It smelled like the sort of gas that was highly flammable.

In front of the arsenal’s closed doors stood a guard brought over from the KGB, not one of the Palace Guard.

“Hey,” Rozanov called to the KGB mannequin. “You smell that?”

The guard turned, took note of Rozanov’s uniform, and ventured: “You think it’s poisonous? I’ve smelled it for the last ten minutes or so.”

“Gas,” Rozanov said, coming closer. “It’s coming from inside there.” He pointed.

“Stay back,” the guard said, suddenly menacing.

“It’s probably poisonous,” Rozanov said. “Could kill you. Let’s take a look.” He came closer still.

“Back,” the guard said. “My orders are not to let anyone in.”

“Look, comrade,” Rozanov said more stiffly. “Your orders are not to stand there like a moron if there’s a gas leak.”

The guard seemed to consider this.

“Let’s take a look. Who knows, you find a gas leak, you get a commendation. Maybe a promotion, right? Pavlichenko admires a little initiative in times of crisis.”

The guard relented. “All right, but quick. Someone else could come by, and I’m dead. Our orders are to shoot anyone who enters the room on sight.” He turned around and slowly unlocked the double metal doors. “Shoot first, ask questions later,” he elaborated unnecessarily.

The arsenal was dark, illuminated partially by the light from the outside corridor. The stench of gas was overpowering, and the air in the room was hazy. Rozanov could hear a distinct, loud hiss.

“Don’t touch that!” Rozanov shouted when the KGB guard reached for the light switch. “This place is full of gas! A spark from the light could set this off.”

And then he noticed the tank, in the center of the room, from which the hiss was coming. And then the wires that ran throughout the room, and the blocks of plastic explosive, and the grenades. A bomb? Here?

“What the fuck–?” was all he had time to say as he wheeled around and was bayoneted in the throat by a second KGB guard, whose form was suddenly framed in the arsenal’s doors.

Only afterward did things come full circle.

The first thing Stone became aware of, as he slowly awakened, was the warmth and velvety softness of Charlotte’s naked back, nestled tightly against him. Then: the morning light from the strong May sun, flooding the bedroom.

Her nearness aroused him, and he slowly reached a hand around to the warmth between her legs. With spread fingers he massaged her downy pubic hair gently and slowly, then closed his fingers and increased the pressure. She was, though not awake, moist. His other hand stroked her breasts; the nipples were erect now. He kissed her neck, nuzzled her shoulder. She stirred and gave a throaty moan.