Agatha was playing her role-eager, yet fearful of appearing too eager- to the hilt. "I was wondering... I mean, if you're free... What I'm driving at is, well, what the h.e.l.l, would you like to come for supper tomorrow."

The Russian cleared his throat. "So: I am free tomorrow-I will come happily, of course."

"Do you remember where I live?"

ae/PINNACLE laughed excitedly; he, too, was playing his role well- but what was his role? "It is not something I am forgetting easily," he said.

"Where are you calling from?" Agatha asked.

"A public phone near the... near where I work."

"They traced the call-he's calling from the Soviet emba.s.sy," the security man on the open line told Manny.

"Well, that's settled," Agatha said. "About six-thirty would be fine. I get back from the Patent Office at five-thirty"-she had worked the Patent Office into the conversation as Manny had asked-"which will give me time to make myself presentable."

"You are very presentable," ae/PINNACLE said.

Agatha caught her breath. "Tomorrow, then?"

"Yes. Tomorrow. Goodbye to you, presentable lady."

"Goodbye, Sergei."

A moment later the phone rang in 5E. Manny s.n.a.t.c.hed it off the hook. "He's coming," Agatha announced excitedly.

"I know. I heard the conversation."

"How'd I do?"

"You were great. You ought to think of getting into the acting business.

Agatha laughed nervously. "To tell the truth I had my heart in my mouth-I was so frightened."

"The thing now, Agatha, is to go about your life as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening. We'll be monitoring your apartment all day to make sure n.o.body from their side breaks in to plant microphones. If you have any unusual contacts-if anybody calls you whom you don't know-you phone the number I gave you and report it immediately."

"You'll be here when he shows up?"

"I'll be outside your door when he gets off the elevator.

Despite Angleton's a.s.surances that ae/PINNACLE would not be wired, Manny decided it wouldn't hurt to check. As the Russian emerged from the elevator Manny signalled with a forefinger to his lips for him to remain silent, then held up an index card with the words, written in Russian: "Are you wired for sound?"

"Not wired for sound, Manny," Kukushkin replied in English. He raised his arms and spread his legs. "You may search me if you wish. My rezident very happy when I tell him of this contact. He always ready to boast to Moscow Centre about new sources of information."

Manny gestured for him to lower his arms and follow him. He produced a key, opened the door to 5D and locked it when they were both inside Ept's apartment.

Agatha came across the room. "h.e.l.lo," she said, shyly offering a hand, which the Russian vigorously shook.

"h.e.l.lo to you, presentable lady," he said with a smirk.

"Not that it matters," she said, "but today happens to be a propitious time for intercourse between Capricorns and Virgos. Both parties will tend to be wary at first but once they break the ice great things will follow. I'd explain why but judging from the way you're both looking at me it would take more time than you want to invest. So unless I hear dissenting opinion... no one? Then I'll leave you gentlemen to yourselves now." Turning on a heel she disappeared into the bedroom.

Manny motioned Kukushkin to sit on the couch and settled down on a chair facing him. The Russian loosened his tie and grunted something that Manny recognized as a curse in Tajik. "You speak Tajik?" Manny asked in surprise.

"I do not speak it-I curse in it," Kukushkin said. "My grandfather on my father's side was a Tajik. How is it you recognize Tajik?"

I studied Central Asian languages in college." He pulled a thick wad of typed pages from his breast pocket. "Question and answer time, Sergei," he announced.

"I am knowing the rules of this terrible game we are playing. You wanting to make certain I am who I say."

"Something like that." Manny eyed the Russian. "When you phoned Agatha yesterday you told her you were calling from a public phone. Were you?" Kukushkin looked around. "Where are microphones?"

Manny said, "All over the place."

Kukushkin nodded grimly. "I am phoning from emba.s.sy, not public phone. The rezident, Kliment Borisov, is listening on extension. SK is recording conversation. Borisov is telling me to tell I using public phone since I am supposed to be starting love affair outside of marriage and not wanting wife, not wanting people at emba.s.sy, to know." The Russian crossed his legs, then uncrossed them and planted his large feet flat on the floor. "Are you having patent doc.u.ments I can take back."

Manny put on a surgeon's glove and pulled the photocopies of the three raw patent reports from a manila envelope. He handed them to Kukushkin, who glanced quickly at the pages. "Her fingerprints are being on them?" he asked.

"You think of everything," Manny said, removing the glove. "I had her read through the reports and put them into the envelope."

The Russian folded the papers away in his inside breast pocket. "It is you who are thinking of everything, Manny."

"Time to put the show on the road," Manny said. He looked at the first question typed in Cyrillic on the top sheet. "What was the name and nickname of the person who taught "Bourgeois Democracy-a Contradiction in Terms' at Lomonosov University?"

Kukushkin closed his eyes. "You are having very good biography records at your CIA. Teacher of 'Bourgeois Democracy' is Jew named Lifs.h.i.tz. He is losing an eye escorting British convoys from Murmansk during Great Patriotic War and wearing black patch over it, so students are calling him Moshe Dayan behind his back."

Reading off the questions in Russian, Manny worked his way down the list. Speaking in English, Kukushkin answered those that he could. There were a handful that he couldn't answer-the man's name had slipped his mind, he said-and several that he answered incorrectly, but he got most or them right. Agatha brought them cups of steaming tea at one point and sat with them while they drank it. Kukushkin asked her where she worked in the Patent Office and what kind of doc.u.ments pa.s.sed through her hands. Manny understood that he was gathering details for the report he would be obliged to write for the SK people. When they returned to Manny's list of questions, Kukushkin corrected one of the inaccurate answers he had given and remembered the nickname of the fat woman who had served tea in the third floor canteen in Moscow Centre: because of the mustache on her upper lip and her habit of wearing men's shirts, everyone had taken to calling her "Dzhentlman Djim." Manny was halfway through the last of Angleton's six pages when the telephone on the sideboard rang. Both the Russian and Manny stared at it. Agatha appeared in the bedroom doorway; behind her the television set was tuned to Candid Camera. "It could be my mother," she said hopefully.

"Answer it," Manny said.

"What do I say if it's not?"

"You don't say anything. You're starting an illicit affair with a married man. That's not the kind of thing you'd tell someone over the phone while he was here."

Agatha gingerly brought the telephone to her ear. "h.e.l.lo?" Then: "What number are you calling?"

She looked at Manny and mouthed the words search me search me. "Well, you have the right number but there's no one here by that name... You're welcome, I'm sure." She hung up. "He wanted to speak to someone named Maureen Belton." She batted her eyes nervously and retreated to the bedroom.

Manny went over to the sideboard and picked up the phone. "Were you able to trace it?" He listened for a moment, then replaced the receiver and came back to his seat. "Too quick to trace. It was a man-he spoke with an accent."

"The SK is having her phone number. Maybe they checking to see if there is a woman here."

"That may be it," Manny agreed.

"So how am I doing with your questions and my answers?" Kukushkin asked when Manny reached the end of the six pages. You did just fine," Manny said.

" So we may talk now of how I can come over?"

Manny shook his head. "If only it was that easy, Sergei. Successful defections aren't organized in one night. Your answers must be a.n.a.lyzed by our counterintelligence staff-"

"By your Mr. Angleton," Kukushkin said.

"You know of Mr. Angleton?"

'Everybody at our emba.s.sy knows of your Mr. Angleton."

"If counterintelligence gives us the go-ahead, then we need to set up a safe house in the countryside and staff it, and then organize the actual coming over-we will need a time when you and your wife and your darghter leave the Russian compound together on a pretext. You must be able fill that briefcase with the secrets you promised us and spirit it out of the emba.s.sy. We must be able to bring you over and hide you away before the SK people know you are missing."

Kukushkin face darkened. "How long?"

"If all goes well it could be done in five to six weeks."

The Russian exploded out of his chair. "SASHA is back in Washington before five weeks!" He strode over to the window, parted the curtain and studied the dark street below. "In five weeks, Manny, I am a dead man."

"Calm down, Sergei. There is a way out of this."

"There is no way out of a coffin."

Manny joined Kukushkin at the window. "There will not be a coffin Sergei, if you give me the SASHA serials now-give us the first initial of SASHA's family name, give us the biographical detail, tell us when SASHA was absent from Washington."

Kukushkin turned away and prowled back and forth behind the couch, a caged panther looking for a way out of the trap he had fallen into. "So: how are you feeling when you play this blackmail game with me?"

Manny avoided Sergei's eye. "Lousy. I feel lousy, is how I feel. But we all have our jobs to do..."

The Russian grunted. "Being in your shoes I am doing the same. You and me, we are being in a lousy business."

"I didn't invent SASHA, Sergei," Manny said from the window. "I didn't create the situation where he returns to Washington in a little more than a week."

"How can I be sure you are not throwing me away like old rag after I deliver SASHA serials?"

"I give you my word, Sergei-"

"Your Mr. Angleton is not bound by your word."

"You have other things we want-most especially, we want to discover the ident.i.ty of your mole inside the NSA."

The Russian settled onto the couch again, defeated by the logic of the situation. "What about medical help for my wife?"

"We can have her examined by specialists within days. If she needs treatment we can provide it."

"How examined within days?"

"The Russians at the emba.s.sy all get their teeth fixed in America-they use that Bulgarian dentist near the Dupont Circle subway stop who speaks Russian and doesn't charge a lot. If your wife suddenly had a toothache she would make an appointment. If she were going to have a root ca.n.a.l, she would need three or four appointments over a period of three or four weeks. We could organize to have a heart specialist in another office in the same building."

"And the Bulgarian dentist?"

"He would cooperate. He could pretend to do actual work on her and n.o.body would be the wiser."

"How are you being sure he cooperating?"

Manny only smiled.

ae/PINNACLE thought about it. Manny came across the room and sat on the back of the couch. "Trust me, Sergei-give me the SASHA serials. If we can identify SASHA your troubles are over. We'll bring you and your wife and your daughter across under conditions that are as near to risk-free as we can make them. Then we'll make you an offer that will knock your eyes out. You won't regret it."

3.

WASHINGTON, DC, FRIDAY, MAY 24, 1974.

TIME WAS RUNNING OUT ON THE SOVIET POLITICAL ATTACHE Kukushkin. His two-week window of opportunity had forty-eight hours left on the clock; if his information was correct, SASHA would return to Washington on Sunday and be back at his desk the following morning. Despite the task force's efforts to limit distribution of its product, SASHA would be bound to pick up rumors of a high-level defection in the works, after which he could be expected to alert the SK people at the Soviet emba.s.sy.

At the start, Angleton had been wary of ae/PINNACLE. But his natural tendency to a.s.sume the worst case, when it came to defectors, started to crack the day Manny mentioned the serial concerning Moscow Centre's newly created Department D, the Disinformation Directorate in charge of coordinating the KGB's global disinformation campaign. Angleton had long ago inferred the existence of such a directorate from the fact that the world in general, and the American media in particular, had swallowed whole the rumors of a Sino-Soviet split, as well as the stories of Dubcek and Ceausescu and t.i.to seeking to distance themselves from Moscow. Angleton, who prided himself on being able to distinguish between KGB disinformation and real political events in the real world, knew intuitively that these were planted stories designed to lull the West into cutting military and intelligence budgets.

The SASHA serials that Manny brought back from his second rendezvous with ae/PINNACLE made Angleton's head swim with possibilities. For the better part of two years he had been closing in on SASHA, gradually narrowing the list of suspects using a complex process of elimination that involved a.n.a.lyzing operations that had gone bad, as well as operations that had been successful. He felt that it was only a matter of months before he would be able to figure out, with near-certainty, the ident.i.ty of SASHA. During those months, of course, SASHA could still do a great deal of damage.

Which was why the ae/PINNACLE serials, used in conjunction with Angleton's own painstaking work, were so crucial. Back in his own shop, Angleton a.s.signed a team of counterintelligence experts to each serial.

_SASHA, according to ae/PINNACLE, would be away from Washington until Sunday, May 26, which probably meant that he would be back at Langley on Monday, the twenty-seventh.

-he was a Russian-speaker.

-his last name began with the letter K.

-when Kukushkin worked in Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow Centre, he reported directly to Starik. In September of 1972, Kukushkin was asked to provide Starik with logistical support-highway and city maps, bus and train schedules, locations of car rental agencies-for one of his rare trips abroad, this one to the province of Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. In a casual conversation that took place when Kukushkin personally delivered the file to Starik's private apartment, located in a villa known as the Apatov Mansion near a village called Cheryomuski, Starik intimated that he was going abroad to meet someone. Only later, when Kukushkin became aware of the existence of a high-level KGB penetration of the CIA, code named SASHA, did he put two and two together; only SASHA would have been important enough to lure Starik overseas.

Even with these serials, identifying SASHA would be tantamount to stumbling across the proverbial needle in the haystack. The Company had something in the neighborhood of 22,000 regular employees and another 4,000 contract employees. The Clandestine Service alone had roughly 5,000 staffers worldwide; 4,000 of them worked in Washington and another thousand were spread across stations around the globe.

While counterintelligence went about the tedious business of searching the Central Registry-they had to sort through thousands of files by hand- Manny organized the medical visit for Kukushkin's wife, a short, heavy woman whose close-cropped hair was beginning to turn white... with worry, Manny supposed. Her name was Elena Antonova. On cue, she complained of a toothache and asked the Russian nurse at the emba.s.sy to suggest a dentist. The nurse gave her the phone number of the Russian-speaking Bulgarian dentist near Dupont Circle whom everyone at the emba.s.sy used.

Miraculously, someone had canceled and there was an opening on the following day. The dentist, actually a Company contract employee, had given Mrs. Kukushkin a formal written diagnosis without even examining her; she was suffering from an abscess at the root of the lower first bicuspid which would require between three and four appointments for root ca.n.a.l work, at a cost of $45 per visit.

Manny was loitering in the corridor when Elena Antonova emerged from the dentist's office, an appointment card in her hand. He gestured for her to follow him up two flights to an office with the words "Proffit & Proffit Attorneys at Law" stenciled on the gla.s.s door. Inside, Manny introduced Kukushkin's wife to a heart specialist, a Company contract employee with a top secret security clearance. The doctor, who went by the name M. Milton when he moonlighted for the CIA's Office of Medical Services, was fluent in Russian. He led her into an inner office (equipment had been rushed in the night before) for an examination that lasted three quarters of an hour. Then, with Manny present, the doctor delivered his prognosis: in all likelihood, Elena Antonova was suffering from angina pectoris (he would make a definitive diagnosis when her blood tests came back from the laboratory), the result of a high cholesterol count that was causing a narrowing of the arteries carrying blood to her heart. Dr. Milton proposed to treat the problem with a combination of beta-blocking agents to decrease the work of the heart and slow the pulse rate, and vasodilators designed to increase coronary circulation. If the condition persisted, Mrs. Kukushkin might eventually require coronary bypa.s.s surgery but that decision could be made at a later date.

Manny accompanied Mrs. Kukushkin to the elevator and, speaking Russian in an undertone, promised her that on her next visit to the dentist, the doctor will have prepared the necessary medicine disguised as ordinary over-the-counter pills that women used to alleviate menstrual cramps.

"Bohhoe spasibo," she whispered. She tried to smile. "I will tell you-I am terrified. If they find out about this it will be terrible for us: for Sergei, for me, for our daughter, Ludmilla.