"Do I understand you correctly, Mr. Sorcerer? Despite the lateness of the hour, you still wish my a.s.sociates to deliver on these contracts?"

"Look at the situation from my point of view, friend. My clients want to make sure Yeltsin won't have the same jokers diddling with him this time next year."

The gnome-like Russian looked up at the Sorcerer. "You are one in a thousand, Mr. Sorcerer." He thrust out a hand and the Sorcerer gave it a limp shake.

"It's a pleasure to do business with you, Endel. You don't mind I call you Endel? I feel as if we've known each other for weeks. Listen, I'm concerned about your remuneration. I wouldn't want you to come away from all this without a little something for your troubles."

"I am moved almost but not quite to tears by your concern, Mr. Sorcerer. Rest a.s.sured, I have been in touch with the Rabbi, who has been in touch with someone who goes by the appellation of Devisenbeschaffer-"

Torriti was startled. "You know of the existence of the currency acquirer?"

Endel Rappaport's thick lips curled into a sheepish smirk. "The legendary Rabbi Hillel, who made something a name for himself in the second century, is said to have posed the ultimate question: If I am not for myself, who is for me? Vladimir here has been tracking the Devisenbeschaffer's pecuniary activities in Dresden for me. A third of what the Rabbi gets from the currency acquirer will wind up in Swiss accounts that I control."

"People like me do not meet people like you every day of the week," Torriti said seriously. "A third of what the Rabbi gets is a pretty penny. What are you going to do with all that money?"

The smirk froze on Rappaport's face. "Before they cut off my fingers I was a student of the violin. Since then I have not been able to listen to music. What I am going to do with my share of the money is get even."

"Even with who?"

"Russia."

"Yeah, well, I'm glad we never got to cross paths during the Cold War. Your premature death would have weighed on my conscience."

Rappaport's brow wrinkled in pain. "I feel the same about you. Do have a good trip back to wherever it is you are going."

"I'm heading home," Torriti said. "The end of the line is East of Eden, a paradise on earth for golfers and/or alcoholics."

Merriment danced in Rappaport's eyes. "I need not ask which category you fall into."

Torriti had to concede the point. "No, I don't suppose you do."

The deaths were all listed on police blotters as accidents or suicides.

Nikolai Izvolsky, the Central Committee's financial wizard who had siphoned Party funds to the Devisenbeschaffer in Germany, fell to his death from the roof of a Moscow apartment house while taking the air late one night. A crotchety old woman in the next building later told police that she had seen four men on the roof next door moments before she heard the scream and the police sirens. As the woman was well known in the local precinct for inventing stories of Peeping Toms on the roofs of adjacent buildings, the state procurator discounted her testimony and ruled the death an accident.

The press baron Pavel Uritzky and his wife, Mathilde, were discovered asphyxiated in their BMW parked in the private garage behind their kottedzhi on the edge of Moscow. One end of a garden hose had been inserted into the exhaust pipe, the other end run into the ventilation tubing under the hood. The nurse in the ambulance responding to the frantic call from the couple's butler broke the car window with a hammer, switched off the motor, dragged the bodies outside and administered oxygen, but it was too late. In his subsequent declaration to the authorities, the nurse mentioned having detected the pungent odor of chloroform in the garage. The first policemen on the scene made no mention of this and the question of chloroform was relegated to a footnote in the official report. The state procurator noted that the car doors had been locked on the inside, with the remote door control device attached to the key in the ignition. The second remote device, normally in Mathilde's possession, was never found but no conclusions were drawn from this. Careful examination revealed no bruises on the corpses and no evidence under the fingernails to indicate there had been a struggle. No suicide note was found. Pavel Uritzky had been one of the ring-leaders of the putsch and deeply depressed at its failure. Mathilde was linked to the shooting of the banking magnet Tsipin and said to be terrified of being prosecuted. The deaths of the Uritzkys were listed as a double suicide and the case was closed.

Moscow neighbors of Boris Pugo heard what sounded like a shot and summoned the police, who broke down the door and discovered the Interior Minister slumped over the kitchen table, a large-caliber pistol (obviously fallen from his hand) on the linoleum floor and brain matter seeping from an enormous bullet wound in his skull. A note addressed to his children and grandchildren said, "Forgive me. It was all a mistake." Pugo's old father-in-law was found cowering in a clothes closet muttering incoherently about a.s.sa.s.sination squads, but police psychiatrists decided the father-in-law was suffering from dementia and the state procurator eventually ruled that Pugo's wound was self inflicted.

The body of Gorbachev's military adviser, Marshal Akhromeyev, was found hanging from a noose attached to an overhead lighting fixture in his office. People in adjacent offices told police they had heard what sounded like furniture being moved and objects being thrown on the floor, but had not become suspicious because they knew that, in the aftermath of the aborted putsch, the Marshal had been retired from active duty and a.s.sumed he was simply moving out his personal affairs. The various noises were further explained away by Akhromeyev's typed suicide note, which said: "I am a poor master of preparing my own suicide. The first attempt didn't work- the cord broke. I will try with all my strength to do it again. My age and all I have done give me the right to leave this life."

The foreign ministry apparatchik Fyodor Lomov, one of the key putschists, fled Moscow to avoid arrest and was never heard from again. He left behind a cryptic note saying the only thing he regretted was that the coup against Gorbachev had failed. Clothing later identified as belonging to Lomov were discovered neatly folded on a bank of the Moscow River upstream from the capitol. The river was dragged but Lomov's body was never found; his disappearance was carried on the police books as a "swimming accident."

Newspapers reported other mysterious deaths: two in the city that used to be called Leningrad but had changed its name back to Saint Petersburg (the dead men, killed when their car went over a cliff, were KGB generals who had plotted to oust the elected mayor and take control of the city in the name of the State Committee for the State of Emergency); one in the Crimea (a senior KGB officer from the Ninth Chief Directorate who had commanded the unit keeping Gorbachev prisoner in Foros died in the explosion of a kitchen gas canister); one in the Urals Military District (an Army general who, at the height of the putsch, had ordered the local KGB to round up "cosmopolitans," a Stalinist code word for Jews, was knifed to death in a ba.n.a.l mugging).

Alerted by the rash of accidental deaths and suicides, the authorities decided to take extraordinary precautions with the putsch ringleaders already in custody, KGB Chairman Kryuchkov and Defense Minister Yazov being the most prominent among them. Visitors were required to communicate through a gla.s.s window; shoelaces, belts and sharp objects were removed from the cells and the accused were put on under round-the-clock surveillance.

With all eyes on Russia, few noticed the small item that appeared on a back page in the Dresden press: early-morning joggers had discovered the body of the Devisenbeschaffer hanging under a bridge across the Elbe. Sometime before dawn he had attached one end of a thick rope to a stanchion and tied the other end around his neck, and jumped to his death. He was wearing a neatly pressed conservative three-piece suit that showed no evidence of a struggle. A typed and signed note was found in his inside breast pocket; detectives eventually established that the typeface matched the deceased's computer printer. The note asked his wife and three children to forgive him for taking the easy way out, and went on to say that he had decided to kill himself because he had siphoned funds into Russia to finance the aborted putsch and was now sure he would be exposed and punished. The police report noted that the Devisenbeschaffer had failed to specify which accounts in Russia the money had been sent to, and they held little hope of ever finding out; for all intents and purposes the funds had vanished into thin air.

Turning their backs on the main drag crawling with narrow trolley cars and lined with banks, the Sorcerer and his Apprentice strolled across the footbridge at the end of Lake Geneva and went to ground in an open air cafe. Attractive young women wearing white ap.r.o.ns over gauze-thin blouses and peasant skirts waited on tables. Jack summoned one of them and inquired, "What do people order when they're celebrating?"

"Champagne cups," she said without hesitation.

"Oh, Jesus, not Champagne," Torriti whined. "The G.o.dd.a.m.n bubbles give me gas."

"Two Champagne cups," Jack told the waitress. When Torriti pulled a face, Jack said, "You've been drinking cheap booze so long you think it's an elixir. Besides which, we've got to launch the Enterprise in style."

Torriti nodded grudgingly. "It's not everybody who waltzes into a Swiss bank and finds out he's got $147 million and change stashed in a secret account. When you got up to leave I thought the clown in the three-piece suit was going to shine your shoes with his tongue."

"It's so much money I have trouble thinking of it as money," Jack told his friend.

"Actually, I thought this Devisenbeschaffer character had squirreled away a lot more in Dresden. You sure Ezra Ben Ezra isn't holding out on you?"

"The Rabbi took expenses off the top. To start with, there was your mafia chum in Moscow-"

"The inimitable Endel Rappaport, who's going to make Mother Russia pay through the nose for the fingers that got lopped off."

"He got a share of the money. Another chunk wound up in the pocket of a shadowy individual who may be sponoring the career of a little known KGB lieutenant colonel named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The individual in question worked with Putin in Dresden and knew his way around well enough to siphon off some of the Devisenbeschaffer loot before the Rabbi could get to it."

"Funny thing, there was a Russian named Vladimir with Rappaport the last time our paths crossed."

"The Rabbi said this Putin quit the KGB the day after the coup against Gorbachev began, then turned up in something called the Federal Security Service, which is the successor to the KGB."

"Nimble footwork," Torriti commented. "Putin." He shook his head. "Name doesn't ring a bell."

"It will," Jack said. "With roughly a hundred fifty million to spread around, he's bound to surface eventually."

The waitress set the Champagne cups on the table and tucked the bill under the ashtray. "Here's to Swiss banks," Torriti said, and wincing in apprehension, he warily tested his c.o.c.ktail.

"Here's to the Enterprise," Jack said. He drank off half the Champagne as if it were seltzer water. "You want to know something, Harvey. I feel like Mr. Rockefeller must have felt when he set up his foundation. My big problem now is to figure out how to give away the seven or so million the account generates a year."

"Read the newspapers and send out money orders to deserving causes."

"How would you define deserving causes?"

Torriti said with utter seriousness, "That's not complicated-deserving causes knock off deserving people."

Sniffing the air, Torriti smiled at a thought. Jack asked, "What is it?"

"Funny thing, Kritzky cashing in his chips like that. You want a second opinion, he got what was coming to him."

Jack gazed at the lake without seeing it. He could make out Leo's voice in his ear. I'm still sorry, Jack. About our friendship. But not about what I did. I'm still sorry, Jack. About our friendship. But not about what I did. "He set out to fix the world," Jack said. "He didn't realize it wasn't broken." "He set out to fix the world," Jack said. "He didn't realize it wasn't broken."

Torriti could see that his Apprentice needed cheering up. "Well, don't let it go to your head, sport, but the fact is I'm proud of you. No kidding aside, I am. You're the best thing since sliced bread."

"I had a great teacher."

Torriti hiked his gla.s.s. "To you and me, sport, the last of the Cold War Mohicans."

"The last of the Cold War Mohicans," Jack agreed.

The Company pulled out all the stops for Jack's official going away bash in the seventh-floor dining room at Langley. A banner bearing the McAuliffe family mantra ("Once down is no battle") had been strung over the double doors. The Time magazine photo of Jack being rescued from a half-inflated rubber raft off the Bay of Pigs had been blown up larger than life and taped to one wall. Much to Jack's embarra.s.sment and Millie's delight, the secret citations that accompanied his many "jockstrap" medals ("... for courage above and beyond the call of duty... highest tradition of the clandestine service... honor on the country and on the Company") had been printed up poster-size and tacked to the remaining walls. The speeches-beginning with Manny's tribute and ending with Ebby's-had been interminable. "All Central Intelligence officers have the right to retire when they're pushing sixty-five," the DCI told the several hundred men and women crowded into the executive dining room, "especially after forty years of dedicated service to the flame of liberty. But with Jack's departure, we're losing more than a warm body who happens to be the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. We're losing the heart and the soul and the brain and the expertise and the instincts of a warrior who has fought all the battles, from the rooftops of East Berlin to Cuba to the recent attempt at a putsch in Russia. In the process, he survived the bloodletting and earned the kudos and taught us all that once down is no battle. Forty years ago I sat with Jack in a cabaret in Berlin called Die Pfeffermuhie and we drank more than our share of beer and wound up singing the Whiffenpoof song. And there's a stanza in it-correct me if I screw this up, Jack-that says: And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth, G.o.d help us, for we knew the worst too young!

"For those of us who were around then and, like you, Jack, knew the worst too young, that about says it all. Except, perhaps, good luck and G.o.dspeed."

The Company officers, a great many of whom hadn't been born when Jack and Ebby were hanging out in Die Pfeffermuhie, applauded enthusiastically; Jack was extremely popular with the rank and file and the truth was they were sorry to see him go. It was, as one section head put it, the end of an era. To everyone's delight, Millie, sobbing openly, rushed up and planted a kiss on Jack's Cossack mustache. Elizabet and Nellie and Manny crowded around him. Jack's son, Anthony, and his daughter-in-law, Maria, hugged him affectionately.

And then the liquor started flowing.

"How did things go in Room SH219?" Jack asked when he managed to b.u.t.tonhole Ebby in a corner.

"For once they gave us grudging credit for antic.i.p.ating the putsch and getting the President to warn Gorbachev, even if the warning fell on deaf ears," Ebby recounted. "They asked about you, Jack. I told them you were starting a private security consultancy called the Enterprise. They wanted to know who was bankrolling you." Ebby raised his half-empty whiskey gla.s.s and clinked it against Jack's. "Who is bankrolling you, old buddy?"

"Clients," he said.

"You sure are tight-lipped about the whole thing."

"A security consultancy needs to be tight-lipped if it wants to have credibility," Jack retorted.

"I suppose," Ebby said. "Funny thing happened at today's session-our congressional watchdogs went to great pains to remind me that political a.s.sa.s.sination is prohibited by a 1976 executive order. They kept coming back to that rash of accidents and suicides after the putsch-they asked me several times if I knew anything about them."

"What did you say?"

"I told them the truth, Jack. I told them I'd read about the deaths in the newspapers. I told them that there was no way under the sun the Company would be involved in this sort of thing on my watch." Ebby tilted his head and sized up his retiring DDCI. "You don't happen to know anything about these deaths that you haven't told me, do you, Jack?"

"I'm clean as a whistle on this," he replied.

Jack had learned how to lie from a virtuoso. Every inch the Sorcerer's Apprentice, he summoned up a perfectly guileless smile and, looking Ebby squarely in the eye, repeated what Harvey Torriti said when Jack had raised the subject of RAINBOW'S death in Berlin a dozen or so wars back. "Hey, pal, I swear it to you. On my mother's grave."

POSTLUDE.

"Tut, tut, child!"said the d.u.c.h.ess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

VIENNA, VIRGINIA, SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 1995.

HIGH OVER THE CITY, A MARE'S TAIL DRIFTED ACROSS THE GREAT Bear so languorously it looked as if the motion picture had been slowed down. On a deserted street running along one side of Nottoway Park in Fairfax County, Virginia, a crow's mile from the town of Vienna, a broad-shouldered fiftyish-something man known to his Russian handlers only by his code name, Ramon, surveyed the neighborhood through prism binoculars that could see in the dark. Sitting motionless in the back seat of his Isuzu Trooper, he'd been keeping an eye on the streets and paths since midnight. He'd watched several people impatiently walking dogs, a couple of h.o.m.os.e.xuals who stopped in their tracks every few seconds to bicker, an inebriated woman of uncertain age tottering on spiky heels that dispatched sharp echoes into the still summer night. Then absolute silence. Just after two in the morning he'd spotted the dark four-door Ford with two men in it cruising the area. It vanished down a side street and materialized ten minutes later from another direction. On its fourth pa.s.s around the area the car eased to a stop at the curb near the park's main entrance on Old Courthouse Road. The headlights flickered out. For a long while the two men remained in the Ford. From time to time one of them would light a fresh cigarette from the glowing embers of the last one. At a quarter to three the men finally emerged from the car and made their way through the park to the wooden footbridge. The one smoking the cigarette turned his back on the bridge and stood guard. The other crouched quickly and tugged a green plastic trash bag from its hiding place under the end of the bridge, and wedged a paper shopping bag into the cranny in its place. On their way back to their automobile, the two men stripped off the white adhesive tape pasted vertically across a "pedestrian crossing" sign (indicating that Ramon was ready to receive the package) and replaced it with a horizontal length of tape (indicating that the dead drop had been serviced). With a last look around, they got back into their car and, accelerating cautiously, drove off.

Ramon waited another twenty minutes before making his move. He had been spying for the Russians for ten years now, and long ago decided that this was the only really perilous moment in the game. His Russian handlers had no idea who he was. They would have figured out from the doc.u.ments he supplied that he was deeply involved in Russian counterintelligence and just a.s.sumed he worked for the CIA; it would never have crossed their minds that he actually worked for the FBI. Which meant that even if the Americans got their hands on a mole or a highly placed Russian defector, they couldn't discover Ramon's ident.i.ty from the Russians because the Russians didn't know it. On his end, he was senior enough in his shop to have access to computer codes and files that would give him early warning if anybody raised the specter of an American mole working for the Russians.

Ramon, meticulous and experienced when it came to tradecraft, had examined the operation from every point of the compa.s.s. As far as he could see there was no way he could be caught-except in the act of picking up the payload in the dead drop. Which was why he went to such lengths to survey the park before retrieving what his Russian handlers had left for him.

Back in the mid-1980s, when he'd delivered his first plastic trash bag filled with secrets, the motive had been money. The people around him-his college cla.s.smates, his neighbors, lawyers and stock brokers he ran into at c.o.c.ktail parties-were pulling down enormous salaries and year-end bonuses and stock options worth a fortune. Ramon's government payroll check permitted him and his family to live comfortably, but he didn't see how he would pay for the college education of the three children he already had and the fourth that was on its way. He didn't see how he could live with a measure of self-indulgence when the time came to retire. Unless... unless he came up with a scheme to augment his income. And the only scheme that seemed within the realm of possibility was peddling state secrets to the state's princ.i.p.al adversary, Russia. He carefully studied the case histories of previous moles to make sure he didn't fall into the same traps that eventually led to their downfall. He was careful not to change his lifestyle, something that was sure to attract the attention of the security mavins. He drove the same beat-up cars and lived in the same middle-cla.s.s home in Virginia and vacationed at the same modest resorts on mainland America. Curiously, it was only after he'd delivered the first few packets to the Russians that he realized the money wasn't the only reward.

There was an enormous kick to be had from beating the system; the adrenalin flowed when he outsmarted the counterintelligence teams that had been created to prevent someone from doing what he was doing. The fact that he was a member of such a team only made the exploit sweeter. His drab life, which was filled with dreary routines and tedious paperwork and rigorous pecking orders, suddenly seemed a lot more glamorous.

Ramon could feel the pulse pounding in his temple as he let himself out of the Isuzu. Walking soundless on rubber soles, he approached the footbridge and, squatting, worked the paper bag free from the cranny. He could make out the wads of bills, used twenties and fifties bound together with rubber bands, through the paper; his Russian handlers will have left him $50,000 in all, compensation for the payload he'd left the month before that included the ident.i.ties of two Russian diplomats serving in Washington who were spying for the CIA. Back in the car, he jammed the paper bag up under the dashboard behind the radio and started the motor. Threading his way through the empty streets in the direction of home, he felt the throb in his temple gradually returning to something approaching normal and experienced the liberating serenity familiar to the mountaineer coming down from an alp.

The G.o.d-awful truth was he had become an adrenalin junkie; the double game had become the only game worth playing.

Minutes before 5 A.M. an ambulance eased down the ramp of the Veterans Administration hospital on San Pedro Drive in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hunched over the wheel of a rented car parked in an outdoor s.p.a.ce reserved for doctors, Jack McAuliffe watched the automatic door rise and began ticking off the seconds. At three one-hundredth he was jogging down the ramp as the taillights of the ambulance disappeared into the vast bas.e.m.e.nt garage. At nine one-hundredth he ducked under the overhead door as it started closing behind him. Threading his way between parked cars to a locked door, he worked a thin metal wedge down the jamb until the dead bolt clicked open. Picking the lock gave him a lot of satisfaction; he hadn't done this sort of thing since S.M. Craw Management initiated him into the joys of tradecraft. Taking the stairs two at a time, he climbed to the fourth floor. Winded, he leaned on the banister to catch his breath; the body had aged more than the mind wanted to admit. Checking to make sure the coast was clear, he loped down the hospital corridor to the locker room, which was precisely where the nurse said it would be. He s.n.a.t.c.hed a pair of white trousers and a knee-length white coat from the laundry bin, along with two white canvas shoe sheaths, and quickly pulled everything on. For good measure, he pinched a stethoscope from a peg on the wall and hung it around his neck. Moments later he made his way down to the third floor and pushed through the doors of the special ward the Company maintained for former officers and agents. There was an imperious red-lettered sign splashed across the inner doors that warned "Absolutely No Visitors."

Out of the corner of an eye Jack noticed a nurse at the far end of the unit glance in his direction as he approached the third cubicle. He made a show of studying the chart attached to the part.i.tion. Moving around to the side of the bed, he reached down to take the patient's pulse. Harvey Torriti, wearing a sleeveless hospital gown and looking like a beached whale, opened one damp eye and then the other. He sniffed in pleasure as he recognized his visitor.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n, Harvey, how did you wind up here?" Jack whispered.

"With all the painkillers I take, they're worried about me babbling Company secrets," Torriti said. "So they sentenced me to death in this sterile VA brig. Only immediate family are allowed to visit. As I have no family, immediate or otherwise, n.o.body gets in to see me." The sight of his Apprentice had obviously cheered the Sorcerer. "How'd you get past the guards?" he demanded in a voice raw from disuse.

"Exfiltrations, infiltrations, I learned it all at the foot of the master," Jack said.

Jack could make out the shrapnel wound that had decapitated the naked lady tattooed on Torriti's arm; he remembered Miss Sipp fainting dead away when the Sorcerer peeled off his shirt to show it to her. He leaned closer until his face was hovering above Torriti's. "So how are you doing, Harvey?"

"What can I say, kid? I'm not doing so good. I'm dog-tired when I go to sleep, I'm bushed when I wake up. Lets face it, I'm on my last legs. I think this is where I get to buy the farm."

"These days the doctors can pull off miracles-"

Torriti waved away the idea with a limp hand. "Don't f.u.c.k with me, pal. We've come too far together for you to fling bulls.h.i.t on a dying man." He turned his head on the pillow to make sure the nurse was still at the far end of the ward., "You wouldn't by any chance have a pick-me-up on you to help a buddy over the Great Divide?"

"Funny you should mention it-"

Jack produced the hip flask filled with cheap whiskey. Torriti brightened as his Apprentice lifted his head and tilted the flask to his lips. The alcohol burned. There was a rattle in the back of his throat as he sucked in air to douse the fire. "Just what the doctor ordered," he murmured as he sank back onto the pillow. "Suppose you read about those two Russian diplomats who were caught spying for the CIA and shot."

"What about them, Harvey?"

"You need to be dumb and blind not to see it, kid. Anybody could stumble across one mole, but two at a time-it set my nose to twitching. Want an educated guess, means the Russians have got themselves a mole of their own somewhere, probably in counterintelligence, since he knew about the two diplomats we'd turned."

"The Cold War may be over but the great game goes on," Jack said.

"Nature of the beast," Torriti grunted. "Long as the h.o.m.o politicus is addicted to adrenalin highs, spies will keep on spying." The Sorcerer, in pain, opened his mouth wide and breathed deeply. When the pain had subsided, he said, "Read about Endel Rappaport in the papers from time to time."

"I never saw Rappaport's name-"