The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 1

THE COMPANY.

by Robert Littell.

ROME, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1978.

HIGH OVER THE CITY, A RACK OF CLOUDS DRIFTED ACROSS THE hunter's moon so rapidly it looked as if a motion picture had been speeded up. On a deserted avenue near a long wall, a dirty yellow Fiat mini-taxi cut its lights and its motor and coasted to the curb at Porta Angelica. A lean figure wearing the rough ankle-length ca.s.sock and hood of a Dominican friar emerged from the back seat. He had been raised in the toe of the boot of Italy and was known as the Calabrian by the shadowy organizations that from time to time employed his services. As a teenager, the Calabrian, a beautiful young man with the angelic face of a Renaissance castrato, had trained for several years as an equilibrist in a circus academy but abandoned it when he fell from a high wire and shattered an ankle. Now, despite a perceptible limp, he still moved with the catlike elegance of a tightrope walker. From the hills above the Tiber, a church bell that had recently been hooked up to an electric timer sounded the half-hour half a minute early. The Calabrian checked the luminous dial of his wrist.w.a.tch, then walked the fifty meters alongside the colonnade to the heavy wooden doors. Pulling on a pair of surgeon's latex gloves, he scratched at the tradesmen's entrance. Immediately a heavy bolt on the inside was thrown and the small blue door set into the larger doors opened just enough for him to slip through. A pale, middle-aged man, dressed in mufti but with the ramrod bearing of an army officer, held up five fingers and nodded toward the only window of the guard barracks out of which light streamed. The Calabrian nodded once. With the officer leading the way, the two started down the alley, ducking when they came to the lighted window. The Calabrian peered over the sill; inside the orderly room two young soldiers in uniform were playing cards, three others dozed in easy chairs. Automatic weapons and clips of ammunition were visible on the table next to a small refrigerator.

The Calabrian trailed after the officer in mufti, past the Inst.i.tute for Religious Works, to a servants' door in the back of the sprawling palazzo. The officer produced a large skeleton key from his jacket pocket and inserted it into the lock. The door clicked open. He dropped a second skeleton key into the Calabrian's palm. "For the door on the landing," he whispered. He spoke Italian with the flat elongated vowels of someone who came from one of the mountainous cantons of Switzerland bordering the Dolomite Alps. "Impossible to get the key to the apartment without attracting attention."

"No matter," the Calabrian said. "I will pick the lock. What about the milk? What about the alarms?"

"The milk was delivered. You will soon see whether it was consumed. As for the alarms, I disconnected the three doors on the control panel in the officers' ready room."

As the Calabrian started through the door, the officer touched his arm. "You have twelve minutes before the guards begin their next patrol."

"I am able to slow time down or speed it up," remarked the Calabrian, looking up at the moon. "Twelve minutes, spent carefully, can be made to last an eternity." With that, he vanished into the building.

He knew the floor plan of the palazzo as well as he knew the lifelines on the palms of his hands. Hiking his ca.s.sock, taking the steps three at a time, he climbed the narrow servants' staircase to the third floor, opened the door with the skeleton key and let himself into the dimly lit corridor.

A long tongue of violet drugget, faded and worn in the middle, ran from the far end of the corridor to the small table facing the antiquated elevator and the central staircase next to it. Moving soundlessly, the Calabrian made his way down the corridor to the table. A plump nun, one of the Sisters of the Handmaids of Jesus Crucified, sat slumped over the table, her head directly under the pale circle of light from a silver desk lamp almost as if she were drying her hair. An empty tumbler with the last of the drugged milk was next to the old-fas.h.i.+oned telephone perched high on its cradle.

The Calabrian pulled an identical tumbler, with a film of uncontaminated milk at the bottom, from one of the deep pockets of his ca.s.sock and retrieved the nun's gla.s.s containing traces of the doped milk. Then he headed back up the corridor, counting doors. At the third door, he inserted a length of stiff wire with a hook on the end into the keyhole and expertly stroked the inside until the first pin moved up into position, then repeated the gesture with the other pins. When the last pin moved up, the lock snapped open. The Calabrian eased open the door and listened for a moment. Hearing nothing, he padded through the foyer into a large rectangular drawing room with a marble fireplace on each end and ornate furniture scattered around. The slatted shutters on all four windows had been pulled closed. A single table lamp with a low wattage bulb served, as the briefing report had predicted, as a night-light.

Gliding soundlessly across the room and down a hallway on rubber-soled shoes, the Calabrian came to the bedroom door. He turned the ceramic k.n.o.b and carefully pushed the door open and listened again. A stifling stuffiness, the stench of an old man's room, emerged from the bedchamber; the person who occupied it obviously didn't sleep with a window open. Flicking on a penlight, the Calabrian inspected the room. Unlike the drawing room, the furnis.h.i.+ngs were spartan: there was a st.u.r.dy bra.s.s bed, a night table, two wooden chairs, one piled with neatly folded clothing, the other with dossiers, a wash basin with a single tap over it, a naked electric bulb dangling from the ceiling, a simple wooden crucifix on the wall over the head of the bed. He crossed the room and looked down at the figure sleeping with a sheet drawn up to its chin. A thickset man with a peasant's rugged features, he had been in his new job only thirty-four days, barely enough time to learn his way around the palazzo. His breathing was regular and intense, causing the hairs protruding from his nostrils to quiver; he was deep in a drugged sleep. There was a tumbler on the night table with traces of milk at the bottom, and a photograph in a silver frame-it showed a prince of the church making the sign of the cross over a young priest prostrate on the ground before him. The inscription, written in a bold hand across the bottom of the photograph, read "Per Albino Luciani, Venizia, 1933." A signature was scrawled under the inscription: "Ambrogio Ratti, Pius XI." Next to the photograph was a pair of reading spectacles, a worn bible filled with place markers, and a bound and numbered copy of Humani Generis Unitas, Pius XI's never-promulgated encyclical condemning racism and anti-Semitism that had been on the Popes desk awaiting his signature the day he died in 1939.

The Calabrian checked his wrist.w.a.tch and set to work. He rinsed the milk gla.s.s in the wash basin, dried it on the hem of his ca.s.sock and replaced it in precisely the same place on the night table. He produced the phial filled with milk from his pocket and emptied the contents into the gla.s.s so there would be a trace of uncontaminated milk in it. Clamping the penlight between his lips, the Calabrian turned to the drugged man in the bed, stripped back the sheet and heaved him over onto his stomach. Then he pulled up the white cotton nightgown, exposing the saphenous vein behind the knee. The people who had hired the Calabrian had gotten their hands on Albino Luciani's medical report after a routine colonoscopy the previous winter; because of the varicose nature of the vein running the length of his right leg, the patient had been given preventive treatment against phlebitis. The Calabrian fetched the small metal kit from his pocket and opened it on the bed next to the knee. Working rapidly-after his high-wire accident, he had spent several years as a male nurse-he inserted a 30-gauge, 0.3 millimeter needle into the syringe filled with extract from a castor oil plant, then deftly stabbed the needle into the saphenae behind the knee and injected the four-milliliter dose of fluid into the bloodstream. According to his employer, cardiovascular collapse would occur within minutes; within hours the toxin would dissipate, leaving no trace in the unlikely event an autopsy were to be performed. Carefully extracting the incredibly thin needle, the Calabrian wiped away the pinpoint of blood with a small moist sponge, then bent close to see if he could detect the puncture wound. There was a slight reddening, the size of a grain of sand but that, too, would disappear by the time the body was discovered in the morning. Satisfied with his handiwork, he went over to the chair piled high with dossiers and shuffled through them until he came to the one marked, in Roman letters, KHOLSTOMER. Lifting the hem of his ca.s.sock, he wedged the file folder under his belt, then looked around to see if he had forgotten anything.

Back in the corridor, the Calabrian pulled the apartment door shut and heard the pins in the lock click closed. Checking his watch-he had four minutes remaining before the guards started on their rounds-he hurried down the stairs and through the alleyway to the tradesmen's entrance. The officer in mufti, looking quite shaken, stared at him, afraid to pose the question. The Calabrian smiled the answer as he handed back the skeleton key. The officers lips parted and he sucked in a quick gulp of air; the thing that had no name was accomplished. He pulled open the small blue door wide enough for the Calabrian to slip through and bolted it after him.

The taxi was waiting at the curb, its door ajar. The Calabrian settled into the back seat and slowly began to peel away the latex gloves, finger by finger. The driver, a young Corsican with a broken, badly-set nose, started down the still deserted street, moving cautiously at first so as not to attract attention, then picking up speed as he turned onto a broad boulevard and headed for Civitavecchia, the port of Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea, thirty-five minutes away. There, in a dockside warehouse a stones throw from the Vladimir Ilyich, a Russian freighter due to sail on the morning tide, the Calabrian would meet his controller, a reed-like man with a scraggly pewter beard and brooding eyes, known only as Starik. He would return the paraphernalia of a.s.sa.s.sination- the gloves, the lock-pick, the metal kit, the tumbler with the last drops of doped milk in it, even the empty phial-and deliver the dossier marked KHOLSTOMER. And he would take possession of the bag containing a king's ransom, $1 million in used bills of various denominations; not a bad wage for fifteen minutes' work. About the time first light stained the eastern horizon, when the Sister of the Handmaids of Jesus Crucified (emerging from a drugged sleep) discovered Albino Luciani dead in his bed, the victim of a heart attack, the Calabrian would board the small fis.h.i.+ng boat at a wharf that would take him, in two days' time, into exile on the sun-drenched beaches of Palermo.

BERLIN, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 31, 1950.

FROM ITS PERCH OVER THE MANTELSHELF A MUTILATED BAVARIAN cuckoo clock, its hour hand mangled, its minute hand missing, sent the seconds ricocheting from wall to wall of the shabby room. The Sorcerer, his face contorted in chronic constipation, sniffed tentatively at the air, which was bitterly cold and stung his nostrils. "Someday the G.o.dd.a.m.n fiction writers will get around to describing what we did here-"

"I love spy stories," the Fallen Angel giggled from the door of the adjoining room.

"They'll turn it into melodrama," Jack McAuliffe said. "They'll make it sound as if we played cowboys and Indians to brighten our dull lives."

"Spying-if that's what I been doing all these years-don't brighten my life none," remarked the Fallen Angel. "I always get stomach cramps before an operation."

"I'm not here in this dry-rotted rain-wash of a city because it brightens my life," the Sorcerer said, preempting the question an apprentice with b.a.l.l.s would have posed by now. "I'm here because the G.o.dd.a.m.n Goths are at the G.o.dd.a.m.n gate." He tugged a threadbare scarf up over his numb earlobes, tap-danced his scruffy cowboy boots on the floor to keep up the circulation in his toes. "Are you reading me loud and clear, sport? This isn't alcohol talking, this is the honcho of Berlin Base talking. Someone has to man the G.o.dd.a.m.n ramparts." He sucked on a soggy Camel and washed down the smoke with a healthy gulp of what he called medicinal whiskey. "I drink what my fitness report describes as a toxic amount of booze," he rambled on, addressing the problem Jack didn't have the guts to raise, articulating each syllable as if he were patrolling the fault line between soused and sober, "because the G.o.dd.a.m.n Goths happen to be winning the G.o.dd.a.m.n war."

Harvey Torriti, a.k.a. the Sorcerer, sc.r.a.ped back the chair and made his way to the single small oriel window of the safe house two floors above the East Berlin neighborhood cinema. From under the floorboards came the distant shriek of incoming mortars, then a series of dull explosions as they slammed into the German positions. Several of Torriti's hookers had seen the Soviet war film the week before. The Ukrainian girl who bleached her hair the color of chrome claimed the movie had been shot, with the usual cast of thousands, on a studio lot in Alma-Ata; in the background she recognized, so she'd said, the snow-capped Ala-Tau mountain range, where she used to sleigh ride when she was evacuated to Central Asia during the war. Snorting to clear a tingling sinus, the Sorcerer parted the slats of an imaginary Venetian blind with two thick fingers of his gloved hand and gazed through the grime on the pane. At sunset a mustard-color haze had drifted in from the Polish steppe, a mere thirty miles east, shrouding the Soviet Sector of Berlin in an eerie stillness, coating its intestine-like cobble gutters with what looked like an algae that reeked, according to Torriti's conceit, of intrigue. Down the block jackdaws beat into the air and cawed savagely as they wheeled around the steeple of a dilapidated church that had been converted into a dilapidated warehouse. (The Sorcerer, an aficionado of cause-and-effect, listened for the echo of the pistol shot he'd surely missed.) In the narrow street outside the cinema Silwan I, known as Sweet Jesus, one of the two Rumanian gypsies employed by Torriti as bodyguards, could be seen, a sailor's watch cap pulled low over his head, dragging a muzzled lap dog through the brackish light of a vapor lamp. Except for Sweet Jesus, the streets of what the Company pros called "West Moscow" appeared to be deserted. "If there are h.o.m.o sapiens out there celebrating the end of the year," Torriti muttered gloomily, "they sure are being discreet about it."

Suffering from a mild case of first operation adrenalin jitters, Jack McAuliffe, a.k.a. the Sorcerer's Apprentice, called from the door with elaborate laziness, "The quiet gives me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s, Harvey. Back in the States everyone honks their horns on New Years Eve."

The second gypsy, Silwan II, dubbed the Fallen Angel by Torriti after he detected in his dark eyes an ugly hint of things the Rumanian was desperately trying to forget, stuck his head in from the next room. A gangly young man with a smallpox-scarred face, he had been reading for the Rumanian Orthodox church and wound up in the business of espionage when the Communists shut down his seminary. "Blowing horns is against the law in the German Democratic Republic," Silwan II announced in the precise accented English of someone who had picked up the language from textbooks. "Also in our capitalist Germany."

At the window, the Sorcerer fogged a pane with his whiskey breath and rubbed it clean with a heavy forearm. Across the roofs the top floors of several high-rise apartment buildings, their windows flickering with light, loomed through the murky cityscape like the tips of icebergs. "It's not a matter of German law," Torriti reckoned moodily, "it's a matter of German character." He wheeled away from the window so abruptly he almost lost his balance. Grabbing the back of the chair to steady himself, he cautiously shoehorned his heavy carca.s.s onto the wooden seat. "I happen to be the G.o.d-d.a.m.n Company specialist on German character," he insisted, his voice pitched high but curiously melodic. "I was a member of the debriefing team that interrogated the SS Obersturmfuhrer of Auschwitz night before the f.u.c.ker was strung up for war crimes. What was his G.o.dd.a.m.n name? Hoss. Rudolf Hoss. f.u.c.ker claimed he couldn't have killed five thousand Jews a day because the trains could only bring in two thousand. Talk about an airtight defense! We were all smoking like concentration camp chimneys and you could see Herr Hoss was dying for a G.o.dd.a.m.n cigarette, so I offered him one of my Camels." Torriti swallowed a sour giggle. "You know what Rudy did, sport?"

"What did Rudy do, Harvey?"

"The night before his execution he turned down the f.u.c.king cigarette because there was a 'No Smoking' sign on the wall. Now that's what I call German character."

"Lenin once said the only way you could get Germans to storm a railway station was to buy them tickets to the quay," ventured the Fallen Angel.

Jack laughed-a shade too quickly, a shade too heartily for Torriti's taste.

The Sorcerer was dressed in the shapeless trousers and ankle-length rumpled green overcoat of an East German worker. The tips of a wide and flowery Italian tie were tucked, military style, between two b.u.t.tons of his s.h.i.+rt. His thin hair was sweat-pasted onto his glistening skull. Eying his apprentice across the room, he began to wonder how Jack would perform in a crunch; he himself had barely made it through a small Midwestern community college and then had clawed his way up through the ranks to finish the war with the fool's gold oak leaves of a major pinned to the frayed collar of his faded khaki s.h.i.+rt, which left him with a low threshold of tolerance for the Harvard-Yale-Princeton crowd-what he called "the boys from HYP." It was a bias that grew during a brief stint running organized crime investigations for the FBI right after the war (employment that ended abruptly when J. Edgar Hoover himself spotted Torriti in the corridor wearing tight trousers and an untied tie and fired him on the spot). What the h.e.l.l! n.o.body in the Company bothered consulting the folks on the firing line when they press-ganged the Ivy League for recruits and came up with jokers like Jack McAuliffe, a Yalie so green behind the ears he'd forgotten to get his ashes hauled when he was sent to debrief Torriti's hookers the week the Sorcerer came down with the clap. Well, what could you expect from a college graduate with a degree in rowing?

Clutching the bottle of PX whiskey by its throat, closing one eye and squinting through the other, the Sorcerer painstakingly filled the kitchen tumbler to the brim. "Not the same without ice," he mumbled, belching as he carefully maneuvered his thick lips over the gla.s.s. He felt the alcohol scald the back of his throat. "No ice, no tinkle. No tinkle, schlecht." He jerked his head up and called across to Jack, "So what time do you make it, sport?"

Jack, anxious to put on a good show, glanced nonchalantly at the Bulova his parents had given him on his graduation from Yale. "He should have been here twelve, fifteen minutes ago," he said.

The Sorcerer scratched absently at the two-day stubble on his overlapping chins. He hadn't had time to shave since the high priority message had sizzled into Berlin Base forty-two hours earlier. The heading had been crammed with in-house codes indicating it had come directly from counterintelligence; from Mother himself. Like all messages from counterintelligence it had been flagged "CRITIC," which meant you were expected to drop whatever you were doing and concentrate on the matter at hand. Like some messages from counterintelligence-usually the ones dealing with defectors-it had been encoded in one of Mother's unbreakable polyalphabetic systems that used two cipher alphabets to provide multiple subst.i.tutes for any given letter in the text.

TOP SECRET.

WARNING NOTICE: SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION.

Intelligence sources and methods involved FROM: Hugh Ashmead [Mother's in-house cryptonym]

To: Alice Reader [the Sorcerers in-house cryptonym]

SUBJECT: Bringing home the bacon The message had gone on to inform Torriti that someone claiming to be a high-ranking Russian intelligence officer had put out feelers that had landed in one of the several in-boxes on Mother's desk. (In the Sorcerers experience everything landed in one of the in-boxes on Mother's desk but that was another story.) Mother's cable identified the would-be defector by the random cryptonym SNOWDROP, preceded by the digraph ae to indicate the matter was being handled by the Soviet Russia Division, and went on to quote the entire contents of the Company's 201-the file in Central Registry-on the Russian.

Vishnevsky, Konstanun: born either 1898 or 1899 in Kiev; father, a chemical engineer and Party member, died when subject was a teenager; at age 17 enrolled as cadet in Kiev Military Academy; graduated four years later as an artillery officer; did advanced studies at the Odessa Artillery School for officers; co-opted into military intelligence at the start of Second World War; believed to be a member of the Soviet Communist Party; married, one son born 1940; after war transferred to the Committee for State Security (KGB); studied counterintelligence at the High Intelligence School (one-year short course); on graduation posted to Brest-Litovsk for four months; attended the KGB Diplomatic Inst.i.tute in Moscow for one year; on successfully completing course a.s.signed to Moscow Centre for six months as a.n.a.lyst in US order of battle section of the KGBs Information Department; posted to Stockholm summer 1948-January 1950 where he believed to have specialized in military affairs; subsequent a.s.signment unknown. No record of anti-Soviet opinions. Conclusion: considered poor candidate for recruitment.

Always maternally protective of his sources. Mother had been careful not to identify where the original tip had come from, but the Sorcerer was able to make an educated guess when Berlin Base asked the Germans- "our" Germans, which was to say Reinhard Gehlen's Sud-Deutsche Industrie-Verwertungs GmbH, working out of a secret compound in the Munich suburb of Pullach-for routine background traces on a baker's dozen KGB officers stationed at the Soviet Karlshorst enclave in East Berlin. Gehlen's people, always eager to please their American masters, quickly provided a bulky briefing book on the Russians in question. Buried in the report was a detail missing from the Company's 201: aeSNOWDROP was thought to have had a Jewish mother. That, in turn, led the Sorcerer to suspect that it was the Israeli Mossad agent in West Berlin known as the Rabbi who had been whispering in Mother's ear; nine times out of ten anything that even remotely concerned a Jew pa.s.sed through the Rabbi's hands. (The Israelis had their own agenda, of course, but high on it was scoring Brownie points in Was.h.i.+ngton against the day when they needed to cash in their lOUs.) According to Mother the potential KGB defector wanted to come over with a wife and a child. The Sorcerer was to meet with him in the safe house designated MARLBOROUGH at such and such a date, at such and such an hour, establish his bona fides to make absolutely certain he wasn't what Mother called a "bad 'un"-a dispatched agent sent across with a briefcase full of KGB disinformation-at which point he was to "press the orange" and find out what goodies he had to offer in exchange for political asylum. After which the Sorcerer would report back to Mother to see if Was.h.i.+ngton wanted to go ahead with the actual defection.

In the next room the Fallen Angel's radio crackled into life. Surfing on a burst of static came the codewords Morgenstunde hat Gold im Mund ("the morning hour has gold in its mouth"). Jack, startled, snapped to attention. Silwan II appeared at the door again. "He's on the way up," he hissed. Kissing the fingernail of his thumb, he hurriedly crossed himself.

One of the Sorcerer's Watchers, a German woman in her seventies sitting in the back row of the theater, had seen the dark figure of a man slipping into the toilet at the side of the cinema and mumbled the news into a small battery-powered radio hidden in her knitting bag. Inside the toilet the Russian would open the door of a broom closet, shove aside the mops and carpet sweepers and push through the hidden panel in the back wall of the closet, then start up the ridiculously narrow wooden stairs that led to the top floor and the safe house.

The Sorcerer, suddenly cold sober, shuddered like a Labrador shaking off rain water and shook his head to clear his vision. He waved Silwan II into the adjoining room, then leaned toward the spine of G.o.d and Man at Yale- the Superst.i.tion of Academic Freedom and whispered "Testing five, four, three, two, one." Silwan popped through the door, flashed a thumbs-up sign and disappeared again, shutting and locking the door behind him.

Jack felt his pulse speed up. He flattened himself against the wall so that the door to the corridor, once opened, would conceal him. Pulling a Walther PPK from the holster strapped to the belt in the hollow of his back, he thumbed off the safety and held the weapon out of sight behind his overcoat. Looking across the room, he was unnerved to see the Sorcerer rocking back and forth in mock admiration.

"Oh, neat trick," Torriti said, his face straight, his small beady eyes flas.h.i.+ng in derision. "Hiding the handgun behind you like that, I mean. Rules out the possibility of frightening off the defector before the f.u.c.ker has a chance to give us his name, rank, and serial number." Torriti himself carried a pearlhandled revolver under one sweaty armpit and a snub-nosed .38 Detective Special in a holster taped to an ankle, but he made it a rule never to reach for a weapon unless there was a strong possibility he would eventually pull the trigger. It was a bit of tradecraft McAuliffe would pick up if he stuck around Berlin Base long enough: the sight of handguns made the nervous people in the business of espionage nervouser; the nervouser they got the more likely it was that someone would wind up shooting someone, which was from everyone's point of view a disagreeable denouement to any operation.

The fact of the matter was that Torriti, for all his griping about greenhorns, got a charge out of breaking in the virgins. He thought of tradecraft as a kind of religion-it was said of the Sorcerer that he could blend into a crowd even when there wasn't one-and took a visceral pleasure in baptizing his disciples. And, all things considered, he judged McAuliffe-with his tinted aviator sungla.s.ses, his unkempt Cossack mustache, his flaming-red hair slicked back and parted in the middle, the unfailing politeness that masked an affinity for violence-to be a cut above the usual cannon fodder sent out from Was.h.i.+ngton these days, and this despite the handicap of a Yale education. There was something almost comically Irish about him: the progeny of the undefeated bareknuckle lightweight champion of the world, a McAuliffe whose motto had been "Once down is no battle"; the lapsed moralist who came out laughing and swinging and wouldn't stop either simply because a gong sounded; the lapsed Catholic capable of making a lifelong friend of someone he met over breakfast and consigning him to everlasting purgatory by teatime.

At the door Jack sheepishly slipped the Walther back into its holster. The Sorcerer rapped a knuckle against his forehead. "Get it into your thick skull we're the good guys, sport."

"Jesus H. Christ, Harvey, I know who the good guys are or I wouldn't be here."

In the corridor outside the room, the floorboards groaned. A fist drummed against the door. The Sorcerer closed his eyes and nodded. Jack pulled open the door.

A short, powerfully built man with close-cropped charcoal hair, an oval Slavic face, and skin the color and texture of moist candle wax stood on the threshold. Visibly edgy, he looked quickly at Jack, then turned to study through narrowed, vaguely Asiatic eyes the Buddha-like figure who appeared to be lost in meditation at the small table. Suddenly showing signs of life, the Sorcerer greeted the Russian with a cheery salute and waved him toward the free chair. The Russian walked over to the oriel window and peered down at the street as one of those newfangled East German cars, its sorethroated motor coughing like a tubercular man, lurched past the cinema and disappeared around a corner. Rea.s.sured by the lack of activity outside, the Russian took a turn around the room, running the tips of his finger over the surface of a cracked mirror, trying the handle on the door of the adjoining room. He wound up in front of the cuckoo clock. "What happened to his hands?" he asked.

"The first time I set foot in Berlin," the Sorcerer said, "which was one week after the end of what you jokers call the Great Patriotic War, the Ring Road was crammed with emaciated horses pulling farm wagons. The scrawny German kids watching them were eating acorn cakes. The horses were being led by Russian soldiers. The wagons were piled high with loot-four-poster beds, toilets, radiators, faucets, kitchen sinks and stoves, just about anything that could be unscrewed. I remember seeing soldiers carrying sofas out of Hermann Goering's villa. Nothing was too big or too small. I'll lay odds the minute hand of the cuckoo clock was in one of those wagons."

An acrid smirk made its way onto the Russian's lips. "It was me leading one of the wagons," he said. "I served as an intelligence officer in an infantry regiment that battled, in four winters, from the faubourg of Moscow to the rubble of the Reichstag in the Tiergarten. On the way we pa.s.sed hundreds of our villages razed to the ground by the fleeing n.a.z.is. We buried the mutilated corpses of our partisan fighters-there were women and children who had been executed with flame throwers. Only forty-two of the original twelve hundred sixty men in my battalion reached Berlin. The hands of your cuckoo clock, Mister American Central Intelligence agent, were small repay for what the Germans did to us during the war."

The Russian pulled the seat back from the table so that from it he could watch both Jack and the Sorcerer, and sat down. Torriti's nostrils flared as he nodded his chins toward the bottle of whiskey. The Russian, who reeked of a trashy eau de cologne, shook his head no.

"Okay, let's start down the yellow brick road. I've been told to expect someone name ofKonstantin Vishnevsky."

"I am Vishnevsky."

"Funny part is we couldn't find a Vishnevsky, Konstantin, on the KGB Berlin roster."

"That is because I am carried on the register under the name Volkov. How, please, is your name?"

The Sorcerer was in his element now and thoroughly enjoying himself. "Tweedledum is how my name is."

"Tweedle-Dum how?"

"Just Tweedledum." Torriti wagged a forefinger at the Russian sitting an arm's length from the table. "Look, friend, you're obviously not new at this game we're playing-you know the ground rules like I know the ground rules."

Jack leaned back against the wall next to the door and watched in fascination as Vishnevsky unb.u.t.toned his overcoat and produced a battered tin cigarette case from which he extracted a long, thin paper-tipped papyrosi. From another pocket he brought out an American Army Air Corps lighter. Both his hand and the cigarette between his lips trembled as he bent his head to the flame. The act of lighting up appeared to soothe his nerves. The room filled with the foul-smelling Herzegovina Flor that the Russian officers smoked in the crowded cabarets along the Kurfurstendamm. "Please to answer me a single question," Vishnevsky said. "Is there a microphone? Are you recording our conversation?"

The Sorcerer sensed a great deal was riding on his answer. Keeping his unblinking eyes fixed on the Russian, he decided to wing it. "I am. We are. Yes."

Vishnevsky actually breathed a sigh of relief. "Most certainly you are. In your position I would do the same. If you said me no I would get up and exit. A defection is a high-wire act performed without benefit of safety net. I am putting my life in your hands, Mr. Tweedle however your name is. I must be able to trust you." He dragged on the cigarette and exhaled through his nostrils. "I hold the rank of lieutenant colonel in our KGB."

The Sorcerer accepted this with a curt nod. There was a dead silence while the Russian concentrated on the cigarette. Torriti made no effort to fill the void. He had been through this drill more times than he could remember. He understood that it was crucial for him to set the agenda, to impose a pace that violated the defectors expectations; it was important to demonstrate, in subtle ways, who was running the show. If there was going to be a defection it would be on the Sorcerer's terms and at the Sorcerer's pleasure.

"I am listed as a cultural attache and function under the cover of a diplomatic pa.s.sport," the Russian added.

The Sorcerer reached out and caressed the side of the whiskey bottle with the backs of his gloved fingers. "Okay, here's the deal," he finally said. "Think of me as a fisherman trawling the continental shelf off the Prussian coast. When I feel there is something in the net I pull it up and examine it. I throw the little ones back because I am under strict orders to only keep big fish. Nothing personal, it goes without saying. Are you a big fish, Comrade Vishnevsky?"

The Russian squirmed on his seat. "So: I am the deputy to the chief of the First Chief Directorate at the KGB's Berlin base in Karlshorst."

The Sorcerer produced a small notebook from an inside pocket and thumbed through it to a page filled with minuscule writing in Sicilian. He regularly debriefed the sister of a cleaning woman who worked at the hotel a stone's throw from Karlshorst where KGB officers from Moscow Centre stayed when they visited Berlin. "On 22 December 1950 KGB Karlshorst had its books inspected by an auditor sent out from the Central. Committee Control Commission. What was his name?"

"Evpraksein, Fyodor Eremeyevich. He ended up at the spare desk in the office next to mine."

The Sorcerer arched his eyebrows as if to say: Fine, you work at Karlshorst, but you'll have to do a lot better if you want to qualify as a big fish. "What exactly do you want from me?" Torriti asked suddenly.

The defector cleared his throat. "I am ready to come over," he announced, "but only if I can bring with me my wife, my son."

"Why?"

"What does it change, the why?"

"Trust me. It changes everything. Why?"

"My career is arrived to a dead end. I am"-he struggled to find a word in English, then settled for the German-li desillusioniert with system. I am not talking about Communism, I am talking about the KGB. The rezident tried to seduce my wife. I said him face to face about this. He denied the thing, he accused me of trying to blackmail him into giving me a good endyear report. Moscow Centre believed his version, not mine. So: this is my last foreign posting. I am fifty-two years old-I will be put out like a sheep to graze in some obscure pasture. I will spend the rest of my life in Kazakhstan typewriting in triplicate reports from informers. I dreamed of more important things... This is my last chance to make a new life for myself, for my wife, for my son."

"Is your rezident aware that you are half-Jewish?"

Vishnevsky started. "How can you know..." He sighed. "My rezident discovered it, which is to say Moscow Centre discovered it, when my mother died last summer. She left a testament saying she wished to be buried in the Jewish cemetery of Kiev. I tried to suppress the testament before it was filed but-"

"Your fear of being put out to pasture-is it because Moscow found out you were half-Jewish or your dispute with the Berlin rezident?"

The Russian shrugged wearily. "I said you what I think."

"Does your wife know you've contacted us?"

"I will tell her when the time arrives to leave."

"How can you be sure she'll want to go?"

Vishnevsky considered the question. "There are things a husband knows about a wife... things he does not have to ask in words."

Grunting from the effort, the Sorcerer pushed himself to his feet and came around the table. He leaned back against it and looked down at the Russian. "If we were to bring you and your family out, say to Florida, we would want to throw you a party." Torriti's face twisted into an unpleasant smile as he held out his hands, palms up. "In the US of A it's considered rude to come to a party empty-handed. Before I can get the folks I work for to agree to help you, you need to tell me what you plan to bring to the party, Comrade Vishnevsky."

The Russian glanced at the clock over the mantle, then looked back at Torriti. "I was stationed in Stockholm for two years and two months before being posted to Berlin. I can give you the names of our operatives in Stockholm, the addresses of our safe houses-"

"Exfiltrating three people from East Germany is extremely complicated."

"I can bring with me the order of battle of the KGB Karlshorst rezidentura in Berlin."

Jack noticed the Sorcerers eyes misting over with disinterest; he made a mental note to add this piece of playacting to his repertoire. The Russian must have seen it, too, because he blurted out, "The KGB works under cover of Inspektsiia po voprosam bezopasnosti-what you call the Inspectorate for Security Questions. The Inspektsiia took over the Saint Antonius Hospital and has a staff of six hundred thirty full-time employees. The rezident, General Ilichev, works under the cover of counselor to the Soviet Control Commission. The deputy rezident is Ugor-Molody, Oskar- he is listed as chief of the visa section. General Ilichev is creating a separate illegals directorate within the Karlshorst-based First Chief Directorate-the designation is Directorate S. It will train and provide doc.u.ments for KGB illegals a.s.signed to Westwork."

The Sorcerer's lids seemed to close over his eyes out of sheer boredom. The Russian dropped his cigarette on the floor and ground it out under a heel. "I can give you microphones... phone taps... listening posts."

The Sorcerer glanced across the room at Jack in obvious disappointment. Under the floorboards heavy caliber machine guns spat out bullets as the Russians stormed Guderian's tanks dug in along the Oder-Neisse line. "For us to get a KGB officer, a.s.suming that's what you are, his wife, his son into West Berlin and then fly them out to the West will take an enormous effort. People will be asked to put their lives in jeopardy. An extremely large sum of money will be spent. Once in the West the officer in question will need to be taken care of, and generously. He will require a new ident.i.ty, a bank account, a monthly stipend, a house on a quiet street in a remote city, an automobile." The Sorcerer stuffed his notebook back into a pocket. "If that's all you have, friend, I'm afraid we're both wasting our time. They say there are seven thousand spies in Berlin ready to put down cold cash for what our German friends call Spielmaterial. Peddle your wares to one of them. Maybe the French or the Israelis-"

Following every word from the wall, Jack grasped that Torriti was an artiste at this delectable game of espionage.

The Russian lowered his voice to a whisper. "For the last several months I have been a.s.signed as the KGB liaison with the new German Democratic Republic intelligence service. They are setting up an office in a former school in the Pankow district of East Berlin near the restricted area where the Party and government leaders live. The new intelligence service, part of the Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit, goes by a cover name-Inst.i.tut fuerWirtschaftswissenschafuiche Forschung, the Inst.i.tute for Economic and Scientific Research. I can deliver you its order of battle down to the last paper clip. The chief is Ackermann, Anton, but it is said that his second in command, who is twenty-eight years of age, is being groomed as the eventual boss. His name is Wolf, Marcus. You can maybe find photographs of him-he covered the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1945 for the Berlin radio station Berliner Rundfunk."

Jack, who had been poring over the Berlin Base morgue files in the six weeks since he'd been posted to Germany, interrupted in what he hoped was a bored voice. "Wolf spent the war years in Moscow and speaks perfect Russian. Everyone at Karlshorst calls him by his Russian name, Misha."