Moody studied the photograph. "Medium height, what looks like light hair. If this is the man we knew as Dodgson, his hair has grown thin and his body has thickened around the middle."

Moody pa.s.sed the photo on to Ebby, who said, "It's been twenty-two years since the FBI described him as st.u.r.dy. All of us have thickened around the middle."

"The trick," Casey quipped, "is not to thicken around the brain."

Ebby handed the photograph on to Jack, who fitted a pair of reading gla.s.ses over his ears and peered at the photograph. His mouth fell open and he muttered, "It's not possible-"

Ebby said, "What's not possible?"

"Do you recognize him?" Moody asked.

"Yes... Maybe... It couldn't be... I'm not sure... It looks like him but he's changed..."

"We've all changed," Ebby commented.

"It looks like whom?" Casey demanded.

"You're not going to believe this-it looks like the Russian exchange student I roomed with my senior year at Yale. His name was Yevgeny Tsipin. His father worked for the United Nations Secretariat..."

Moody turned to Casey. "The Tsipin who worked for the UN Secretariat in the 1940s was a full-time KGB agent." He fixed his eyes on Jack. "How well did your Russian roommate speak English?"

Jack, still puzzled, looked up from the photograph. "Yevgeny graduated from Erasmus High in Brooklyn-he spoke like a native of Brooklyn."

Moody flew out of his chair and began circling the table. "That would explain it-" he said excitedly.

"Explain what?" Casey asked.

"The Eugene Dodgson who worked at Kahn's Wine and Beverage spoke English like an American-there was no trace of a Russian accent. But Jim Angleton never ruled out the possibility that he was a Russian who had somehow perfected his English."

Shaking his head in amazement, Jack gaped at the photograph. "It could be him. On the other hand it could be someone who looks like him." He stared at the photograph. "I know who'll know," he said.

5.

CHERYOMUSKI, MOSCOW DISTRICT, SAt.u.r.dAY, NOVEMBER 12, 1983.

STARIK'S NIECES HAD TAKEN TO TIPTOEING AROUND THE SECOND-FLOOR apartment in the Apatov Mansion as if it were a clinic and Uncle was ailing, which was how he looked. His disheveled appearance-the scraggly white beard tumbling in matted knots to his cadaverous chest, the bloodshot eyes sunken into the waxen face and conveying permanent trepidation, the odor of an old man's secretions emanating from his unwashed carca.s.s-frightened the girlies so much that the bedtime cuddle in the great bed in which the Chechen girl blew out her brains had become a nightly ordeal. Unbeknownst to Uncle, the girlies had taken to drawing lots to see who would be obliged to crawl under the hem of his sweaty peasant's shirt. "If you please, Uncle, do read more quickly," implored the blonde Ossete when he lost his place and started the paragraph over again. Starik absently stroked the silken hair of the newly arrived niece from Inner Mongolia; even now, approaching the age of seventy, he was still moved by the innocence of beauty, by the beauty of innocence. Behind his back the Ossete reached beneath the undershirt of the Latvian and pinched one of her tiny nipples. The girl squealed in surprise. Uncle turned on the Latvian in vexation. "But she pinched my nipple," whined the girl, and she pointed out the culprit.

"Is that the way to treat a cousin?" Starik demanded.

"It was meant to be a joke-"

Uncle's hand shot out and he cuffed her hard across the face. His long fingernails, cut square in the style of peasants, scratched her cheek. Blood welled in the wounds. Sobbing in fright, the Ossete peeled off her sleeveless cotton undershirt and held it against the welts. For a moment n.o.body dared to utter a word. Then the m.u.f.fled voice of the Vietnamese girl could be heard from beneath Uncle's shirt, "What in the world is happening up there?"

Adjusting his spectacles. Uncle returned to the book and started the paragraph for the third time. "'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.'"

Starik's voice trailed off and he cleared a frog from his throat. His eyes turned misty and he was unable to continue. "Enough for tonight," he barked, tugging the Vietnamese girl out from under the nightshirt by the scruff of her neck. He slid off the bed and padded barefoot to the door, leaving the room without so much as a "sleep tight, girlies." The nieces watched him go, then looked at one another in bafflement. The Ossete's sobbing had turned into hiccups. The other girls set about trying to scare the hiccups away with sharp cries and hideous expressions on their faces.

In the inner sanctum off the library, Starik poured himself a stiff Bulgarian cognac and sank onto the rug with his back against the safe to drink it. Of all the pa.s.sages he read to the girls this one unnerved him the most. For Starik-who saw himself as the Knight with the mild blue eyes and the kindly smile, the setting sun shining on his armor-could discern the black shadows of the forest out of which the White Queen had run, and they terrified him. "'There's some enemy after her,' the King said. 'The woods full of them."' Starik had long ago identified the enemy lurking in the woods: It was not death but failure.

When he was younger he had believed with all his heart and all his energy in the inevitability of success; if you fought the good fight long enough you were bound to win. Now the sense of quest and crusade were gone, replaced by the presentiment that there was not even a remote possibility of triumph; the economy of Greater Russia, not to mention the social structure and the Party itself, was coming apart at the seams. Vultures like that Gorbachev fellow were circling overhead, waiting to feast off the pieces. Soviet control over Eastern Europe was unraveling. In Poland, the independent trade union Solidarity was gaining ground, making a joke out of the Polish Communist Party's claim to represent the Polish proletariat. In East Germany, the "concrete heads"-the nickname for the old Party hacks who resisted reform-were clinging to power by their fingertips.

Clearly the genius, the generosity of the human spirit would shrivel, replaced by the rapaciousness of the unrestrained h.o.m.o economicus. If there was consolation to be had, it was in the certainty that he would wreck the capitalist edifice even as socialism went down to defeat. The Germans had an expression for it: the twilight of the G.o.ds, Gotterdammerung! It was the last gasp of gratification for those who had battled and failed to win.

Andropov had been dozing, an oxygen mask drawn over the lower half of his face, when Starik turned up at the third-floor Kremlin suite earlier in the day. The Venetian blinds had been closed; only low-wattage bulbs burned in the several shaded lamps around the room. The General Secretary had just completed another grueling session of hemodialysis on the American artificial kidney machine. Male nurses bustled around him monitoring his pulse, changing the bedpan, checking the drip in his forearm, applying rouge to his pasty cheeks so that the afternoons visitors would not suppose they were in the presence of a corpse.

"Izvinite, Yuri Andropov," Starik had whispered. "Are you awake?" Andropov had opened an eye and had managed an imperceptible nod. "I am always awake, even when I sleep," he had mumbled from behind his oxygen mask. His left hand had levitated off the blanket and two fingers had pointed toward the door. The nurses had noticed the gesture and departed, closing the door behind them.

Andropov understood what Starik was doing there. This was to be the General Secretary's final briefing before KHOLSTOMER was initiated. All the elements were in place: the accounts in off-sh.o.r.e banks were set to dump 63.3 billion US dollars onto the spot market; at the first sign of the downward spiral of the dollar, KGB's agents of influence in j.a.pan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia, along with a German economist who was close to West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, would press their central banks into selling off dollar Treasury bond holdings to protect their positions, resulting in the collapse of the bond market.

Prying away the oxygen mask, breathing hard, Andropov had started firing questions: Had the KGB come up with evidence confirming America's intention of launching a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union? If so, where had the evidence originated? Was there an indication of a time frame?

It had become obvious to Starik that the fate of KHOLSTOMER was intricately bound to Andropov's a.s.sumption that the NATO exercise, designated ABLE ARCHER 83, was intended to cover the preemptive strike. If the General Secretary began to have doubts about American hostile intentions, he-like Brezhnev before him-would step back from the brink. The operatives around the world waiting for the final coded message to launch KHOLSTOMER would have to stand down. The CIA might get wind of what had almost happened from a disgruntled agent. Once the secret was out KHOLSTOMER would be dead. And so Starik did what he had never done in his forty-three years of running spies: he fabricated the report from one of his agents in place.

"Tovarish Andropov, I have the response from SASHA to your most recent queries." He held out a sheet filled with typescript, knowing that the General Secretary was too ill to read it for himself.

Andropov's eyes twitched open and something of the old combativeness glistened in them; Starik caught a glimpse of the unflinching amba.s.sador who had put down the Hungarian uprising and, later, run the KGB with an iron hand.

"What does he say?" the General Secretary demanded.

"The Pentagon has asked the CIA for real-time satellite intelligence updates on the twelve trains filled with ICBMs that we keep shuttling around the country. Their Joint Chiefs have also requested a revised estimate of Soviet missile readiness; they specifically wanted to know how long it would take us to launch ICBMs from missile silos once an American attack was spotted and the order to shoot was given and authenticated."

Andropov collapsed back into the pillows of the hospital bed, drained of hope that his a.n.a.lysis of Reagan's intentions had been wrong. "SASHA's information has always been accurate in the past..."

"There is more," Starik said. "We have deciphered a cable to American detachments guarding medium-range nuclear missile bases in Europe cancelling all leaves as of twenty-fifth November. The NATO exercise designated ABLE ARCHER 83 has been advanced two weeks and is now scheduled to commence at three A.M. on December first."

Andropov reached for the oxygen mask and held it over his mouth and nose. The act of breathing seemed to take all his strength. Finally he tugged the mask away from his lips, which were bluish and caked with sputum. "The only hope of avoiding a nuclear holocaust is if KHOLSTOMER can damage them psychologically-if the capitalist system collapses around them Reagan and his people may lose their nerve. The world would accuse them of starting a war to divert attention from the economic crisis. Under these circ.u.mstances they may hesitate."

"There could be widespread unrest, even riots," Starik agreed. He was starting to believe the scenario that Andropov had invented and he had confirmed. "It is not out of the realm of possibility that their military establishment will be too preoccupied with maintaining order to wage war."

The General Secretary sc.r.a.ped the sputum off his lips with the back of his arm. "Do it," he wheezed. "KHOLSTOMER is our last hope."

From his corner table near the back of the courtyard restaurant in Dean's Hotel, Hippolyte Afanasievich Fet, the gloomy KGB rezident, kept an eye on the CIA officers drinking bottles of Murree beers at the first table off the seedy lobby. The Americans talked in undertones but laughed boisterously-so boisterously no one would have guessed that there was a war raging beyond the Khyber Pa.s.s, half an hour by car down the road. At half past seven, the Americans divided up the bill and counted out rupees and noisily pushed back their chairs to leave. Fet's two table companions-one was the rezidentura's chief cipher clerk, the other a military attache at the Soviet consulate-exchanged s.m.u.tty comments about the comportment of Americans abroad. You could tell Americans, one of them remarked, the minute they walked into a room. They always acted as if the country they were in belonged to them, the other agreed. Fet said, They throw rupees around as if they were printing them in the back room of the CIA station. Maybe they are, said the military attache. All three Russians laughed at this. Fet excused himself to go to the lavatory. Get the bill and pay it but don't tip like an American-the Pakistanis overcharge as it is, he instructed the cipher clerk.

Fet ambled across the restaurant to the lobby. Walking past the door to the lavatory, he continued on out the front door and made his way to the parking lot behind the hotel. The Americans were lazily climbing into two Chevrolets. Fet walked around to the pa.s.senger side of one and motioned for the acting chief of station to roll down the window.

"Well, if it isn't Boris Karloff in the flesh," the American commented. "Got any state secrets you want to sell, Fet?"

"As a matter of fact, I do."

The smile was still plastered across the American's face but his eyes were bright with curiosity. Sensing that something unusual was occurring, he signaled with a hand. The others spilled out of the cars and surrounded the Russian. Two of them walked off a few paces and, turning their backs on Fet, peered into the parking lot to see if there were other Russians around.

"Okay, Fet, what's all this about?" demanded the acting chief of station.

"I wish to defect. Do not attempt to talk me into defecting in place. I will come across here and now, or not at all." He patted his jacket pockets, which were stuffed with thick manila envelopes. "I have all the correspondence between the Centre and the rezidentum for the last month in my pockets. And I have many other secrets in my head-secrets that will surprise you."

"What about your wife?" one of the Americans asked. "Things will go badly for her if you skip out?"

A cruel smile stole across Pet's sunken cheeks; it made him look even more like Boris Karloff. "My wife last night announced to me that she has fallen in love with the young head of our consulate, a p.r.i.c.k if there ever was one. She asked me for a separation. I will give her a separation she will never forget."

"I think he's serious," said one of the Americans.

"I am very serious," Fet a.s.sured them.

The acting station chief weighed the pros and cons. Inside the kitchen of the restaurant one of the Chinese chefs could be heard yelling at another in high-pitched Mandarin. Finally the American made up his mind; if for some reason Langley didn't like what they had hooked, h.e.l.l, they could always toss Fet back into the pond. "Quickly, get in the car," he told Fet.

Moments later the two Chevrolets roared out of the parking lot and swung onto Saddar Road, heading at high speed toward the fortress-like American Consulate across town.

Bundled in a sheepskin jacket with a printed Sindhi shawl wound around her neck like a scarf, Maria Shaath sat hunched over the crude wooden table, scratching questions on a pad by the shimmering light of the single candle burning on the table. From time to time she would look up, the eraser end of the pencil absently caressing her upper lip as she stared intently into the yellow-blue flame. As new questions occurred to her, she bent back to the pad to note them down.

Anthony and Maria had been strolling around the compound that morning when Ibrahim emerged from his dwelling. The air was sharp; snow was falling in the mountains, lowering visibility for Russian helicopters that were said to be marauding through the labyrinth of valleys. In the hamlet below, two skinny boys were pulling a hump-backed cow along the dirt trail. A group of fundamentalist fighters back from a three-day patrol, their long shirts and long beards and fur-lined vests caked with dust, could be seen filing up the road, Kalashnikovs casually perched on their shoulders. From a firing range in a hidden quarry came the sound of hollow metallic drumbeats, each one containing its own echo. Just inside the great double doors of the compound, which were open during the day, an old man wearing plastic sungla.s.ses to protect his eyes from sparks was sharpening knives on a stone wheel turned by a girl hidden in a dark brown burqa.

"You are a remarkable man," Maria had said. She looked at him intently. "Why don't you let me interview you?"

"Interview me?"

"Well, that's what I do for a living. You have all this gear around-surely you can come up with a television camera."

Ibrahim seemed interested. "And what would you ask me in such an interview?"

"I would ask you where you come from and where you're going. I would ask you about your religion, your friends, your enemies. I would ask you why you fight the Russians, and what will be your next jihad when the Russians are gone."

"What makes you think there will be another jihad?"

"You are in love with holy war, Commander Ibrahim. It's written on your face. Cease-fire, peace-they bore you. I've met people like you before. You will go from one war to the next until you get your wish-"

"Since you know so much about me, what is my wish?"

"You want to become a martyr."

Maria's comments had amused Ibrahim. "And what would you do with the tape of an interview if I consent," he had asked.

"You could arrange for it to be delivered to my office in Peshawar. Within twenty-four hours it would be on the air in New York-what you say would be picked up and broadcast around the world."

"Let me think about it," Ibrahim had said. And with his Shadow trailing two steps behind him, he had stridden past the knife-sharpener and out of the compound in the direction of the barracks at the edge of the hamlet below.

Maria had turned to Anthony. "Well, he didn't say no, did he?" At dusk Ibrahim had sent word that he consented to the interview, which would take place in the room under the attic at midnight. Included in the note was a list of things he would refuse to talk about: questions concerning his real ident.i.ty and his past were prohibited, along with anything that might reveal the location of the mountaintop he called Yathrib.

When Maria and Anthony climbed down the ladder at a quarter to midnight, they found that the communal kitchen had been transformed into a crude studio. Two kleig lights, running off a generator humming away outside the house, illuminated the two kitchen chairs set up in front of the chimney. A beardless young man holding a German Leica motioned for the two prisoners to stand with their backs to a poster of the Golden Dome Mosque in Jerusalem and then snapped half a dozen shots of them. (It was this photo that turned up on front pages around the world a few days later.) Maria regarded the camera with an impatient smile; she was eager to get on with the interview. Anthony managed an uncomfortable grin that editorialists later described as sardonic. With the photo op out of the way Ibrahim, wearing an embroidered white robe that grazed the tops of his Beal Brothers boots, appeared at the door and settled onto one of the chairs. His long hair had been combed and tied back at the nape of his neck, his short henna-tinted beard had been trimmed. A bearded mujaheddin wearing thick eyegla.s.ses fiddled with the focus of a c.u.mbersome Chinese camera mounted on a homemade wooden tripod. Maria, pulling the Sindhi shawl over her shoulders, took her place in the second chair. A red light atop the camera came on.

Maria looked into the lens. "Good evening. This is Maria Shaath, broadcasting to you from somewhere in Afghanistan. My guest tonight-or should I say my host, since I am his guest, or more accurately, his prisoner-is Commander Ibrahim, the leader of the commando unit that kidnapped me and the American diplomat Anthony McAuliffe from the streets of Peshawar in Pakistan." She turned toward Ibrahim and favored him with a guileless smile. "Commander, it's hard to know where to begin this interview, since you have given me a list of things you refuse to talk about-"

"Let us start by correcting an error. Anthony McAuliffe is posing as an American diplomat, but he is actually a CIA officer attached to the CIA station in Peshawar at the time of his... apprehension."

"Even if you're correct, its still not clear why you kidnapped him. I thought the American Central Intelligence Agency was helping Islamic fundamentalist groups like yours in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan."

Ibrahim's fingers kneaded the worry beads. "The American Central Intelligence Agency could not care less about Afghanistan. They are supplying antiquated arms to Islamic fundamentalists in order to bleed the Soviet enemy, much as the Soviets supplied arms to the North Vietnamese to bleed their American enemy in Vietnam."

"If the situation were reversed, if you were fighting the Americans, would you accept aid from the Soviet Union?"

"I would accept aid from the devil to pursue the jihad."

"If you drive out the Soviet occupiers-"

"When we drive out the Soviet occupiers-"

Maria nodded. "Okay, will the war be over when you drive out the Russians?"

Ibrahim leaned forward. "We are engaged in a struggle against colonialism and secularism, which are the enemies of Islam and the Islamic state we will create in Afghanistan, as well as other areas of the Muslim world. The war will go on until we have defeated all vestiges of colonialism and secularism and inaugurated a Muslim commonwealth based on the pure faith-the Islam- of the Prophet you call Abraham and we call Ibrahim. Such a state, governed by Koranic principles and the example of the Messenger Muhammad, would be characterized by total submission to G.o.d. This I believe."

Casey and his deputy, Ebby, stood in front of the enormous television set in the Director's office on the seventh floor of Langley, drinks in their fists, watching the interview.

On the screen Maria was glancing at her notes. "Let me ask you some personal questions. Are you married?"