Casey held the phone away from his ear and let the senator drone on. He'd heard it all before: the motivating force in the White House was the President's popularity; the search for popularity drove policy; the best-kept secret in the capitol was that Reagan and his senior White House people were ignoramuses when it came to foreign affairs; the President had a hearing problem so you couldn't be sure, when you briefed him, that you were getting through to him; he never came right out and said no to anything, it was always Yes, well or Sounds all right to me but, uh, after which the sentence trailed off; decisions, when you managed to get any, filtered down from the White House staff and it wasn't certain where they came from; for all anybody knew Nancy Reagan could have been running the country. The terrible part was that it was all true, though Casey wasn't about to tell the senator that; Reagan had never fully recovered from the bullet that John Hinckley had pumped to within an inch of the President's heart two and a half years before. "The story that he can't locate his chief of staff's office-it's a bad rap, senator," he said, forever loyal to his old pal, Ron. "Reagan's a big picture man but he's been on top of everything I've brought up to the White House, up to and including the downing of the Korean 747 that strayed into Soviet air s.p.a.ce two weeks ago."

Casey's daughter, Bernadette, stuck her head in the door of the den and pointed upstairs: the people her father was expecting had turned up. "Senator, let me get back to you-I've got some Company business to attend to." He listened for another moment, then mumbled "Count on it" and hung up.

"Tell them to come on in," he told his daughter.

Ebby, Bill Casey's Deputy Director Central Intelligence, had met the plane carrying Manny at McGuire Air Force Base and driven his son (after a hurried phone call to Nellie) straight out to the Director's new tan brick house in the posh development carved out of the old Nelson Rockefeller estate off Foxhall Road in northwest Washington. As they made their way down half a level and through the three sitting rooms, he told Manny, "Jack may turn up, too. He's worried sick about Anthony-if you have any gory details, for crying out loud keep them to yourself. No point in alarming him more than we have to."

"Anthony wasn't hurt or anything," Manny said. "It was plain bad luck that he and the Shaath woman didn't make it through the window. I still kick myself for going first-"

"No one faults you so don't fault yourself."

He stepped into the den and Casey came off the couch to seize his hand. "This is my boy, Manny," Ebby said.

Casey waved both of them to leather-covered easy chairs. "I don't need to tell you how glad I am you got your a.s.s out of there," he remarked. Sinking back onto the couch, he asked Manny about the escape.

"Anthony gets the credit," Manny said, and he went on to explain how Jack's son had turned a can of insecticide into a blowtorch to burn away the wire mesh on the window. "I'd slipped through and Maria Shaath was halfway out when the guerrilla leader-"

Casey, renowned for his photographic memory, had read the cable that Manny filed from Islamabad. "The one who calls himself Commander Ibrahim?" he said.

"Commander Ibrahim, right. They'd just buried the fighter who'd been shot in the attack and Ibrahim turned up at the door and gave the alarm. In the darkness I scrambled down into a ravine and up the other side. Headlights came on above me, illuminating the area. There were shots. I threw up my arms as if I'd been hit and fell over the lip of a bluff. Then I just let myself roll downhill. After that it was a matter of walking for three days in the general direction of the rising sun."

The DCI, a lawyer by training who had been chief of the Special Intelligence Branch of the OSS at the end of World War II, savored the cloak-and-dagger side of intelligence operations. "You make it sound easy as falling off a log," he said, leaning forward. "What did you do for food and water?"

"Water was no problem-I came across streams and rivulets. As for food, I took a refresher survival course at the Farm before I went out to Peshawar, so I knew which roots and mushrooms and berries were edible. Three days after my escape I spotted a campfire. It turned out to be an Afridi camel caravan running contraband over the Khyber from Afghanistan. I gave them the five hundred-dollar bills hidden in my belt. I promised them that much again when they delivered me to Peshawar."

When Jack turned up Manny had to go through the escape again for him. Director Casey, whose lack of patience was legendary, fidgeted on the couch. Jack, his face tight with worry, asked, "What condition was Anthony in when you last saw him?"

"He wasn't wounded in the kidnapping, Jack," Manny said. "He was in great shape, and very alert."

The Director said, "As far as I'm aware, we don't have string on a Commander Ibrahim."

Jack said, "There was nothing in Central Registry. The Afghanistan desk at State never heard of him. The National Security people have no string on him either."

"Which means," Ebby said, "that he's just come out of the woodwork."

"Aside from the physical description Manny's provided, what do we know about him?" the Director asked.

"He spoke English with what I took to be a Palestinian accent," Manny offered. "Which could mean he was brought up in the Middle East."

"He might have cut his teeth in one of the Hezbollah or Hamas training camps," Jack said. He turned to the Director. "We ought to bring the Israelis in on this-they keep close tabs on Islamic fundamentalists in the Palestinian ranks."

"That's as good a place as any to start," Casey agreed. "What about the report from the Kalasha informant?"

Jack, quick to clutch at any straw, said, "What report are we talking about?"

Ebby said, "This came in late last night. We have an informant among the Kalasha, which is an ancient tribe of non-Muslims living in three valleys along the Afghanistan frontier, who claims that a Palestinian named Ibrahim had been running arms into Pakistan and selling them in Peshawar. According to our Kalasha, Ibrahim has made a trip every two months-he bought automatic weapons in Dubai, crossed the Gulf and Iran in trucks, then smuggled the stuff into Pakistan and up to the Tribal Areas on pack animals."

"Did your informant provide a physical description?" Jack asked.

"As a matter of fact, yes. The Kalasha said Ibrahim was tall and thin, with long hair and an amulet on his cap to protect him from sniper bullets. His right arm was partially paralyzed-"

"That's Commander Ibrahim," Manny said excitedly. "He ate, he manipulated his worry beads with his left hand. His right arm hung limply at his side or lay in his lap."

"That's a start," Casey said. "What else did the Kalasha have on this Ibrahim character?"

"He described him as a rabid fundamentalist in search of a jihad," Ebby said. "He dislikes Americans only slightly less than he despises Russians."

"Well, he's found his jihad," Manny commented.

"Which brings us to the fax that landed in the American consulate in Peshawar," Casey said, impatient to move on. His expressionless eyes regarded Ebby through oversized gla.s.ses. "Are we sure it came from this Ibrahim character?"

"The fax appears to be authentic," Ebby said. "It was hand-printed in English, in block letters. There were two grammatical mistakes-verbs that didn't agree with their subjects-and two misspellings, suggesting that English was not the writer's native language. There was no way to trace where the fax originated, of course. It came in sometime during the night. Our people found it in the morning. It spoke of three hostages-Manny would have escaped by then but Commander Ibrahim probably thought he'd been killed and didn't want to advertise the fact, which makes sense from his point of view."

"They want Stingers," Jack said.

"Everybody out there wants Stingers," Manny noted.

"Not everybody who wants Stingers has hostages," Jack observed glumly.

Casey said, "I'm all for giving them Stingers-I'm for anything that makes the Russians bleed-but the praetorians around the President are chickens.h.i.t. They're afraid to escalate. They're afraid to make the Russians mad." The Director's head bobbed from side to side with the futility of it all. "How is it that we always wind up fighting the Cold War with one hand tied behind our back? Everything we do has to be so G.o.dd.a.m.ned licit. When are we going to fight fire with fire? The Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua are a case in point. I have some creative ideas on the subject that I want to throw at you, Ebby. If we could get our hands on some cash that the Senate Committee on Intelligence doesn't know about-"

The red phone next to the couch purred. Casey s.n.a.t.c.hed it off the hook and held it to his ear. "When'd you get back, Oliver?" he asked. "Okay, let me know as soon as the payment is transferred. Then we'll work out the next step." He listened again. "For Christ's sake, no-you tell Poindexter that the President has signed off on this so there's no need to bring the details to his attention. If something goes wrong he has to be able to plausibly deny he knew anything about it." Casey snorted into the phone. "If that happens you'll fall on your sword, then the Admiral will fall on his sword. If the President still needs another warm body between him and the press, I'll fall on my sword."

"Where were we?" Casey said when he'd hung up. "Okay, let's plug into the Israeli connection to see if Commander Ibrahim's Palestinian accent leads anywhere. Also, let's see if the people who read satellite photos can come up with something-your report, Manny, mentioned two tarpaulin-covered trucks, a bunch of Jeeps and about sixty Islamic warriors. If a snail leaves a trail on a leaf, h.e.l.l, these guys ought to leave a trail across Afghanistan. To buy time we'll instruct Peshawar Station to respond to the fax-"

"They're supposed to put an ad in the personal column of the Islamabad English-language Times Times," Jack said.

"Lets establish a dialogue with the kidnappers, however indirect. Let them think we're open to trading Stingers for the hostages. But we want proof that they're still alive. The thing to do is stall them as long as we can and see where this goes."

Nellie cleared the dishes and stacked them in the sink. Manny refilled the wine gla.s.ses and carried them into the living room. He sank onto the couch, exhausted both physically and mentally. Nellie stretched out with her head on his thigh. From time to time she lifted her long-stemmed gla.s.s from the floor and, raising her head, took a sip of wine. On the radio, a new pop singer named Madonna Louise Ciccone was belting out a song that was starting to make its way up the charts. It was called "Like a Virgin."

"The Mossad guy brought over seven loose-leaf books filled with mug shots," Manny said. 'I saw so many Islamic militants my eyes had trouble focusing."

"So did you find this Ibrahim individual?"

"Nellie?"

Nellie laughed bitterly. "Whoops, sorry. I must have been out of my mind to think that just because my occasional lover and absentee husband was shanghaied by an Islamic crazy he'd let me in on Company secrets, such as the ident.i.ty of the Islamic crazy in question. I mean, I might go and leak it to the New York Times Times."

"We live by certain rules-"

"It's a d.a.m.n good thing I love you," Nellie said. "It's a d.a.m.n good thing I'm too relieved you're back to pick a fight." She put on a good show but she was close to tears; she'd been close to tears since he returned home. "I hate that f.u.c.king Company of yours," she said with sudden vehemence. "One of the reasons I hate it is because you love it."

In fact, Manny had come across Ibrahim in the Mossad books. Two hours and twenty-minutes into the session one mug shot had leapt off the page-Ibrahim was younger and leaner and wearing his hair short but there was no mistaking him. Curiously, this earlier version of Ibrahim had the eyes of someone who was hunted-not the hunter. The Israelis identified the man in the photograph as Hajji Abdel al-Khouri and quickly came up with a profile on him. Al-Khouri, born in September 1944 in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, turned out to be half-Saudi, half-Afghan, the youngest son of Kamal al-Khouri, a Yemeni-born Saudi millionaire who had founded a construction empire that built roads and airports and shopping malls in the Middle East and India. The second of his three wives, the ravishing seventeen-year-old daughter of a Pashtun prince he met in Kabul, was Hajji's mother. In his late teens Hajji, then an engineering student at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jidda, abandoned his studies, a.s.sumed the nom de guerre of Abu Azzam and moved to Jordan to join Fatah, the forerunner of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Arrested by the Israelis in Hebron on the West Bank of the Jordan for the attempted murder of a Palestinian suspected of collaborating with the Israeli Shin Bet, Abu Azzam spent two years in a remote Negev prison. After his release (for lack of evidence) in 1970 he broke with the PLO when he became convinced that its leader, Ya.s.ser Arafat, was too willing to compromise with the Israelis. In the early 1970s the PLO sentenced Abu Azzam to death in absentia for vowing to kill Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan, at which point the Fatah renegade fled to Baghdad, founded the Islamic Jihad and masterminded a series of terrorist actions against Israeli and Arab targets, including the 1973 occupation of the Saudi Emba.s.sy in Paris. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 Abu Azzam a.s.sumed still another ident.i.ty-henceforth he was known as Ibrahim-and moved the Islamic Jihad to the Hindu Kush Mountains east of the Afghan capitol of Kabul. Making use of an estimated hundred million dollars that he had inherited from his father he established secret recruiting and training centers around the Arab world and forged links with Pakistan's radical Islamic Tablighi Jamaat, Gulbuddin Hekmatyars Hezb-i-Islami and other extremist Islamic splinter groups in the Middle East. What all these groups shared was a fanatic loathing of both the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan and the Americans who were using Islamic warriors as cannon fodder to oppose them; Ibrahim and the others a.s.sociated Westernization with secularization and a rejection of Islam's dominant role in defining the cultural and political ident.i.ty of a country. Ibrahim in particular looked beyond the Soviet defeat and the Afghan war to the establishment of strict Koranic rule in Afghanistan and the overthrow of the feudal Saudi ruling family; if oil rich Saudi Arabia were to fall into the hands of the fundamentalists, so Ibrahim reasoned, Islam- by controlling the quant.i.ty of petrol pumped out of the ground, and the price-would be in a strong position to defend the faith against Western infidels.

Jack was exultant when he learned that Manny had succeeded in identifying Ibrahim. "Jesus H. Christ, you're one hundred percent sure?" he demanded on a secure intra-Company line, and Manny could hear the sigh of relief escape Jack's lips when he told him there was no doubt about it. Jack raced down one flight to Millie's suite of offices-she was now, in addition to her regular public relations ch.o.r.es, the Company's senior spokesperson-and pulled his wife into the corridor to share the hopeful news out of earshot of the half-dozen a.s.sistants and secretaries in her shop. "It's the first step in the right direction," he told her, grasping her clammy hand in both of his giant paws, nodding stubbornly as if he were trying to convince himself that the story would have a happy ending. Thanks to the Israelis, he whispered, the Company now had a mug shot to go with Manny's description. A top-secret Action Immediate was on its way to all Stations, signed by the DCI himself, William Casey, and countersigned by the Deputy Director/ Operations, yours truly, John J. McAuliffe, using my middle initial, which is something I never do, to emphasize its importance. The Company, it said, considered the identification and eventual infiltration of Islamic Jihad's recruiting and training centers in the Middle East to be of the highest priority. A Company officer's life was on the line. Any and all potential sources with ties to Islamic groups should be sounded out, IOU's should be called in, the expenditure of large sums of money was authorized. No stone should be left unturned. The quest to find Commander Ibrahim and his two hostages should take priority over all other pending business.

"What do you think, Jack?" Millie asked. She could see how drawn he looked; she knew she didn't look much better. "Is there any possibility of getting Anthony out of this alive?"

"I promise you, Millie... I swear it..."

Millie whispered, "I know you'll do it, Jack. I know you'll succeed. You'll succeed because there is no alternative that you and I can live with."

Jack nodded vehemently. Then he turned and hurried away from the woman whose eyes were too full of anguish to look into.

Jack b.u.t.tonholed Ebby at the end of the workday. The two sat knee to knee in a corner of the DDCI's s.p.a.cious seventh-floor office, nursing three fingers of straight Scotch, talking in undertones. There was a hint of desperation in Jack's hooded eyes; in his leaden voice, too. "I stumbled across an Israeli report describing how the Russians dealt with a hostage situation," he said. "Three Soviet diplomats were kidnapped in Beirut by a Hezbollah commando. The KGB didn't sit on their hands, agonizing over what they could do about it. They abducted the relative of a Hezbollah leader and sent his body back with his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es stuffed in his mouth and a note nailed- nailed, for Christ's sake-to his chest warning that the Hezbollah leaders and their sons would suffer the same fate if the three Soviets weren't freed. Within hours the three diplomats were released unharmed a few blocks from the Soviet emba.s.sy." Jack leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Look, Ebby, we've identified the kidnapper-this Ibrahim character has to have brothers or cousins or uncles-"

There was an embarra.s.sed silence. Ebby studied his shoelaces. "We're not the KGB, Jack," he finally said. "I doubt if our Senate custodians would let us get away with employing the same tactics."

"We wouldn't have to do it ourselves," Jack said. "We could farm it out-Harvey Torriti would know who to go to."

Ebby said, "I know how scared you must be, Jack. But this is a nonstarter. The CIA is an endangered species as it is. There's no way I'm going to sign off on something like this." He looked hard at Jack. "And there's no way I'm going to let my Deputy Director/Operations sign off on it, either." Ebby climbed tiredly to his feet. "I want your word you won't do anything crazy, Jack."

"I was just letting off steam."

"Do I have your word?"

Jack looked up. "You have it, Ebby."

The DDCI nodded. "This conversation never took place. Jack. See you tomorrow."

Keeping one eye on the odometer, Tessa jogged along the treadmill in the Company's makeshift bas.e.m.e.nt gymnasium at Langley. "I prefer to run down here," she told her twin sister, Vanessa, "than on the highway where you breathe in all those exhaust fumes."

Vanessa, an IBM programmer who had been hired by the Company the previous year to bring its computer retrieval systems up to date, was lying flat on her back and pushing up a twenty-pound bar to strengthen her stomach muscles. "What's new in the wide world of counterintelligence?" she asked.

A stocky woman wearing a sweat suit with a towel around her neck, something of a legend for being the first female Station Chief in CIA history, abandoned the other jogging machine and headed for the shower room. Tessa waited until she was out of earshot. "Actually, I stumbled across something pretty intriguing," she said, and she proceeded to tell her sister about it.

In part because she was the daughter of Leo Kritzky, Jack McAuliffe's current Chief of Operations, in part because of an outstanding college record, Tessa had been working in the counterintelligence shop since her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1975. Her most recent a.s.signment had been to pore through the transcripts of English-language radio programs originating in the Soviet Union, looking for patterns or repet.i.tions, or phrases or sentences that might appear to be out of context, on the a.s.sumption that the KGB regularly communicated with its agents in the Americas by pa.s.sing coded messages on these programs. "Seven months ago," she said, "they gave me the transcripts of Radio Moscow's nightly shortwave English-language cultural quiz program, starting with the first broadcast made in the summer of 1950."

Sliding over to sit with her back against a wall, Vanessa mopped her neck and forehead with a towel. "Don't tell me you actually found a coded message in them?" she said.

"I found something in them," Tessa said. She glanced at the odometer and saw that she'd run five miles. Switching off the treadmill, she settled down next to her sister. "You remember how I adored Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Gla.s.s when I was a kid. I read them so many times I practically knew both books by heart. Well, at the end of every quiz program they give a line from some English-language cla.s.sic and ask the contestant to identify it. In the thirty-three years the program has been on the air-that's something in the neighborhood of twelve thousand fifteen-minute broadcasts-they used Lewis Carroll quotations twenty-four times. They naturally caught my eye because they were the only questions I could personally answer." Tessa c.o.c.ked her head and came up with some examples. '"The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.' Or 'If I'm not the same, who in the world am I?' Or 'Whiffling through the tulgey wood.' And 'I don't like belonging to another person's dream."'

Vanessa said, "I don't really see how you could decode these sentences-"

"I studied Soviet and East European code systems at the NSA school in Fort Meade," Tessa said. "Some KGB codes are merely recognition signals- special sentences that alert the agent to something else in the program that is intended for him."

"Okay, for argument's sake let's say that the twenty-four references to Alice or Looking Gla.s.s are intended to alert an agent," Vanessa said. "The question is: Alert him to what?"

"Right after the quotes they always announce the winning lottery number," Tessa said.

"How many digits?"

"'Ten."

"That's the number of digits in a telephone number if you include the area code." Vanessa thought a moment. "But the lottery number itself couldn't be a phone number-it would be too obvious."

"At the NSA code school," Tessa said, "they taught us that East German agents operating in West Germany in the early 1950s were given American ten-dollar bills-they used the serial numbers on the bill as a secret number, which they subtracted from the lottery number broadcast from East Germany to wind up with a phone number."

Vanessa looked puzzled. "You said there were twenty-four references to Alice and Looking Gla.s.s-if you're right about all this, it means there were twenty-four lottery numbers that translated into twenty-four phone numbers over a period of thirty-three years. But why would a Soviet agent have to be given a new phone number to call all the time?"

Tessa said, "KGB tradecraft calls for cutouts to keep on the move. So the agent might be getting in touch with a cutout who periodically changes his phone number."

"Did you show your boss what you'd found?"

"Yeah, I did. He said it could easily be a coincidence. Even if it wasn't, he didn't see how we could break out a phone number from a lottery number, since there were an infinite number of possibilities for the secret number."

Vanessa said, "Hey, computers can deal with an infinite number of possibilities. Let me take a crack at it."

Vanessa, who was programming an IBM mainframe, stayed after work to play with the twenty-four lottery numbers that had been broadcast after the Lewis Carroll quotations. She checked with the CIA librarian and found out that area codes had been introduced in the early 1950s, about the time the Moscow Radio quiz program began, so she started with the a.s.sumption that the ten-digit lottery number hid a ten-digit phone number that included a low-numbered East Coast area code. She began with the winning lottery number broadcast after the first use of an Alice quotation ('And the moral of that is-the more there is of mine, the less there is of yours') on April 5, 1951: 2056902023. Running a series of equations through the computer, she discovered there was a high probability that an eight-digit secret number beginning with a three and a zero, subtracted from the ten-digit lottery number, would give you a ten-digit phone number that began with the 202 area code for Washington, DC, which was where the girls a.s.sumed a cutout would live. Using an eight-digit secret number that began with a three and a zero, Vanessa was also able to break out the 202 area code from the other twenty-three lottery numbers.

The results were hypothetical-but the statistical probability of this being a fluke were slim.

Starting with a three and a zero still left six digits in the secret number. The problem stymied Vanessa for the better part of a week. Then, one evening, she and her lawyer boyfriend happened to be eating at a Chinese restaurant two blocks from the apartment the sisters shared in Fairfax outside the Beltway. The boyfriend went off to pay the cashier with his Visa card and asked her to leave the tip. Vanessa pulled two dollar bills from her purse and flattened them on the table. Her head was swimming with the numbers that the computer had been spitting out for the past ten days. As she glanced at the dollar bills the serial numbers seemed to float off the paper. She shook her head and looked again. Tessa's story of how East Germans spies operating in the West had used the serial numbers on American ten-dollar bills to break out telephone numbers came back to her. The first Moscow quiz lottery number had been broadcast on April 5, 1951, so the Soviet agent on the receiving end of the code would have been in possession of a ten-dollar bill printed before that date. The serial numbers on American bills ran in series, didn't they? Of course they did! What she needed to do now was find out the serial numbers that were in circulation from, say, the end of the war until April 1951, and run them through the computer.

First thing next morning, Vanessa made an appointment with a Treasury Department official and turned up at his office that afternoon. Yes, serial numbers on all American bills did run in series. No problem, he could supply her with the series that were in circulation from 1945 until April 1951, it was just a matter of checking the records. If she would care to wait he could have his a.s.sistant retrieve the log books and photocopy the appropriate pages for her.

That evening, with a very excited Tessa looking over her shoulder, Vanessa went down the list of ten-dollar bill serial numbers in circulation before April, 1951 until she found one that began with the telltale three and zero. In 1950, the Treasury had printed up $67,593,240-worth of ten-dollar bills with serial numbers that started with a letter of the alphabet, followed by 3089, followed by four other numbers and another letter of the alphabet.

Going back to her mainframe, Vanessa started to work with the number 3089; subtracting 3089 from the first winning lottery number broke out a Washington area code and exchange that existed in the early 1950s: 202 601. And that, in turn, left a mere 9,999 phone numbers to check out.

"What we're looking for," Tessa reminded her sister, "is someone who had a phone number corresponding to 201 601 and then moved out of that house or apartment in the week after April 5, 1951."

Tessa was almost dancing with excitement. "Boy, oh boy," she said. "Do you think this is actually going to work?"

KGB housekeepers had drawn the Venetian blinds and transformed the third-floor Kremlin suite into a working clinic. It was staffed around the clock by doctors and nurses specially trained in hemodialysis, and fitted with an American-manufactured artificial kidney machine to deal with acute kidney failure. Yuri Vladimirovich Andropov-the former Soviet Amba.s.sador to Budapest at the time of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, head of the KGB from 1967 to 1982, and since the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union's undisputed leader-was the clinic's only patient. Ten months in power, Andropov, at 69, was suffering from chronic kidney disease and kept alive by regular sessions of hemodialysis that filtered noxious waste out of his blood stream. Living on borrowed time (doctors gave him six months at most), pale and drawn, capable of concentrating for only relatively short periods, Andropov sat propped up in bed, an electric blanket tucked up to his gaunt neck.

"I'm fed up with the bickering," he told Starik. "The Army bra.s.s, their chests sagging under the weight of medals, come here every day or two to swear to me that the war is winnable, it is only a question of having the stamina to stick with it despite the losses."

Starik said something about how his particular service concentrated on the Princ.i.p.al Adversary but Andropov rushed on. "Then the KGB people drop by with their latest a.s.sessment, which is the same as the previous a.s.sessment: the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, the Islamic fundamentalists can never be defeated, the Army must be instructed to cut its losses, at which point the fundamentalists can be manipulated in such a way as to turn them against US interests." Shaking his head in frustration, Andropov glanced at the yellow appointments card. "It is written here you requested an appointment to talk about KHOLSTOMER."

"The Politburo's Committee of Three has split down the middle, Yuri Vladimirovich," Starik explained. "One member is for the project, one against, one undecided."