This was the most shocking revelation his officer had reported, the main thing he'd come to hear.

"They know it's all a ruse, but they want us to keep going, and they keep pouring billions of dollars into it. Don't you see? Our job is only to convince the public that it's real."

"Reagan himself said that the task would be formidable, that it may not be achieved until the end of the century."

"There's a big difference between saying something is tough and will take time, and something that's completely non-achievable. SDI is just that. It can't be done, or more correctly it can't be done anytime in the foreseeable future. And Washington knows that. The whole program will never amount to anything, except fattening the pockets of the defense contractors who are getting paid to develop what's not possible."

Sources were ranked by reliability.

"Extremely well placed" meant access to exactly what he or she was talking about. "Unproven" denoted either a rookie or information that had yet to be verified. "Unconfirmed" was always suspect, but once a source established a track record, confirmed or not, they became "reliable."

Turning targets had been his specialty, the rules of the game common sense. He or she had to first be worth the effort and have access to desirable information. If so, contact was made-usually informal and coincidental-then a friendship cultivated. The danger of a dangle, though, loomed great. Another operative merely pretending to be receptive to spying. Which was exactly what he'd first thought Aladdin to be. That happened a lot, and it was suicide for any KGB career. Ultimately, if targets passed an extensive background check and at least seven personal encounters seemed genuine, then they were assigned a code name and brought operational.

Aladdin had passed each test, becoming "highly reliable."

Everyday field officers had to contend with their natural suspicions and the consequences that might come from believing what they were being told. He had been fed something that, at best, could be fantastical and at worst a lie.

But he'd reported the information.

Only to be chastised by his superiors.

Moscow viewed the SDI program as a move by the United States to neutralize the Soviet military and seize the initiative in arms controls. To the Kremlin, space-based missile defenses made offensive nuclear war inevitable. So their response was never in doubt. A similar Soviet initiative had to be undertaken and it was the KGB's job to shorten that development process through espionage. Yet instead of providing any useful information, Zorin had reported that the whole thing may be a fraud. Most times information from even "highly reliable" sources was trivial. Seldom did anything compromise a nation. But every once in a while luck would fall their way.

He stirred in the jet's leather seat and recalled the official response to his report on Aladdin.

Forget such nonsense and get back to work.

Yet history had proved him right.

No missile defense system has ever existed anywhere in the world.

The USSR eventually spent billions of rubles trying to create one, thinking all the while that America was actively doing the same. True, billions of U.S. dollars were also spent, just as Aladdin had said, but it had all been a ruse that Ronald Reagan himself masterminded. A way for his enemies to do themselves in. Which worked. The Soviet economy imploded from hyperinflation, fueling a total communist collapse.

His gut churned every time he thought of how it all could have been avoided. If only Moscow had listened when he, and other KGB officers, reported what they were each learning, independent of the others. Yet ignorance seemed the greatness weakness of conformity. A select few made all the decisions, and everyone else followed, regardless that those decisions could be wrong.

He closed his eyes and allowed sleep to take hold.

No longer did the Red Army march in a gorgeous phalanx, stepping high, gleaming boots springing from the cobbles of Red Square, arms slapped flat across their chests as heads angled to the top of Lenin's mausoleum.

Where fools had stood.

Those days were gone, too.

Now here he was, decades later. Alone. But not impotent. He had the blood and strength of a peasant with the resolve of a communist, and, thankfully, his body had not been fatally damaged by alcohol, cigarettes, or reckless living.

Another childhood rhyme came to him.

Hush you mice, a cat is near us.

He can see us, he can hear us.

What if he is on a diet?

Even then you should be quiet.

Excellent advice.

Decades of reflection had taught him that the entire Soviet system had run on institutionalized mistrust, the military and civilian intelligence services never close. The idea had been to keep both from becoming either complacent or too powerful, but the real effect had been to render them ineffectual. Neither listened to or cared what the other thought. Both had been masters at gathering information, neither one of them good at analyzing it. So when the obvious was placed before them-that they were engaged in a bitter and desperate race that America had manufactured-both had rejected the conclusion and stayed the course to their collective end.

He would not be that stupid.

This was his war.

To be fought on his terms.

A quick shock of nervousness coursed through him. Not unusual. Every field officer knew fear. The good ones learned how to tame it.

The main adversary, the United States of America, had taken his past, his reputation, credibility, achievements, even his probity, rank, and honor.

But not his life.

And though his brain stayed racked with alternating bouts of optimism and doubt, eased occasionally by conviction but nearly always flagged with guilt, this time- There would be no mistakes.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

Luke drove the Ford Escape that, as Stephanie told him, belonged to Fritz Strobl. How she managed to acquire a loaner from a total stranger he could only imagine. They were headed east, out of DC, on U.S. 301 toward Annapolis.

"You heard earlier about missing nukes," she said to him from the passenger seat. "The Russians think five are still out there. Suitcase size."

"Like on 24?"

"I know. It sounds fantastic. But I think Osin is being straight with us. We've always thought the Soviets developed compact nuclear weapons. Each bomb was, maybe, six kilotons. But nothing could ever be verified. Of course, we developed the same."

"And we still have these?"

"I don't think so. They were outlawed in the 1990s. That decision was reversed after 9/11, but I haven't heard of our having anything like them in our current arsenal."

He then listened as she told him more about Aleksandr Zorin, who supposedly held a grudge against the United States, and a KGB archivist named Vadim Belchenko.

"Cotton was looking into the Belchenko angle."

The Escape's little engine packed a surprising punch, and they were making good time down the highway, the Friday-afternoon traffic light.

"Have you heard anything from Cassiopeia?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Not a word."

Which was not good. "You think Cotton's okay?"

"I'm hoping so."

He heard the concern, which he echoed.

Her cell phone dinged and they looked at each other. She studied the display and shook her head again. "It's Osin."

She took the call, which lasted only a few moments. When it ended she said to him, "Petrova's on the move."

She'd already explained that Osin had driven Petrova to Dulles International, handing her a ticket for a KLM flight straight to Moscow. Osin's men escorted her into the terminal, leaving her as she made her way through the security checks. Of course, there was no doubt that she'd promptly double back and flee, finding a cab, which should take her to a street two blocks away from Anderson House, where her dented rental car remained parked.

"She headed straight for the car," Stephanie said. "That puts her not far behind us. She'll come to Annapolis."

"You always right about people?"

"More so than not."

"What about those missing nukes?"

"It's unlikely they still exist and, even if they did, even more unlikely they're operational. Yet Zorin is definitely focused on them."

"You okay?"

He knew her well enough to know that she was bothered by what had happened with Bruce Litchfield.

"I never thought my career would end like this," she said, her voice trailing off. "Thirty-seven years."

"I was but a twinkle in my daddy's eye thirty-seven years ago."

She smiled, and he left her to her thoughts as they rode for a few minutes in silence.

"It was an exciting time back then," she said, more to herself than him. "Reagan planned to change the world. At first, we all thought he was nuts. But that's exactly what he did."

Luke knew little about the 1980s, his life focused more on the here and now. He considered himself dependable, tough, and pragmatic. He took life as it came-daydreams, nostalgia, and the charms of the world held little appeal. History was just that to him-the past-not exactly ignored, but not to be obsessed about, either.

"I was part of that great change," she said.

He could tell she wanted to talk, which was unusual. But everything about this day fit into that category.

So he kept his mouth shut and listened.

Stephanie followed the pope into a courtyard on this, her twenty-ninth visit to Rome. John Paul had specifically requested the meeting. Much was happening in the United States. Reagan's two terms as president were drawing to a close. Vice President Bush and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis were engaged in a bitter battle for the White House, the outcome of which remained uncertain. The pope was concerned about the future, so she'd come to alleviate his fears. A marble villa and a two-story loggia surrounded them, the courtyard dotted with statues, empty benches, and a fountain. They were deep inside the Vatican, in a space reserved for residents, of which there were but a precious few.

"President Reagan will soon be out of office," he said to her. "Will that end your service, too?"

She decided to be straight. "Most likely. Either side will select its own people to carry on."

To her knowledge Vice President Bush had never been part of Forward Pass, and an open bitterness was festering between the Bush and Reagan camps. At the Republican National Convention, when accepting the party's nomination, Bush had told the delegates that he wanted a kinder, gentler nation. Which had brought a swift rebuke from the Reagan people of, What the hell are we?

"The new wash away the old," the pope said. "It is the same here. The same all over the world. And if you are no longer here, what happens to what we've done these past six years? Does that end, too?"

A fair question.

"I don't think what has been started can be stopped," she said. "It's too far along. Too many moving parts are in motion. Our people think it will be but two or three years, at the most, until the USSR ends."

"That was October 1988, the last time John Paul and I spoke," she said. "But I was right. Bush won and a new team took over at State, one that did not include me, and other people finished what I started. That's when I moved to Justice. A few years later I was given the Magellan Billet."

"How friggin' amazing," he said. "You were there? Right in the middle of what happened when the Berlin Wall came down?"

"Which Bush got credit for," she said. "But by the time he was inaugurated, the Soviet end was a foregone conclusion."

"Didn't help him get reelected," he offered, hoping to make her feel better. He wasn't entirely oblivious to history.

She grinned. "No. It didn't."

"How did you do it?" he asked.

"That's a complicated question. But by the late 1980s pressure was coming on Moscow from nearly every angle, both internally and externally. That pressure had been building for a long time. Reagan, to his credit, developed a way to exploit it. He told me once that all we needed to create was the straw that would break the communist back. And that's what we did. The operation was called Forward Pass."

Which started with Admiral John Poindexter, a key member of the Reagan National Security Council. Others had postulated the concept before, but Poindexter hammered the idea of a strategic defense initiative into a workable concept. Why match the Soviets bomb for bomb, as had been American policy for decades? That accomplished little to nothing, except mutual assured destruction.

MAD.

An appropriate label.

Instead, America's advantage was its strong economy and innovative technology. So why not a resource shift-a change from offense to defense. The United States possessed tens of thousands of nuclear warheads to launch east. Why not develop a way to stop Russian warheads from coming west? Poindexter's idea was presented to the White House in late 1982 and the president immediately embraced it. Reagan had many times said that he considered MAD immoral, and he liked the idea of shifting to a strategic defense. The whole thing was kept quiet until March 1983 when the president announced the change, on television, to the world.

Initially, the idea had been to actually develop SDI. But technological challenges began to overwhelm the effort. Simultaneous with SDI came a massive defense buildup of conventional weapons and equipment. New aircraft, ships, and submarines. Billions upon billions of new money flooded into the Defense Department in what became the largest peacetime escalation in American military preparedness ever.

Which the Soviets had no choice but to match.

And they did.

The Soviets were genuinely shocked by the concept of strategic defense initiative. Moscow called the plan a bid to disarm the USSR, claiming the United States sought world supremacy. But for the Soviets the true danger of SDI came more from the technological effort itself, one that might lead to new offensive weapons-innovations that they may not be able to counter without a strategic defense initiative of their own.

So they poured billions into development.

Which they could not afford.

Creating the straw that broke the communist back.

"You're tellin' me that the U.S. worked a con on the communists?"

"Not so much a con. More we exploited the other side's clear weakness, using our strengths to maximum advantage."