Aleksandr Timofeyevich's bony fingers dug into Yevgeny's palm with surprising strength. The only emotion Yevgeny was able to muster was pity for the shipwreck of a man who had foundered on a hospital bed in the special KGB clinic in Pekhomaya Street. He wondered if his father was hanging on to his son, or to life?

"Pro... prou... proud," Aleksandr Timofeyevich managed to say. "Lo... lone... lonely."

"Yes, it is a lonely life." He smiled into his father's good eye. "But there is satisfaction to be had from it, as you know from your own experience."

A corner of the old man's mouth drooped, almost as if he were trying to work the muscles that produced a smile. "Where?" he managed to say. "Wh...when?"

Yevgeny understood the question. "The same place as before. Soon."

The eye fixed intently on Yevgeny blinked and several tears welled from it. The nurse touched Yevgeny on the shoulder. "You must not tire him," he whispered. Yevgeny gave a last squeeze to his father's now limp hand. The lid closed slowly over the open eye. The only sound in the room was the nasal wheezing of his father sucking air through congested nostrils.

The days pa.s.sed quickly. Starik monopolized Yevgeny's mornings, going over and over every detail of his meetings with SASHA, reviewing the tight security precautions that built a fire wall between the Washington rezidentura and the Polish circuit breaker; between the Polish circuit breaker and Yevgeny; and that kept Yevgeny isolated from SASHA in all but the most extraordinary circ.u.mstances. A trusted technician turned up at the Apatov Mansion one afternoon to introduce Yevgeny to a new generation of espionage gadgets: a microdot projector hidden inside a Kodak box camera that was actually able to take photographs; a shortwave transmitter disguised as an electric razor that could send coded messages from perforated tape in bursts; a one-shot pistol hidden in an ordinary lead pencil that fired a 6.35 millimeter bullet straight from the cartridge buried under the eraser.

Evenings, Yevgeny prowled the streets of Moscow, drifting through the ma.s.ses of people hurrying home from work, studying their faces-he was curious to see if they were eager to get where they were going, which he took to be a barometer-reading of whether the system worked. Afterward he would catch a bite to eat, dining in the Chinese restaurant in the Hotel Peking one night, the Prague restaurant complex near Arbat Square another. One evening, fresh from a visit to his father in the clinic, Yevgeny was invited to join Starik and a handful of KGB bra.s.s at a private restaurant on the top floor of the Ukraine Hotel. Settling down for a banquet that began with bowls of black beluga caviar and French Champagne, Yevgeny found himself sitting next to none other than the ill.u.s.trious Chairman of the KGB, Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov, who, as Soviet Amba.s.sador to Hungary in 1956, had masterminded the Russian a.s.sault on Budapest and the arrest of Imre Nagy. The conversation was ba.n.a.l enough- Andropov seemed more interested in gossip about American film stars than in the Watergate scandal or Nixon's chances of being impeached. Was it true that John Kennedy had slept with Marilyn Monroe, he wanted to know. Had the famous ladies' man Errol Flynn really lived on a yacht off Cannes with a sixteen-year-old girl? Was there any truth to the rumor that the marriage of so and so- here he named a notorious Hollywood couple-was a sham organized by one of the film studios to obscure the fact that both were h.o.m.os.e.xuals?

The dishes were cleared away and a four-star Napoleon brandy was set out, after which the two waiters disappeared and the double door was locked from the inside. Andropov, a tall, humorless man who was said to write melancholy poems about lost love and the regret of old age, climbed to his feet and tapped a knife against a snifter. "Tovarishi," he began. "To me falls the pleasure-I may say the honor-of celebrating tonight, in this necessarily restricted company, the remarkable career of one of our preeminent operatives. For reasons of security I must keep my remarks vague. Suffice it to say that the comrade sitting on my right, Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin, has blazed a trail through the espionage firmament, equaling, perhaps surpa.s.sing, the accomplishments of the legendary Richard Sorge, who, as we all know, played a crucial role in the j.a.panese theater during the Great Patriotic War. If anything, the stakes are higher today. I can say to you that when the time comes for Yevgeny Alexandrovich to come in, his portrait will take its place alongside other Soviet intelligence heroes in the Memory Room of the First Chief Directorate." Reaching into the pocket of his suit jacket, Andropov produced a small flat box, which he clicked open. It was lined in blue velvet and contained a Soviet medal and ribbon. He motioned for Yevgeny to rise. "Acting in my capacity as Chairman of the KGB, I award you this Order of the Red Banner." The general lowered the ribbon over Yevgeny's head and straightened it around his collar so that the round metal badge rested against his shirtfront. Then he leaned forward and kissed him on both checks. The eight people around the room tapped their knives against their gla.s.ses in salute. Yevgeny, embarra.s.sed, looked at Starik across the table.

His mentor, too, was tapping his knife and nodding his approval. And it hit Yevgeny that his approval meant far more to him than his father's; that in a profound sense, Starik-who had started out as his Tolstoy-had become the father he always wanted to have: the authoritarian idealist who could point him in the right direction, after which all he had to do was concentrate on his forward motion.

Grinka phoned Yevgeny at the apartment the next morning to announce the bad news: their father had slipped into a coma during the early morning hours and breathed his last just as the sun was rising over Moscow. The body was to be cremated that morning and the ashes would be entrusted to Grinka, who proposed driving his brother to the dacha at Peredelkino and scattering them in the white birch woods surrounding the house. To Grinka's surprise, Yevgeny declined. "I am preoccupied with the living and have little time to devote to the dead," he said.

"And when will I see you again?" Grinka asked. When Yevgeny didn't answer, Grinka said, "You haven't forgotten about the dacha-there will be papers to sign."

"I will leave instructions with people who will arrange things to your liking," he said. And he hung up the receiver.

There was one other base that Yevgeny wanted to touch before he left Moscow. For that he needed to get his hands on a Moscow-area phone book, an item that was not available to the general public. One afternoon when he was roaming through the narrow lanes behind the Kremlin, he stopped by the Central Post Office on Gorky Street. Flashing a laminated card that identified him as a GRU officer on detached duty, he asked a functionary for the directories, which were cla.s.sified as a state secret and kept under lock and key. Which letter do you require? the woman, a prissy time-server, demanded. Yevgeny told her he was interested in the L's. Moments later he found himself in a private room leafing through a thick volume. Running his thumb down the column filled with Lebowitzes, he came across an A.I. Lebowitz. He jotted the phone number on a sc.r.a.p of paper, then stuffed kopeks into a public phone on the street and dialed it. After two rings a musical voice came on the line.

"Is it you, Marina? I have the doc.u.mentation on your-"

The woman answering the phone hesitated.

"Who is on the line?"

"Azalia Isanova?"

"Speaking."

Yevgeny didn't know how to explain the call to her; he doubted whether he could explain it to himself. "I am ghost from your past," he managed to say. "Our life lines crossed in a previous incarnation-"

On the other end of the phone line, Azalia gasped. "I recognize the tentativeness of your voice," she breathed. "Are you returned from the dead, then, Yevgeny Alexandrovich?"

"In a manner of speaking, yes. Would it be possible... can we talk?"

"What is there to say? We could explore what might have been but we can never go back and pick up the thread of our story as if nothing had happened; as if the thread had not been broken."

"I was not given a choice at the time-"

"To allow yourself to be placed in a position where you have no choice is a choice."

"You're right, of course... Are you well?"

"I am well, yes. And you?"

"Are you married?"

She let the question hang in the air. "I was married," she said finally. "I have a child, a beautiful girl. She is going to be sixteen this summer. Unfortunately my marriage did not work out. My husband was not in agreement with certain ideas that I hold, certain things that I was doing... The long and short of it is that I am divorced. Did you marry? Do you have children?"

"No. I have never married." He laughed uneasily. "Another choice, no doubt. What kind of work do you do?"

"Nothing has changed since... I work for the Historical Archives Inst.i.tute in Moscow. In my free time I still like to translate from the English language. Do you know a writer by the name of A. Sillitoe? I am translating something he wrote ent.i.tled The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner."

"The t.i.tle is intriguing."

"Are you a long-distance runner, Yevgeny Alexandrovich?

"In a manner of speaking."

A cement truck roared down Gorky, causing Yevgeny to miss what she said next. He plugged his free ear with a fingertip and pressed the phone harder against the other one. "I didn't hear you."

"I asked if you were lonely?"

"Never more so than right at this moment. My father just died."

"I am sorry to hear that. I remember him at the garden party that day at the dacha in Peredelkino-an old man was pressing a bottle filled with bees against the bare skin of his back when Comrade Beria introduced me to him. You must be melancholy..."

"That's the problem. I am not at all melancholy, at least not at the death of my father. I barely knew him and barely liked what I knew. He was a cold fish..."

"Well, at least he lived into old age. My father and mother died after the war."

"Yes. I remember your telling me about their disappearance-"

"They didn't disappear, Yevgeny. They were murdered."

"In his last years, Stalin strayed from the Socialist norm-"

"Strayed from the Socialist norm! In what ostrich hole have you been hiding your head? He was a murderer of peasants in the early thirties, he murdered his Party comrades in the mid and late thirties, he suspended the killings during the war but resumed them immediately afterward. By then it was the turn of the Jews-"

"It was not my intention to get into a political discussion, Aza."

"What was your intention, Yevgeny Alexandrovich? Do you know?"

"I only intended... I thought..." He was silent for a moment. "The truth is I was remembering-"

"Remembering what?"

"Remembering the gap between your two front teeth. Remembering also how my l.u.s.t and your desire turned out to be harmonious in bed."

"It is indelicate of you to raise the subject-"

"I mean no offense..."

"You are from a previous incarnation, Yevgeny Alexandrovich. I am not the same person who lived in the apartment of Comrade Beria. I am no longer innocent." And she quickly added, "I am not speaking of s.e.xual matters, it goes without saying. I am speaking of political matters."

"I wish things could have been otherwise-"

"I don't believe you."

A woman waiting to use the pay phone tapped a finger against the crystal on her wrist.w.a.tch. "How long do you intend to monopolize the line?" she cried.

"Please believe me, I wish you well. Goodbye, Azalia Isanova."

"I am not sure I am glad you called. I wish you had not stirred memories. Goodbye to you, Yevgeny Alexandrovich."

A dark scowl pa.s.sed across Starik's eyes. "I won't tell you again," he scolded the two nieces. "Wipe the smirks off your faces, girlies."

The nieces found Uncle unusually short-tempered; they were not at all sure what he did to gain money but, whatever it was, they could tell he was preoccupied by it now. He switched on the klieg lights and adjusted the reflectors so that the beams bathed the bodies of the two angelic creatures posing for him. Returning to the tripod, he peered down into the ground gla.s.s of the Czech Flexaret. "Revolucion, how many times must I tell you, throw your arm over Axinya's shoulders and lean toward her until your heads are touching. Just so. Good."

The two girls, their long gawky feet planted casually apart, their pubic bones jutting pugnaciously, stared into the camera. "Do take the photograph, Uncle," Axinya pleaded. "Even with all these lights I am quite chilly."

"Yes, take the picture before I catch my death of cold," Revolucion said with a giggle.

"I will not be rushed, girlies," Starik admonished them. "It is important to focus correctly, after which I must double check the exposure meter." He bent his head and studied the image on the ground gla.s.s; the klieg lights had scrubbed the pink out of the naked bodies until only the eye sockets and nostrils and oral cavities of the girls, and their rosebud-like nipples, were visible. He took another reading on the light meter, set the exposure, then moved to one side and regarded the girls carefully. They were staring into the lens, painfully conscious of their nudity. He wanted to achieve something incorporeal, something that could not be a.s.sociated with a particular time and place. He thought he knew how to distract them.

"Girlies, imagine you are innocent little Alice lost in Wonderland- transport yourselves into her magical world for a moment."

"What is Wonderland really like?" Axinya asked shyly.

"Is Wonderland in the socialist camp, Uncle?" Revolucion, always pragmatic, wanted to know. "Is it a workers' paradise, do you think?"

"It is a paradise for little girls," Starik whispered. He could make out the ethereal expressions creeping onto the faces of the two little nieces as they were transported to the whimsical world where, at any moment, the White Rabbit might appear, splendidly dressed, with a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the other. Satisfied, Starik tripped the plunger. Opening the aperture to heighten the washed-out effect, he took several more shots. Finally he waved toward the door. "Enough for today," he said grumpily. "You may go outside and play until suppertime."

The nieces, only too happy to flee his moodiness, tugged sleeveless cotton shifts over their heads and, arm in arm, scampered from the room. Starik could hear their shrieks as they skipped down the wide steps toward the front door of the Apatov Mansion. He turned off the klieg lights, rewound the film and stuck the exposed roll in the pocket of his long shirt. Deep in thought, he returned to the library and poured himself a gla.s.s of mineral water.

What should he make of Philby, he wondered. He liked the man personally; Yevgeny had come away from their meeting saying that the Englishman was an embittered drunk and incapable of the intricate mental compartmentalization that would be required of a triple agent. Andropov, on the other hand, was absolutely convinced that Philby had been turned by Angleton; that somewhere along the way Philby had switched his ultimate loyalties to the CIA. How else explain the fact, so Andropov reasoned, that Philby had never been arrested? How else explain that he had been allowed to slip away from Beirut, where he had been working as a journalist, after the British came up with irrefutable evidence that he had betrayed his country? Starik's gut view, which found few supporters within the KGB hierarchy, was that Angleton would have been only too happy to see Philby escape; might even have made sure whispers of an impending arrest reached the Englishman's ears so that he could head for Moscow one jump ahead of the MI6's agents come to fetch him home to London. The last thing Angleton wanted was for Philby to tell the world about all those lunches with the American counterintelligence chief at La Nicoise, about all the state secrets he'd swiped directly from the man charged with protecting state secrets. When Philby had turned up in Moscow in 1963, Starik had spent weeks screening the serials he'd sent from Washington during the years he'd been meeting regularly with Angleton. All of them had seemed true enough, which meant... which meant what? If Angleton had turned Philby into a triple agent, he would have been shrewd enough to continue feeding him real secrets to keep the KGB from suspecting the truth. That was what Starik had done over the years; was still doing, in fact: sending over false defectors with real secrets and real defectors with false secrets was all part of the great game.

Sipping the mineral water, Starik slipped through the narrow door in the wood paneling into his small inner sanctum. Locking the door behind him, he disabled the destruction mechanism on the large safe cemented into the wall behind the portrait of Lenin, then opened it with the key he kept attached to the wrought silver chain hanging around his neck. He pulled out the old-fashioned file box with the words Soversheno Sekretno and KHOLSTOMER written in Cyrillic across the oak cover, and set it on the small table. He opened the box and extracted from a thick folder the cable that had been hand-delivered to the Apatov Mansion the previous night. The KGB rezident in Rome was alerting Directorate S to rumors circulating in Italian banking circles: The Patriarch of Venice, Cardinal Albino Luciani, was said to be looking into reports that the Vatican Bank, known as the Inst.i.tute for Religious Works, was involved in money-laundering transactions. Luciani, whom some touted as a possible successor to the current Pope, Paul VI, had apparently been alerted to the existence of a fourteen-year-old investigation by a Roman public prosecutor into a money-laundering operation bearing the code name KHOLSTOMER, and had dispatched two priests with accounting skills to review the handwritten ledgers gathering dust in the archives of the Inst.i.tute for Religious Works.

Starik looked up from the cable, his eyes dark with apprehension. Fortunately, one of the two priests came from a Tuscan family with strong ties to the Italian Communist Party; working closely with the Italian Communists, the rezident in Rome would be able to keep track of what information the priests sent back to Albino Luciani in Venice.

If the Patriarch of Venice came too close to the flame he would have to be burned. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with KHOLSTOMER. Now that the American economy was in a recessionary spiral and inflation was soaring, Starik intended to present the scheme first to KGB Chairman Andropov and, if he approved it, to the secret Politburo Committee of Three that scrutinized intelligence operations. By year's end, Starik hoped that Comrade Brezhnev himself would sign off on KHOLSTOMER and the stratagem that would bring America to its knees could finally be launched.

Starik's thoughts drifted to Yevgeny Alexandrovich. He bitterly regretted his decision to bring him back to Russia on home leave. The fatal illness of Yevgeny's father had clouded Starik's thoughts, lured him into the realm of sentimentality; he owed a last debt to the elder Tsipin, whom Starik had controlled when he worked in the United Nations Secretariat. Now that the debt was paid-Tsipin's ashes had been scattered amid the birches of Peredelkino the previous afternoon-it was time for Yevgeny Alexandrovich to return to the war zone. Time, also, for Starik to get on with his cat-and-bat game with the declining but still dangerous James Jesus Angleton.

"Do cats eat bats? Do bats eat cats.''" he recited out loud.

He made a mental note to read that particular chapter to the girlies before they were tucked in for the night.

5.

WASHINGTON, DC, THURSDAY, JULY 4, 1974.

THE DARK GOVERNMENT OLDSMOBILE, OUTFITTED WITH BULLETPROOF windows and anti-mine flooring, threaded through the heavy beltway traffic in the direction of Langley. Riding shotgun up front next to the driver, the security guard fingered the clips taped back to back in the Israeli Uzi across his knees as he talked on the car radio to the chase car. "Breakwater Two, that there green Ford pickup two cars backa us been round for a spell-"

There was blast of static from the speaker in the dashboard. "Breakwater One, been eyeballing him since we crossed the Potomac. Two Caucasian males with Raybans up front."

"Breakwater Two, ah'd certainly 'preciate you cuttin' em off if they was to try to tuck in behind us."

"Breakwater One, wilco."

In the backseat the Director of Central Intelligence, Bill Colby,was reading through the "Eyes-Only" overnight cables bound in a metal folder with a red slash across it. There had been a dry spell in the last several weeks-Angleton had run into a stone wall in his interrogation of Leo Kritzky, Jack McAuliffe hadn't had any joy in identifying the Soviet mole inside the National Security Agency, Manny Ebbitt was sc.r.a.ping the bottom of the barrel at the weekly debriefing of the Russian defector ae/PINNACLE. Which made downright good news all the more welcome. Colby initialed a cable from Teheran Station (reporting on the feebleness of the Islamic fundamentalist opposition movements in Iran) and added it to the thin batch that would be routed on to Secretary of State Kissinger once the Company indicators and operational codes were expunged. Teheran Stations a.s.sessment reinforced recent estimates from rhe Deputy Director/Intelligence predicting that Iran's pro-Western monarch, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, would rule into the next century; that Islamic fundamentalists would not menace Persian Gulf stability, or Western oil supplies, in the foreseeable future.

The red telephone in the console buzzed. Colby lifted the receiver. "Yes?" He listened for a moment. "I'll be at my desk at the stroke of eight- tell him to stop by."

Minutes later Colby was pushing a steaming cup of coffee across the table toward Jack McAuliffe, the chief of operations for the Deputy Director/ Operations, Elliott Ebbitt. "It seemed pretty straightforward," Jack explained. "Manny went back at ae/PINNACLE with the wording to make sure he got it right. There's no mistake. The KGB rezident deposited a message, addressed to the NSA mole, behind the radiator in the men's room of the Jefferson Hotel. The message said: 'Congratulations on the Second Man.'"

Colby gazed out the window of the seventh floor office. The wooded Virginia countryside stretched away as far as the eye could see, conveying a sense of serenity that contrasted sharply with the mood inside the CIA's sprawling Langley campus. "Maybe the mole's second son was born in December rather than January," Colby suggested.

"Tried that," Jack said. "I went over the NSA roster with their chief of security. There are ten thousand people making and breaking codes over at Fort Meade. Of these ten thousand, fourteen had second sons in January, eight in December, eighteen in November."

"That ought to give you something to work on-"

Jack shook his head. "Remember what ae/PINNACLE told Manny. All contact between the rezidentum and the mole in Washington were through dead drops. The face-to-face debriefings took place when their mole was vacationing abroad-Paris during Christmas of '72, Copenhagen during Christmas of '73, Rome during Easter of this year. None of the fathers of second sons fit into this vacation pattern."