She seemed to accept that. After a while she said, "Elliott?"

"Yes."

"Are you afraid of the dark?"

"I used to be," Ebby said. "I'm not any more."

"Me, too, I used to be when I was four. Now I'm practically six, so I'm not afraid anymore," she said in a surprisingly grown-up voice.

"Whatever happens," Elizabet told the girl, "you must promise not to complain."

"I promise," Nellie said.

"Good girl," Ebby said.

Nellie went to sleep on Elizabet s lap; Elizabet dozed on Ebby's shoulder. The minutes dragged by as the truck, back on dirt roads, continued westward. From time to time someone would switch on a flashlight and Ebby would catch a glimpse of his ghostlike companions, some asleep, others staring straight ahead with wide-open eyes. Just after one in the morning, the truck drew to a stop and the refugees inside the hay came awake. They could hear voices talking to the driver outside. Elizabet, scarcely breathing, pa.s.sed her Webley-Fosbery to Ebby in the darkness. He fingered the bullets in the cylinder to make sure one was under the firing pin. Zoltan whispered in his ear, "Hungarian Army roadblock, not Russian, okay. Not to worry. Driver said him don't search under hay because it will wake everyone up. The soldiers laugh and ask how many. Driver tells him eighteen, not counting one child and one baby. Soldier asks for cigarettes, tells us to watch out for Russians patrolling the frontier, wishes us luck."

b.u.mping over the potholes, the truck continued westward. At two twenty-five in the morning it pulled off the dirt road and eased to a stop next to a stream. Once again the hay was removed and the refugees climbed out. Elizabet wet a kerchief in the stream and rinsed Nellie s face, then her own.

"I'm hungry," Nellie said. Overhearing her, the elderly professor came over and offered her what was left of a sandwich. "Oh, what stories you will tell your children when you are older," he told her. "They will think you made it all up to impress them."

Twenty minutes later Ebby heard the m.u.f.fled sound of hooves on the dirt path. Moments later a lean, middle-aged man wearing knee-high riding boots and breeches and a leather jacket appeared leading a dun-colored stallion, its hooves wrapped in thick cloth. Speaking Hungarian, he introduced himself as Marion. The refugees gathered around him as he spoke in low tones.

"He says it is forty minutes by foot to the border," Elizabet told Ebby. ln principle we will cross an area patrolled by Hungarian Army units. If they spot us it is hoped they will look the other way. He instructs the young couple to give sleeping powder to their baby. He argues with the others-he says luggage will only slow us down. But the puppeteer insists-he says his whole life is in the valises. Without them he would not be able to make a living in the West. Marton tells him, If you fall behind its your problem. He tells us we are to walk double file directly behind him and the horse. He knows the way through the mine fields. He has been through every night for weeks. Each person is instructed to walk in the footsteps of the person before him The little girl will not be able to keep up, he says. Someone must carry her."

"Tell him I will."

Marton supplied a vial of sleeping powder, and the young couple broke the end of the capsule and poured it into the baby's mouth. Those with luggage removed the objects that were valuable and threw the rest aside. When they started out, with Marton in the lead, Ebby saw the puppeteer struggling with his two enormous valises. He reached down and took one from him.

The elfin man, his face taut with anxiety, attempted to smile at him. "Thanks to you, Mister," he whispered.

A low ground fog closed in on the refugees as they left the safety of the clump of trees. Walking in a double file behind Martin and his horse, they cut across the tarmac of Highway 10, the Budapest-Vienna road, and headed into the countryside. Each field they came to was bordered by low stone walls-for centuries the peasants who guarded the flocks had been obliged to build a meter of stone wall a day. Scrambling over the walls, the group trudged through fields that were dark and empty and still. An icy wind knifed through layers of clothing, chilling everyone to the bone. h.o.a.rfrost on the ground crackled underfoot. The women wearing city shoes began to complain of frostbitten toes but there was nothing to do but trudge on. Off to the right a dog bayed at the moon threading through lace-like clouds. Other dogs further afield howled in response. A star sh.e.l.l burst silently high over Highway 10 and floated back toward the earth on a parachute. Marton's horse, visible in the sudden daylight, snorted through his nostrils and pawed softly at the ground. The refugees froze in their tracks. Marton, alert to sounds in the night, climbed onto a low wall and concentrated on the horizon, then muttered something.

"He tells that the Russians are probably hunting for other refugees trying to cross further north," Zoltan explained to Ebby.

When the light from the star sh.e.l.l faded, Marton motioned them forward. The orchestra conductor, immediately in front of Ebby, turned with a long drawn face. His ankle-length leather coat was dripping with fog. "Are you by any chance familiar with Mahler's Kindertotenlieder? he asked. When Ebby shook his head, the conductor removed his beret and cleaned his eyegla.s.ses on the fabric as he hummed the melody in a quiet falsetto. "I was supposed to conduct it in Budapest tonight," he remarked. The jowls in his cheek vibrated as he shook his head in disbelief. "Who would have thought it would come to this?" He turned back to continue on through the icy fields.

Nellie, astride Ebby's shoulders, tapped him on the head. "I am quite cold " she whispered. "I'm not complaining. I'm just giving you information."

"We're almost there," Elizabet told the girl. "Aren't we almost there?" she asked Ebby, a note of alarm in her voice.

"It can't be much further," he agreed.

They tramped on for another half hour. Then, far across a field that sloped gently toward a stand of trees, they saw the white stucco of a farmhouse. It materialized out of the ground fog like a mirage. Marton gathered the refugees around him and began to talk to them in an undertone. Several reached out to shake his hand.

"He says this is where we part company," Elizabet translated. "The farmhouse is immediately inside Austria. There will be hot soup waiting. When we've rested, there will be a two kilometer walk down a dirt road to an Austrian Red Cross center in a village."

Starting to retrace his steps, Marton pa.s.sed close to Ebby. The two regarded each other for a moment and Ebby reached out to offer his hand. "Thank you," he said.

Marton took it and nodded and said something in Hungarian. Elizabet said, "He tells you: Remember Hungary, please, after you leave it."

"Tell him I will never forget Hungary-or him," Ebby replied.

Marton swung onto his horse in an easy motion. Clucking his tongue at the stallion, pulling its head around, he set it walking back into Hungary. Zoltan took over the lead and started toward the stuccoed farmhouse. The group was halfway across the sloping field when there was a disturbance up ahead. Five figures in hooded arctic greatcoats loomed out of a drainage ditch. Each carried a rifle at the ready in mittened hands. Zoltan reached for the handle of his curved knife. Ebby lifted Nellie off his shoulders and set her down behind him, then pulled Elizabet's English revolver from his overcoat pocket. In the stillness he could make out the Jewish professor b.u.mbling a Hebrew prayer. One of the five soldiers came up to Zoltan and asked him something.

Elizabet breathed deeply in relief. "He speaks Hungarian," she said. "He says there are no Russians in this sector tonight. He asks if we have cigarettes. He wishes us G.o.dspeed."

The soldiers saluted the refugees with stiff-armed waves as they lumbered off to finish patrolling the zone.

Four young Austrians emerged from the farmhouse to help the refugees over the last fifty meters. Inside, a fire was burning in an old pot- bellied stove and soup was simmering in a cast-iron pot on top of it. TheI refugees, ma.s.saging their frozen toes, warmed themselves with cup after cup of soup. Before long, four more refugees made it to the house. And still later, two couples with three children joined them. Zoltan thawed out his hands in front of the stove, then slipped on woolen gloves with the fingertips cut off and began playing sentimental gypsy melodies on his fiddle. Gradually the tenseness on the faces around the room faded into tired smiles. Hours later, with the eastern sky ablaze with a fiery dawn, one of the Austrians guided them all down a sunken dirt path toward the village. Ebby, carrying Nellie on his shoulders and the puppeteer's enormous valise in one hand, had just caught sight of the church steeple when he spotted figures standing on a rise.

One of them raised a hand and waved at him. "Ebby!" he called, scrambling down the rise to the road.

"Jack!" Ebby said. The two men thumped each other on the back.

"The Wiz is up there-" Jack turned to call up the rise."It is him." He turned back to Ebby. "Frank's taking this very personally," he said, gesturing with his chin toward the refugees stumbling down the rut of a road. "We've been coming out here mornings hoping against hope... d.a.m.nation, are you a sight for sore eyes." He grabbed the valise from Ebby. "Here, let me give you-Jesus H. Christ, Ebby, what do you have in here?"

"You won't believe me if I tell you."

Jack, falling into step alongside him, laughed happily. "Try me, pal."

"Marionettes, Jack." Ebby turned to look back in the direction of Hungary. "Marionettes."

12.

WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1956.

THE COMPANY'S COUNTERINTELLIGENCE BAILIWICK HAD GROWN BY quantum leaps since James Jesus Angleton set up the shop in the early years of the decade. Three full-time secretaries now guarded the door to his office; in the last twelve months alone thirty-five CIA officers had been added to Mother s ever-expanding roster. Despite the chronically severe shortage of office s.p.a.ce on c.o.c.kroach Alley, counterintelligence had managed to pull off what in-house wags nervously referred to as "Angleton's Anschluss"- it had commandeered a large windowless stockroom across the hall and crammed it full of unpickable Burmah-lock diamond safes to accommodate the paper trails that Angleton's prodigies hacked through the tangled Central Intelligence copse. Despite this expansion, the heart of the heart of counterintelligence was still Angleton's permanently dusky sanctum sanctorum (one school of thought held that Mother's Venetian blinds had been glued closed), with its spill of three-by-five index cards flagged with red priority stickers.

"Nice of you to stop by on such short notice," Angleton told Ebby, steering him through the maze of boxes to the only halfway decent chair in the room.

"Except for the tour with Duties late this afternoon, I have no pressing engagements," Ebby said.

"Jack Daniel's?" Angleton asked, settling behind the desk, peering around the Tiffany lamp at his visitor. The last vestiges of a migraine that had kept him up most of the night lurked in the furrows of his brow.

"Don't mind."

Angleton poured two stiff drinks into kitchen tumblers and pushed one across the desk. "To you and yours," he said, hiking his gla.s.s.

"To the Hungarians who were naive enough to fall for all that malarkey about rolling back Communism," Ebby shot back, his voice a low rumble of crankiness as he clinked gla.s.ses with Mother. Sipping his bourbon, he winced at the memory of the Torkoly that had scalded the back of his throat the first time he met Arpad Zeik. Angleton's Jack Daniel s was a lot tamer. Everything in Washington was a lot tamer.

"You sound bitter-?

"Do I?"

Angleton was always uncomfortable with small talk but he made a stab at it anyway. "How was your plane ride back?"

"How it was, was long-twenty-seven hours, door to door, not counting the day and a half holdover in Germany while the Air Force cured a coughing propeller."

"I heard on the grapevine you came back with a woman-"

"A woman and a kid. A girl. She's practically six and not afraid of the dark. The woman is practically thirty-three and very much afraid of the dark. Of the light, too, come to think of it."

"Manage any R and R after you got out of Hungary?"

"The Wiz laid on ten days in a Gasthaus near Innsbruck for the three of us. Long walks in the Bavarian Alps. Quiet evenings by a roaring fire. While we were there another twelve thousand Hungarian refugees came across."

Angleton's well of small talk dried up. He lit a cigarette and vanished for a moment behind a bank of smoke. "I read through"-there was a hacking cough-"through the notes the debriefing team made in Vienna..."

"Thought you might."

"Especially interested in your suspicions about a Soviet mole-"

"What I have isn't suspicions-it's certainty."

"Uh-huh."

"I told the debriefing people pretty much all I knew."

"Want to walk me through it once more?"

"I went in under deep cover-I was backstopped at my old law firm in New York in case anybody tried to check up on me. The AVH people picked me up-"

"After or before you made contact with Arpad Zeik?"

"It was after."

Angleton was thinking out loud. "So you could have been betrayed by one of the Hungarians around Zeik."

"Could have been. Wasn't. The AVH colonel general who interrogated me seemed familiar with my Central Registry file. He knew I was a.s.signed to Frank Wisner's Operations Directorate; he knew I was in the DD/O's Soviet Russia Division. He knew I'd worked out of Frankfurt station running emigres into Poland and Soviet Russia and Albania."

Behind the smoke screen, Angleton's eyes were reduced to slits of concentration.

"Then there was the business about Tony Spink," Ebby said.

"There's no mention of Spink in the transcript of your debriefing."

"It came back to me during one of those long walks in the Alps-I went over and over the interrogation in my head. When I slept, I dreamed about ... dreamed I was back in that room, back on the stool, back in the spotlight, back at the window watching them torture Elizabet..."

Angleton tugged the conversation back to where he wanted it to go. "You were talking about Spink."

"Spink, yes. Comrade Colonel General knew that Tony Spink was my immediate superior at Frankfurt Station. He knew that I was kicked upstairs to run agent ops when Spink was rotated back to Washington in 1954."

"He knew the date?"

"Yeah. He said 1954." Ebby closed his eyes. "Just before Arpad Zeik dragged him into the refrigerator room and hung him from a spike, the colonel general cried out that the Centre had told them about me..."

Angleton leaned forward. "In the wide world of intelligence there are many Centers."

"He meant Moscow Centre."

"How could you know that?"

"I just a.s.sumed-" Ebby shrugged.

Angleton scribbled notes to himself on a three-by-five card tagged with a red sticker. One of the telephones on his desk purred. He wedged the receiver between a shoulder and his ear and listened for a moment. "No, it's not a rumor," he said. "My Cattleya cross flowered, and eighteen months ahead of my wildest dreams. It's a raving beauty, too. Listen, Fred, I have someone with me. Let me get back to you." He dropped the phone back onto its cradle.

"What's a Cattleya cross?"

Angleton smiled thinly. To Ebby, eyeing him from across the desk, the Company's edgy counterintelligence chief almost looked happy. "It's a hybrid orchid," Angleton explained with unaccustomed bashfulness. "I've been trying to breed one for years. Son of a gun flowered over the weekend. I'm going to register it under my wife's name-it's going into the record books as the Cicely Angleton."

"Congratulations."

Angleton didn't hear the irony. "Thank you." He nodded. "Thank yoa very much." He cleared his throat and glanced down at the index card. When he spoke again there was no hint of the orchid in his voice. "Anything else you forgot to tell the debriefing people in Vienna?"

"I can think of a lot else. Most of what I can think of comes across as questions."

"Such as?"

"Such as: Why did all those emigre drops go bad after June 1951, which is when Maclean and Burgess skipped to Moscow and Philby got sacked? Why did we lose those double agents in Germany two years ago? How did the KGB know which of the diplomats working out of our Moscow emba.s.sy were Company officers servicing dead drops? The list is a long one. Where did the leaks come from? How could the Hungarian colonel general be so sure I worked for the Wiz? How did he know I'd stepped into Spink's shoes when he was called home? If he was tipped off by the KGB, how did the Russians find out?"

Angleton, his shoulders bent under the weight of secrets, stood up and came around the desk. "Thanks for your time, Elliott. Glad to have you back safe and sound."

Ebby laughed under his breath. "Safe maybe. I'm not so sure about sound."

When Ebbitt had gone, Angleton slumped back into his chair and helped himself to another dose of Jack Daniel's. Ebbitt was right, of course; the Russians had a mole in the CIA, most likely in the Clandestine Service, maybe even in the heart of the Clandestine Service, the Soviet Russia Division. Angleton pulled the index card on Anthony Spink from a file box and attached a red sticker to the corner. Spink intrigued him. Unbeknownst to Ebbitt and the others at Frankfurt Station, Spink hadn't been rotated back to Washington in 1954-he'd been pulled back by Angleton because he was sleeping with a German national who had a sister living in East Germany. At the time Spink had pa.s.sed the polygraph test, but if you took enough tranquilizers anybody could get past a polygraph. It wouldn't hurt to bring Spink in and flutter him again. As long as he was taking another look at Spink, he might as well flutter the two desk officers who had known about Spink's affair and covered for him at the time. And there was the deputy head of station in Prague who had deposited $7,000 in his wife's account in an upstate New York bank. And the cipher clerk in Paris who had made seven telephone calls to Istanbul, supposedly to speak to a vacationing daughter. And the secretary in Warsaw who had received flowers from a Polish national she'd met at a concert. And the Marine guard at the Moscow emba.s.sy who changed dollars into rubles on the black market to pay for the services of a Russian prost.i.tute. And the contract employee in Mexico City who had been spotted coming out of a transvest.i.te nightclub that the local KGB was known to use for secret meetings. And the voung officer working under diplomatic cover in Sofia who had smuggled three priceless icons back to the States in a diplomatic pouch. And then, of course, there was E. Winstrom Ebbitt II. What if he had been "turned" in prison? What if he had never been in prison? If Ebbitt himself were the Soviet mole, the spymaster Starik might have instructed him to raise the specter of a Soviet mole in the CIA-to tell Angleton what he already knew!-in order to divert attention from himself? Clearly, this was a possibility that had to be looked into. Angleton brought his palms up and pressed them against his ears. He had detected the distant drumbeat of the migraine-a primitive tattoo summoning Starik's specter to prowl the lobes of his brain, keeping sleep and sanity at bay for the time the visitation lasted.

Drifting with postcoital languidness, Bernice hiked herself onto a counter stool at the People's Drugstore, a short stroll from her apartment. "So what are you hungry for?" she asked Eugene as he slid onto the next stool.

"You."