Developing the film and printing enlargements had calmed Starik down. He had returned from the showdown in the Kremlin in a rage, and had actually spanked one of the nieces on her bare bottom for the minor transgression of wearing lipstick. (He had fired the maid who had given it to her.) Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the rising star in the Soviet hierarchy, had lost his nerve, and no amount of persuasion could induce him change his mind. Starik had first briefed Brezhnev on KHOLSTOMER the year before. The First Secretary had been impressed with the meticulous planning that had gone into the project over a twenty-year period; impressed also by the fact that sizable sums of hard currency had been squirreled away with infinite patience and in relatively small doses so as not to attract the attention of the Western intelligence services. The potential of KHOLSTOMER had staggered Brezhnev, who suddenly saw himself presiding over the demise of the bourgeois capitalist democracies and the triumph of Soviet Socialism across the globe. The history books would elevate him to a position alongside Marx and Lenin; Brezhnev would be seen as the Russian ruler who led the Soviet Union to victory in the Cold War.

All of which made his current reticence harder to fathom. Starik had gotten approval for the project from his immediate superior, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, as well as the Committee of Three, the secret Politburo panel that vetted intelligence initiatives, then gone to the Kremlin to clear the final hurdle. He had argued his case to Brezhnev with cool pa.s.sion. American inflation was soaring and consumers were feeling the pinch:, sugar, for instance, had doubled to thirty-two cents a pound. The Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted to 570, down from 1003 two years earlier. The hike in crude oil prices after the 1973 Middle East war (to $11.25 a barrel, up from $2.50 at the beginning of that year) made the American economy particularly fragile; an attack on the dollar stood a good chance of accelerating the crisis and throwing the economy into a recessionary spiral from which it would never recover. On top of everything, the single American who might have exposed Soviet intentions had been discredited and sent into retirement. Conditions for launching KHOLSTOMER couldn't be more propitious.

Tucked into a wicker wheelchair with a blanket drawn up to his armpits and a small electric heater directed at his feet, wearing a fur-lined silk dressing gown b.u.t.toned up to the neck, Brezhnev had heard Starik out and then had slowly shaken his ma.s.sive head. Khrushchev had attempted to destabilize the Americans when he installed medium-range missiles in Cuba, the First Secretary had reminded his visitor. Starik knew as well as he did how that episode had ended. John Kennedy had gone to the brink of war and a humiliated Khrushchev had been forced to withdraw the missiles. The Politburo- Brezhnev in the forefront-had drawn the appropriate conclusions and, two years later, had packed Khrushchev off into forced retirement.

Brezhnev had kicked aside the electric heater and had wheeled himself out from behind his vast desk equipped with seven telephones and a bulky English dictaphone. His bushy eyebrows arched in concentration, his jowls sagging in anxiety, he had informed Starik that he didn't intend to end up like Khrushchev. He had given KHOLSTOMER his careful consideration and had become convinced that an economically weakened America would react to an attack on the dollar like a cornered cat, which is to say that Washington would provoke a war with the Soviet Union in order to save the American economy. Don't forget, he had lectured Starik, it was the Great War that had saved the American economy from the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929. When the economy needed boosting, so the Kremlin's Americanologists argued, the capitalists invariably turned to war.

Brezhnev had not closed the door entirely on KHOLSTOMER. Perhaps in five or seven years, when the Soviet Union had built up its second strike capacity to the point where it could deter an American first strike he would be willing to take another look at the project. In any case it was a good card to keep up his sleeve, if only to prevent the Americans from one day attacking the Soviet economy in a similar way.

Now, in his attic photography shop at Apatov Mansion in Cheryomuski, Starik set the timer on the Czech enlarger to seven seconds, then exposed the photographic paper and slipped it into the pan filled with developer. After a while details began to emerge. First came the nostrils, then the eye sockets and oral cavities, finally the rosebud-like nipples on the flat chests of the bony klieg-scrubbed bodies. Using wooden tongs, Starik extracted the print from the bath and slipped it into a pan of fixative. Studying the washed-out enlargement, he decided that he was reasonably pleased with the finished product.

In a curious way photography had a lot in common with intelligence operations. The trick with both was to visualize the picture before you took it, then attempt to come as close as possible to what had been in your imagination. To succeed required endless patience. Starik consoled himself with the notion that his patience would pay off when it came to KHOLSTOMER, too. Brezhnev wouldn't be around forever. He had suffered a series of mild strokes earlier in the year (caused, according to a secret KGB report, by arteriosclerosis of the brain) that left him incapacitated for weeks on end. Since then an ambulance manned by doctors who specialized in resuscitation accompanied him everywhere. Andropov, who had been head of the KGB since 1967 and a member of the Politburo since 1973, had already confided to Starik that he saw himself as Brezhnev's logical successor. And Andropov was an ardent champion of KHOLSTOMER.

The first December blizzard was howling outside the storm windows when Starik settled onto the great bed that night to read the nieces their bedtime story. Electricity cables, heavy with ice, had sagged to the ground, cutting all power to the Apatov Mansion. A single candle burned on the night table. Angling the frayed page toward the flickering light, Starik came to the end of another chapter.

"Alice ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree. 'It can never get at me here,' she thought: 'it's far too large to squeeze itself in among the trees. But I wish it wouldn't flap its wings so-it makes quite a hurricane in the wood."'

The nieces, snuggling together in a tangle of limbs, sighed as if with one voice. "Oh, do read us a tiny bit more," begged Revolucion.

"Yes, uncle, you must because we are too frightened by what was chasing Alice to fall asleep," Axinya insisted.

"If you will not read to us," pleaded the angelic blonde Circa.s.sian who had been spanked for wearing lipstick, "at least remain for a long while with us."

Starik moved to get up from the bed. "I am afraid I still have files to read," he said.

"Stay, stay, oh, do stay," the girls cried altogether. And they clutched playfully at the hem of his nightshirt.

Smiling, Starik tore himself free. "To become drowsy, girlies, you must plunge deeper into the wonder of Alice's Wonderland."

"How in the world can we do that if you will not read to us?" Revolucion inquired.

"It is not terribly difficult," Starik a.s.sured them. He leaned over the night table and blew out the candle, pitching the room into utter darkness. "Now you must try, all of you, each in her own imagination, to fancy what the flame of a candle would look like after the candle is blown out."

"Oh, I can see it!" exclaimed the blonde Circa.s.sian.

"It is ever so pretty," Revolucion agreed, "drifting across the mind's eye."

"The flame after the candle is blown out looks awfully like the light of a distant star with planets circling around it," Axinya said dreamily. "One of the planets is a wonderland where little nieces eat looking-gla.s.s cakes and remember things that happened the week after next."

"Oh, let's do go there quickly," Revolucion cried eagerly.

"Only close your eyes, girlies," Starik said gruffly, "and you will be on your way to Alice's planet."

INTERLUDE.

THE CALABRIAN.

Alice thought with a shudder, "I wouldn't have been the messenger for anything!"

CIVITAVECCHIA, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1978.

AT 6:40 A.M., UNDER A BLEAK SKY, SAILORS ON THE FIVE-THOUSAND ton Vladimir Ilyich singled up all lines and cast off from the pier. The moment the ship was no longer attached to land, a whistle sounded. The deckhand standing at the stern pole lowered the Soviet flag as a signalman raised another on a halyard. An Italian tug pulled the bow out and cast off the hawser, and the freighter, loaded with a cargo of Fiat engines, heavy lathes and refrigerators, slipped out on the morning tide toward the open sea. On the flying bridge, atop the wheel house, a reed-like figure with a wispy white beard watched as the Italian coast transformed itself into a faint smudge on the horizon. Starik had been up since midnight, drinking endless cups of instant espresso in the dockside warehouse as he waited for the messenger to bring word that the threat to KHOLSTOMER had been eliminated. Seventeen minutes after three, a dirty yellow Fiat minicab had drawn up before the side door. The Calabrian, walking with a perceptible limp, had come into the room. A man of few words, he had nodded at Starik and had said, "La cosa e fatta." Starik's niece, a wafer-thin half-Italian, half-Serbian creature called Maria-Jesus, had translated into Russian. "He tells you," she said, thrilled to be useful to Uncle, "the thing is done."

From the deep pockets of a Dominican ca.s.sock, the Calabrian retrieved the small metal kit with the syringe, the tumbler with traces of doped milk, the phial that had contained uncontaminated milk, the surgeon's gloves and the lock-pick, and set them on a table. Then he handed the Russian a brown dossier with the words KHOLSTOMER printed in Roman letters on the cover. Starik motioned with a finger and the girl handed the Calabrian a sailor's canvas duffle bag containing $1 million in used bills of various denominations. The Calabrian opened the flaps and fingered the packets of bills, each bound by a thick rubber band. "If you again need my services " he said, "you will know how to find me."

Standing in the wheel house of the Vladimir Ilyich at first light, Starik had watched as the Master worked his way down the checklist for getting underway. The engine room telegraph was tested. The rudder was swung from port to starboard and back to midships. Sailors posted at the windla.s.s phoned up to the bridge to say they were ready to trip the riding pawls and let go the anchors if an emergency arose. Deckhands in black turtleneck sweaters and oilskins prepared to single up the heavy lines dipped onto the bollards and retrieve the fenders.

While these preparations were going on, a small fishing boat fitted with powerful diesel engines quit a nearby quay. Once clear of the breakwater it turned due south in the direction of Palermo. Both the Calabrian and his Corsican taxi driver with the broken, badly set nose were on board. Peering through binoculars, Starik spotted them standing on the well deck; one was cupping the flame of a match so that the other could light a cigarette. Over the radio speaker in the pilothouse, a program of early morning Venetian mandolin music was interrupted for an important announcement. Maria-Jesus provided a running translation. There were reports, so far unconfirmed, that Pope John Paul I, known as Albino Luciani when he was the Patriarch of Venice, had suffered a cardio-something attack during the night. The last rites of the church had been administered, leading some to speculate that the Pope, after a reign of only thirty-four days, was either dead or near death. Cardinals were said to be rushing to the Vatican from all over Italy. When the regular program resumed, the station switched to solemn funereal music. As the lines were being singled up on the Vladimir Ilyich, Starik raised the binoculars to his eyes again. The fishing boat was hull down already; only the lights on its mast and tackle were visible. Suddenly there was a m.u.f.fled explosion, no louder than a distant motor coughing before it caught. Through the binoculars Starik could see the mast and tackle tilt crazily to one side, and then disappear altogether.

Filling his lungs with sea air, Starik fondled the back of Maria-Jesus's long neck. He craved one of his Bulgarian cigarettes; on the advice of a Centre doctor he had recently given up smoking. He comforted himself with the thought that there were other pleasures to be taken from life. Like Alice, he had run fast enough to stay in the same place; the messenger had been buried at sea and the Pope, who had made no secret of his intention to crack down on the money-laundering activities of the Vatican bank, would take the secrets of KHOLSTOMER with him to the grave. And in five days time Starik would be home with his adopted nieces, reading to them from the fable that taught the importance of believing six impossible things after breakfast.

PART FIVE.

"Look, look!" Alice cried, pointing eagerly. "There's the White Queen running across the country! She came flying out of the wood over yonder- How fast those Queens can run!" "There's some enemy after her, no doubt," the King said, without even looking round. "That wood's full of them."

Snapshot: the amateur black-and-white photograph, which made front pages around the world, shows the two American hostages being held somewhere in Afghanistan by Commander Ibrahim, the legendary leader of the fundamentalist splinter group Islamic Jihad. The young woman, the well-known television journalist Maria Shaath, regards her captors with an impatient smile; one of her producers in New York said she looked as if she were worried about missing a deadline. Standing next to her, his back to a poster of the Golden Dome Mosque In Jerusalem, is the young American whom Islamic Jihad identified as a CIA officer and the US government insists is an attache a.s.signed to the American consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan. The American stares into the camera with a detached, sardonic grin. Both prisoners appear pale and tired from their weeks in captivity.

1.

PESHAWAR, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1983.

SO MUCH DUST HAD BEEN KICKED UP ON THE DIRT FIELD NEXT TO THE sprawling Kachagan Refugee Camp that the spectators in the wooden bleachers heard the hoofbeats before they saw the horses. "The Pashtun tribesmen call the game buzkashi-literally 'goat-grabbing,'" Manny explained. He had to shout into Anthony's ear to be heard over the clamor of the crowd. On the field, twenty hors.e.m.e.n wheeled in a confused scrimmage, pushing and punching each other as they leaned from saddles to reach for something that had fallen to the ground. "Think of it as a rougher version of polo," Manny went on. "They toss a headless goat onto the field. Anything goes short of using knives. Your team gets points when you wrestle the carca.s.s away from the other team and drop it into the scoring circle."

"How long does this go on?" inquired Anthony, newly arrived from Islamabad and still wearing the sweat-stained khaki suit and Clark boots he had traveled in.

Manny had to laugh. "It goes on nonstop until the horses or the riders collapse from exhaustion."

Anthony McAuliffe was a gangly twenty-three-year-old six-footer with open, rugged features and a mop of flaming-red hair, the spitting image of his father, Jack. He gazed across the field at the scores of young men sitting on a low wooden fence, pa.s.sing joints (so Manny had said) from hand to hand as they egged on the riders of their favorite team. Suddenly Cornell's fraternity parties, basic training at the Farm, his initial tour of duty at Langley all seemed like images from a previous incarnation. Behind the bleachers, half-naked kids fought over a dead chicken as they imitated the adults on horseback. Beyond the playing field, Anthony could make out a ma.s.s of low mud houses stretching off as far as the eye could see. Back in Islamabad, the briefing book for officers posted to Peshawar said that so many refugees had come over the mountain pa.s.ses from Afghanistan since the start of the jihad against the Soviet invasion, almost four years before, that the international agencies had given up trying to count them.

Manny must have noticed the expression on Anthony's face. "Culture shock is curable," he observed. "In a week or two all this will seem perfectly ordinary to you."

"That's one of the things I'm worried about," Anthony shot back.

A roar went up from the crowd as a rider wrenched the goat's carca.s.s from the hands of an opponent and spurred his horse away. With a whoop the opposing team tore after him in hot pursuit. Once again the riders were lost in the dust billowing from the playing field. One of Manny's two bodyguards, a bearded tribesman wearing a thick woolen vest with a jeweled knife in his belt and a double-barreled shotgun under one arm, pointed to his watch. Manny led Anthony off the bleachers and the two started toward the parking lot. The second bodyguard, a giant of a man with a black turban around his head, brought up the rear. Manny's driver, slouched behind the wheel of an old Chevrolet, a joint sticking out of his mouth, came awake. "Where to, chief man?" he asked.

"Khyber Tea Room in Smugglers' Bazaar," Manny ordered as he and Anthony settled onto the rear seat. One of the bodyguards slid in next to Manny, the other rode shotgun up front.

"Where'd you scrounge these guys?" Anthony asked under his breath. "Central casting?"

"They're both Afridis, which is the tribe that controls the Khyber Pa.s.s," Manny said. "The one with the knife in his belt used to slit the throats of Russians the way Muslims slaughter goats for holy day feasts."

"How can you be sure he won't slit ours?"

"You can't." Manny patted the shoulder holster under his bush jacket. "Which is why I keep Betsy around."

Honking nonstop at bicycles and mobilettes and donkey carts and men pulling wheelbarrows filled with television sets or air conditioning units or electric typewriters, the driver turned west onto the Grand Trunk Road. They pa.s.sed an ancient German bus, its red paint faded to a washed-out pink, the original sign ("Dusseldorf-Bonn") still visible above the front window, and several diesel trucks whose bodies had been repaired so often they resembled old women who had had one face lift too many. Manny pointed at the road ahead. "Khyber Pa.s.s starts twenty or so kilometers down there-Darius's Persians, Alexander's Greeks, Tamerlane's Tartars, Babur's Moguls all came through here."

"Now it's our turn," Anthony said.

Infantrymen armed with automatic rifles waved the car to a stop at a checkpoint. At the side of the road, a soldier in the back of a Toyota pickup truck trained a needle-thin machine gun on the Chevrolet. "Pakis," Manny murmured. "They control the road but their authority ends fifty meters on either side of it. Beyond that it's the mountain tribesmen who rule the roost."

"Shenasnameh," a Pak subaltern with the waxed whiskers and long sideburns of a British sergeant major barked. "Ident.i.ty papers."

Manny produced a fistful of crisp twenty-dollar bills from a pocket and cracked the window enough to pa.s.s them through. The Pak soldier took the money and, moistening a thumb, slowly counted it. Satisfied, he saluted and waved the car through.

Smugglers' Bazaar, a warren of shack-like stalls selling everything under the sun, was swarming with tribesmen in shalwar qamiz-the traditional Afghan long shirt and baggy trousers. Wherever Anthony looked there was evidence of war: men with missing limbs hobbled on wooden crutches, a teenage girl tried to flag down a pa.s.sing taxi with the stump of an arm, Pajero Jeeps crammed with bearded mujaheddin brandishing weapons roared off toward the Khyber Pa.s.s and Afghanistan, makeshift ambulances filled with the wounded and the dying raced with screaming sirens back toward Peshawar. In an empty lot between shacks, gun dealers had spread their wares on tarpaulins. There were neat rows of Israeli Uzis and American M-1s and both the Russian and Chinese versions of the AK-47, and every kind of pistol imaginable. Two Syrians had set up World War II machine guns on straw mats. Next to them, on another straw mat, a man wearing the dark flowing robes of a desert Bedouin was selling camouflage fatigues, cartridge belts and black combat boots. Mules loaded with green ammunition boxes were tied to a fence near a trough filled with muddy water. Afghan warriors with a.s.sault rifles slung over their shoulders strolled through the open-air market, inspecting weapons and haggling over the prices.

The Chevrolet turned onto a pitted side lane and b.u.mped its way down it to a two-story wooden house with a sign over the door that read, in English: "Last drinkable tea before the Khyber Pa.s.s." Manny signaled for the bodyguards to remain with the car. He and Anthony crossed a narrow bridge over what smelled like an open sewer. "We're here to meet the Lion of Panjshir, Ahmed Shah Ma.s.soud," Manny explained. "He's a Tadzhik from the Panjshir Valley, which knifes north of Kabul all the way to the Tadzhik border. His people bear the brunt of the fighting against the Russians-the six other resistance groups spend a lot of their time fighting each other."

"So why don't we funnel the arms directly to him?" Anthony asked.

"The Pak Intelligence Directorate, the ISI, cornered the market on handing out American largess. Basically, they have other fish to fry-they want the war to end with a fundamentalist Afghanistan to strengthen their hand against India."

"I can see I've got a lot to learn," Anthony said.

"The Company has a lot to learn," Manny said. "I hope the report you'll write will open their eyes to a great many things."

Inside, a woman dressed in a shroud-like burqa squatted before a chimney and worked the bellows, heating the kettles suspended above the wood fire. In an alcove off to one side, an itinerant dentist was drilling into the tooth of an Afghan fighter who had come through the Khyber Pa.s.s with Ma.s.soud the night before. A teenage boy pedaling a bicycle welded into a metal frame ran the lathe that turned the drill in the dentist's fist. "Don't get a toothache here," Manny warned. "They fill cavities with molten shotgun pellets."

They climbed the narrow steps to the private room on the second floor. Two of Ma.s.soud's bodyguards stood outside the door. For some reason both of them had ear-to-ear grins splashed across their faces. The taller of the two cradled a vintage German MP-44 in his arms, the other had an enormous Czech pistol tucked into his waistband and held a small bamboo cage containing a yellow canary.

"The canary is the Afghan resistances early warning system," Manny said.

"Against what?"

"The bird'll keel over at the first whiff if the Russians use chemical or biological weapons."

Ma.s.soud, a thin, bearded man with a direct gaze and an angelic smile, rose off the prayer rug to greet the Company's Chief of Station at Peshawar. "Manny, my friend," he said, shaking his hand warmly and drawing him into the room. He gestured toward the prayer rugs scattered on the floor. "I am deeply glad to see you again."

Manny saluted Ma.s.soud in Dari, then switched to English so his American friend could follow the conversation. "Meet a comrade, Anthony McAuliffe," Manny said.

Ma.s.soud nodded once at him but didn't offer to shake hands. As the visitors settled cross-legged onto the rugs, a teenage girl with a shawl draped over her head shyly approached and filled two tin cups with khawa, the watery green tea that was standard fare in the tribal area.

Ma.s.soud made small-talk for a quarter of an hour-he brought Manny up to date on the shifting front lines inside Afghanistan and the Soviet order of battle, gave him the names of fighters he knew who had been killed or wounded in the three months since they last met, described a daring attack he had led against a Soviet air base in which three helicopters had been blown up and a Russian colonel had been taken prisoner. Manny wanted to know what had happened to the Russian. "We offered to trade him for the two mujaheddin who were taken prisoner in the raid," Ma.s.soud said. "The Russians sent them back alive and strapped to the saddles of pack animals, each with his right hand cut off at the wrist." Ma.s.soud shrugged. "We returned their colonel missing the same number of hands."

At dusk, wood-burning stoves were lighted in the stalls and a sooty darkness settled over the bazaar area. Ma.s.soud accepted another cup of green tea as he got down to business. "It is this way, Manny," he began. "The modern weapons that you give to the Pakistani Intelligence Directorate finish up in the hands of the Pakistani Army, which then pa.s.ses down its old hardware to the mujaheddin. We go into battle against the Soviet invaders at a great disadvantage. The situation has gotten worse in the last months because the Russians are starting to employ spotter planes to direct the firepower of their helicopters."

"There are portable radars that could detect the helicopters."

Ma.s.soud shook his head. "They fly through the valleys at the height of the tops of trees and fall upon us without warning. Our anti-aircraft guns, our machine guns are of no use against their armor plating. A great many mujaheddin have been killed or wounded this way. Radar will not improve the situation. Heat-seeking Stingers, on the other hand-" He was referring to the shoulder-fired ground-to-air missile that could blow planes or helicopters out of the sky at a distance of three miles.

Manny cut him off. "Stingers are out of the question. We've asked our Pentagon people-they're afraid the missiles will wind up in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists once the war is won."

"Give them to me, Manny, and the fundamentalists will not rule Afghanistan when the Russians are defeated." Ma.s.soud leaned forward. "The group which defeats the Russians will decide the future of Afghanistan-if the United States of America wants a free and democratic state, you must support me."

"Your Tadzhiks are a minority ethnic group. You know as well as I do that we can't give you high-tech weapons without upsetting the delicate balance between the various resistance groups."

"If not the Stinger," Ma.s.soud pleaded, "then the Swiss Oerlikon-it has the fire power to bring down the Russian helicopters."

"The Oerlikon is the wrong weapon for a guerrilla war. Its armor-piercing ammunition is expensive, the guns themselves are very sophisticated and require complicated maintenance. Our people say the Oerlikon wouldn't be operational after the journey over the Khyber Pa.s.s."

"So what is left?" Ma.s.soud asked.

"Conventional weapons."

"And the most conventional of all weapons is the surrogate who fights your war for you."

"It's your country that was occupied by the Russians. It's your war."

"Bleeding the Soviets is in your interest-"