The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 6

A watery rheum seeped from Millicent's nostrils onto her upper lip. She nicked it away with the back of her hand. "More, more-I can tell you more. I was supposed to lure them, money, flattery, f.u.c.k them, picks and locks, his name is Andrew but, oh G.o.d, I can't remember if that's his first name or family name." Oskar tried to interrupt her again but she pleaded, "More, much more, please for Christ's sake-"

And she looked up and saw, through her tears, Mr. Andrews standing in the doorway, the sleeve of his sports jacked folded back, his eyes flickering in mortification, and she fell silent and swallowed hard and then screamed "b.a.s.t.a.r.d... b.a.s.t.a.r.d... p.r.i.c.k!" and pitched forward to pound her forehead against the deck plates until Oskar and one of the sailors restrained her. Her body twitching, she kept murmuring something to herself that sounded like "Bread-and-b.u.t.ter, bread-and-b.u.t.ter."

Watching Mr. Andrews avert his eyes from Millicent's near-naked body, Leo suddenly remembered what he had said that last day in the seminar on interrogation techniques; in his mind's ear he could hear Mr. Andrew's voice. "Believe me, I am speaking from experience when I tell you that anyone can be broken in six hours. Tops. Without exception. Anyone." An infinitely sad expression had superimposed itself on the ugly scars of Mr. Andrews's face. "Curiously, it's not the pain that breaks you-you get so accustomed to it, so accustomed to your own voice yowling like an animal, that you are incapable of remembering what the absence of pain felt like. No, it's not the pain but the fear that breaks you. And there are a hundred ways of instilling fear. There is only sure one way to avoid being broken: for the love of G.o.d, observe the Eleventh Commandment of intelligence work-never, never get caught."

There was no postmortem, at least not a formal one. News of the mock kidnapping had spread, as it was meant to; the Company wanted it clearly understood that the Marquess of Queensberry rules didn't apply to the great game of espionage. Cla.s.smates accosted the three princ.i.p.als in the corridors to ask if it were true and when they said yes, it had happened more or less the way they'd heard it, the others shook their heads in disbelief. Leo discovered that Millicent Pearlstein had been taken away in an unmarked ambulance to a Company clinic somewhere on the Piedmont plateau of Virginia; there was no question of keeping her on board, it was said, not because she had cracked, but because the fault line could never be repaired and the Company needed to weed out the people with fault lines. Mr. Andrews took Leo aside one afternoon and told him he felt terrible about Millicent but he thought it was better this way. She hadn't been cut out for the life of a field officer; when she was back on her feet she would be paid a small indemnity and steered to another, tamer, government security agency-both the State Department and the Defense Department ran intelligence collecting operations of their own.

At the end of the week the recruits began packing their bags-they were being accorded a two-week holiday before reporting for their a.s.signments. By chance, a new batch of recruits was checking into the Hilton Inn. Jack and Leo recognized two of them from Yale.

"Holy s.h.i.+t, you guys look as if you've been through the Maytag wringer," one of them said.

"So how tough is it?" the other wanted to know.

"Its a pushover," Jack said. "I didn't work up a sweat."

"Easy as falling off a log," Leo agreed.

Both of them tried to smile. Neither of them could locate the muscles that did that sort of thing.

Part 6

2.

MOSCOW, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1950.

MUSCOVITES COULDN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING LIKE IT IN THIS century. Drifts of heat had clawed their way up from the Kara k.u.m Desert in Turkmenistan, asphyxiating the sprawling capitol, cooking the asphalt of the streets until it felt gummy under the soles of summer shoes. The sweltering temperatures had driven thousands of Muscovites, stripped to their underwear, into the polluted waters of the Moscow River for relief. Yevgeny found shelter in the bar of the Metropole Hotel near Red Square, where he'd gone for a late afternoon drink with the gorgeous Austrian exchange student he'd flirted with on the flight back from the States. Not for the first time Yevgeny took a mordant pleasure in pa.s.sing himself off as an American; he thought of it as an indoor sport. The Austrian girl, a dyed-in-the-wool socialist overdosing on Marxism at Lomonosov University, was ecstatic at the daily reports of North Korean victories and American defeats, and it took a while before Yevgeny managed to steer the conversation away from politics and onto s.e.x. It turned out the girl was willing but not able-she was afraid to invite him up to her dormitory room for fear a KGB informer would eavesdrop on their lovemaking and she would be expelled from Russia for anti-socialist behavior. And no amount of coaxing ("In Das Kapital, volume two," Yevgeny-ad libbing with a straight face-said at one point, "Marx makes the case that chast.i.ty is a bourgeoisie vice that will not survive the cla.s.s struggle") could convince her otherwise. Yevgeny eventually gave up on her and, suddenly aware of the hour, tried to flag down a taxi in front of the Bolshoi. When that didn't work out he ducked into the metro and rode it across the river to the Maksim Gorky Embankment and jogged the hundred-fifty meters uphill toward the new nine-story apartment complex where his father had gone to ground after his retirement from the United Nations Secretariat. At the walled entrance to the complex, three high-rise buildings dominating the Moscow River, a militiaman stepped out of the booth and crisply demanded Yevgeny's internal pa.s.sport. The complex on the Lenin Hills had been set aside for high-ranking Party secretaries and senior diplomats and important editors and was guarded round the clock, which only added to the aura of the nomenklatura lucky enough to be allotted apartments in any of the buildings. The star resident, so Yevgeny's father had boasted on the phone, was none other than Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the tubby Ukrainian peasant who had made a name for himself in the '30s supervising the building of the Moscow metro and was now one of the "kittens" in Stalin's Politburo; Khrushchev occupied what the Russians (even writing in Cyrillic) called the "bel etage" and had a private elevator that served his floor only. The militiaman examined the photograph in the pa.s.sport and, looking up, carefully matched it against Yevgeny's face, then ran a finger down the list on his clipboard until he came to the name Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Tsipin. "You are expected," he announced in the toneless pitch of self-importance common to policemen the world over, and waved Yevgeny toward the building. There was another militiaman inside the lobby and a third operating the elevator; the latter let the visitor off on the eighth floor and waited, with the elevator door open, until Aleksandr Timofeyevich Tsipin answered Yevgeny's ring and signalled that he recognized the guest. Yevgeny's father, still wearing a black mourning band on the sleeve of his suit jacket eleven months after his wife's death, drew his oldest son into the air-conditioned apartment and embraced him awkwardly, planting a scratchy kiss on each check.

It was difficult to say who felt more self-conscious at this show of affection, the father or the son.

"I apologize for not seeing you sooner," mumbled the elder Tsipin. There were conferences, there were reports to finish."

"The usual things. How is your rheumatism?"

'It comes, it goes, depending on the weather. Since when have you been cultivating a goatee?"

"Since I last saw you, which was at my mother's funeral."

Tsipin avoided his son's eye. "Sorry I was unable to offer you a bed. Where did you wind up living?"

"A friend has a room in a communal apartment. He is putting me up on a couch."

Through the double door of the vast living room, Yevgeny caught a glimpse of the immense picture window with its breathtaking view of the river and of Moscow sprawling beyond it. "Ochen khorosha, " he said. "The Soviet Union treats its former senior diplomats like tsars."

"Grinka is here," the elder Tsipin said, hooking an arm through Yevgeny's and leading him into the living room. "He took the overnight train down from Leningrad when he heard you were coming. I also invited a friend, and my friend brought along a friend of his." He favored his son with a mysterious grin. "I am sure you will find my friend interesting." He lowered his voice and leaned toward his son's ear. "If he asks you about America I count on you to emphasize the faults."

Yevgeny spotted his younger brother through the double door and bounded across the room to wrap Grinka in a bear hug. Tsipin's longtime servant, a lean middle-aged Uzbek woman with the delicate features of a bird, was serving zakuski to the two guests near the window. A sigh of pure elation escaped her lips when she saw Yevgeny. She cried out to him in Uzbek and, pulling his head down, planted kisses on his forehead and both shoulders.

Yevgeny said, "h.e.l.lo to you, Nyura."

"Thanks to G.o.d you are returned from America alive," she exclaimed. "It is said the cities are under the command of armed gangsters."

"Our journalists tend to see the worst," he told her with a smile. He leaned over and kissed her on both cheeks, causing her to bow her head and blush.

"Nyura practically raised Yevgeny during the war years when his mother and I were posted to Turkey," Tsipin explained to his guests.

"I spent several days in Istanbul on a secret mission before the war started," the older of the two remarked. "My memory is that it was a chaotic city."

Yevgeny noticed that the guest spoke Russian with an accent he took to be German. "It was my dream to be allowed to live with my parents in Istanbul," he said, "but Turkey in those days was a center of international intrigue-there were kidnappings, even murders-and I was obliged to remain in Alma-Ata with Nyura and Grinka for safety's sake."

Tsipin did the introductions. "Yevgeny, I present to you Martin Dietrich. Comrade Dietrich, please meet my oldest son recently returned from his American university. And this is Pavel Semyonovich Zhilov, Pasha for short, a great friend to me for more years than I care to remember. Pasha is known to the comrades-"

"Perhaps you will have the good fortune to become one," Dietrich told Yevgeny with elaborate formality.

"-as Starik."

Yevgeny shook hands with both men, then flung an arm over the shoulder of his younger brother as he inspected his father's guests. Martin Dietrich was on the short side, stocky, in his early fifties with a washed-out complexion, tired humorless eyes and surgical scars on his cheeks where skin had been grafted over the facial bones. Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov was a tall, reed-like man who looked as if he had stepped out of another century and was ill at ease in the present one. In his mid or late thirties, he had the scraggy pewter beard of a priest and brooding blue eyes that narrowed slightly and fixed on you with unnerving intensity. His fingernails were thick and long and cropped squarely, in the manner of peasants'. He was dressed in baggy trousers and a rough white s.h.i.+rt whose broad collar, open at the neck, offered a glimpse of a finely wrought silver chain. A dark peasants jacket plunged to his knees. He stood there cracking open toasted Samarkand apricot pits with thick thumbnails and popping the nuts into his mouth. Half a dozen small silk rosettes were pinned on his lapel. Yevgeny, who had learned to identify the rosettes during a stint in the Komsomol Youth Organization, recognized several: the Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of the Red Banner, the Order ofAleksandr Nevsky, the Order of the Red Star. Nodding toward the rosettes, Yevgeny said, with just a trace of mockery, "You are clearly a great war hero. Perhaps one day you will tell me the story behind each of your medals."

Starik, puffing on a Bulgarian cigarette with a long hollow tip, eyed his host's son. "Contrary to appearances, I do not live in the past," he said flatly.

"That alone sets you apart from everyone else in Russia," Yevgeny said. He helped himself to a cracker spread with caviar. "Starik-the old man- was what the comrades called Lenin, wasn't it? How did you come to be called by such a name?"

Yevgeny's father answered for him. "In Lenin's case it was because he was so much older than the others around him at the time of the Revolution. In Pasha's case it was because he talked like Tolstoy long before he let his beard grow."

Yevgeny, who had acquired the American gift for insouciance, asked with an insolent grin, "And what do you talk about when you talk like Tolstoy?"

His father tried to divert the conversation. "How was your flight back from America, Yevgeny?"

Starik waved off his host. "There is no harm done, Aleksandr Timofeyevich. I prefer curious young men to those who, at twenty-one, know all there is to know."

He turned a guarded smirk on Yevgeny for the first time; Yevgeny recognized it for what it was-the enigmatic expression of someone who thought of life as an intricate game of chess. Another member of the Communist nomenklatura who climbed over the bodies of his colleagues to get ahead!

Starik spit a spoiled Samarkand nut onto the Persian carpet. "What I talk about," he told Yevgeny, articulating his words carefully, "is a state secret."

Later, over dinner, Starik steered the subject to America and asked Yevgeny for his impressions. Did he believe racial tensions would lead to a Negro uprising? Would the exploited Caucasian proletariat support such a revolt? Yevgeny responded by saying that he hadn't really been in America- he'd been in Yale, a ghetto populated by members of the privileged cla.s.ses who could afford tuition, or the occasional scholars.h.i.+p student who aspired to join the privileged cla.s.s. "As for the Negroes revolting," he added, "man will walk on the moon before that happens. Whoever is telling you such things simply doesn't know what he's talking about."

"I read it in Pravda," Starik said, watching his host's son to see if he would back down.

Yevgeny suddenly felt as if he were taking an oral exam. "The journalists of Pravda are telling you what they think you should hear," he said. "If we hope to compete successfully with the immense power of capitalist America we must first understand what makes it tick."

"Do you understand what makes it tick?"

"I begin to understand America well enough to know there is no possibility that its Negroes will revolt."

"And what do you plan to do with this knowledge you have of America?" Starik inquired.

"I have not figured that out yet."

Grinka asked his father if he had seen the Pravda story about the Ta.s.s journalist in Was.h.i.+ngton who had been drugged and photographed in bed with a stark-naked teenage girl, after which the American CIA had tried to blackmail him into spying for it. Yevgeny commented that there was a good chance the Ta.s.s man had been a KGB agent to begin with. His father, refilling the gla.s.ses from a chilled bottle of Hungarian white wine, remarked that the Americans regularly accused Soviet journalists and diplomats of being spies.

Yevgeny regarded his father. "Aren't they?" he asked with a laugh in his eyes.

Starik raised his winegla.s.s to eye level and studied Yevgeny over the rim as he turned the stem in his fingers. "Let us be frank: Sometimes they are," he said evenly. "But Socialism, if it is to survive, must defend itself."

"And don't we try the same tricks on them that they try on us?" Yevgeny persisted.

Martin Dietrich turned out to have a mild sense of humor after all. "With all my heart, I hope so," he announced. "Considering the dangers they run, spies are underpaid and occasionally need to be compensated with something other than money."

"To an outsider, I can see how the business of spying sometimes appears to be an amusing game," Starik conceded, his eyes riveted on Yevgeny across the table. Turning to his host, he launched into the story of a French military attache who had been seduced by a young woman who worked at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. "One night he visited her in the single room she shared with one other girl. Before you knew it he and the two girls had removed their clothing and jumped into bed. Of course the girls worked for our KGB. They filmed the whole thing through a two-way mirror. When they discreetly confronted the attache with still photographs, he burst into laughter and asked them if they could supply him with copies to send to his wife in Paris to prove that his virility had not diminished during his two years in Moscow."

Yevgeny s eyes widened slightly. How was it that his father's friend knew such a story? Was Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov connected with the KGB? Yevgeny glanced at his father-he had always a.s.sumed he had some sort of relations.h.i.+p with the KGB. After all, diplomats abroad were expected to keep their eyes and ears open and report back to their handlers. Their handlers! Could it be that Starik was his father's conducting officer? The elder Tsipin had introduced Starik as his great friend. If Starik was his handler, his father may have played a more active role in Soviet intelligence than his son imagined; Zhilov simply didn't seem like someone who merely debriefed returning diplomats.

There was another riddle that intrigued Yevgeny: Who was the quiet German who went by the name Martin Dietrich and looked as if his features had been burned-or altered by plastic surgery? And what had he done for the Motherland to merit wearing over his breast pocket a ribbon indicating that he, too, was a Hero of the Soviet Union?

Back in the living room, Nyura set out Napoleon brandy and snifters, which the host half-filled and Grinka handed around. Zhilov and Tsipin were in the middle of an argument about what had stopped the seemingly invincible Germans when they attacked the Soviet Union. Grinka, a second-year student of history and Marxist theory at Leningrad University, said, "The same thing that stopped Napoleon-Russian bayonets and Russian winter."

"We had a secret weapon against both Napoleons Grand Army and Hitler's Wehrmacht," Aleksandr instructed his youngest son. "It was the rasput.i.tsa-the rivers of melting snow in the spring, the torrents of rain in the autumn-that transform the Steppe into an impa.s.sable swamp. I remember that the rasput.i.tsa was especially severe in March of '41, preventing the Germans from attacking for several crucial weeks. It was severe again in October of '41 and the winter frost that hardens the ground enough for tanks to operate came late, which left the Wehrmacht bogged down within sight of the spires of Moscow when the full force of winter struck."

"Aleksandr is correct-we had a secret weapon. But it was neither our bayonets nor the Russian winter, nor the rasput.i.tsa," Zhilov said. "It was our spies who told us which of the German thrusts were feints and which were real; who told us how much petrol stocks their tanks had on hand so we could figure out how long they could run; who told us that the Wehrmacht, calculating that the Red Army could not resist the German onslaught, had not brought up winter lubricants, which meant their battle tanks would be useless once the weather turned cold."

Yevgeny felt the warmth of the brandy invade his chest. "I have never understood how the Motherland lost twenty million killed in the Great Patriotic War-a suffering so enormous it defies description-yet those who partic.i.p.ated in the blood bath speak of it with nostalgia?"

"Do you remember the stories of the Ottoman sultans ruling an empire that stretched from the Danube to the Indian Ocean?" Starik inquired. "They would recline on cus.h.i.+ons in the lush garden pavilions of Istanbul wearing archer's rings on their thumbs to remind them of battles they could only dimly remember." His large head swung round slowly in Yevgeny s direction. "In a manner of speaking, all of us who fought the Great Patriotic War wear archer's rings on our thumbs or rosettes on our lapels. When our memories fade all we will have left of that heroic moment will be our rings and our medals."

Later, waiting for the elevator to arrive, Starik talked in an undertone with his host. As the elevator door opened Zhilov turned back toward Yevgeny and casually offered him a small calling card. "I invite you to take tea with me," he murmured. "Perhaps I will tell you the story behind one of my medals after all."

If the dinner had been a test, Yevgeny understood that he had pa.s.sed it. Almost against his will he found himself being drawn to this unkempt peasant of a man who-judging from his bearing; judging, too, from the deference with which his father had treated him-clearly outranked a former Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. And much to his surprise he heard himself say, "I would consider it a privilege."

"Tomorrow at four-thirty." Starik wasn't asking, he was informing. "Leave word with your father where you will be and I will send a car for you. The calling card will serve as a laissez-pa.s.ser"-Starik used the French phrase-"for the militiamen guarding the outer gate."

"The outer gate of what?" Yevgeny asked, but Starik had disappeared into the elevator.

Yevgeny was turning the card in his fingers when Grinka s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of his hand. "He's a general polkovnik-a colonel general-in the KGB," he said with a whistle. "What do you think he wants with you?"

"Perhaps he wants me to follow in our father's footsteps," Yevgeny told his brother.

"Become a diplomat!"

"Is that what you were, father?" Yevgeny asked with an insolent smile.

"What I was, was a servant of my country," the elder Tsipin responded in irritation. He turned abruptly and left the room.

Yevgeny saw his brother off at the Leningrad Railway Station, then crossed Komsomolskaya Square to the kiosk with the distinctive red-tiled roof and waited in the shade. As the station clock struck four a black Zil with gleaming chrome and tinted windows pulled to a stop in front of him. The windows were closed, which meant that the car was ventilated. A roundfaced man wearing sungla.s.ses and a bright Kazakh hat rolled down the front window.

Are you from-" Yevgeny began.

"Don't be thick," the man said impatiently. "Get in."

Yevgeny climbed into the back. The Zil turned around the Ring Road and sped out of the city heading southwest on the Kaluga Road. Yevgeny rapped his knuckles on the thick gla.s.s part.i.tion separating him from the two men in the front seat. The one with the Kazakh hat glanced over his shoulder.

"How long will it take to get where we are going?" Yevgeny called through the part.i.tion. The man flashed five fingers three times and turned back.

Yevgeny sank into the cool leather of the seat and pa.s.sed the time studying the people along the street. He remembered the elation he'd felt as a child when his father had taken him and Grinka for excursions in the attache's car and being chauffeured by one of the uniformed militiamen from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a dark man with slanting eyes and a peach-shaped face who called the boys "Little Sirs" when he held the door for them. Peering from behind the car's curtains, Yevgeny would pretend that he and his brother were heroes of Mother Russia who had been decorated by the Great Helmsman, Comrade Stalin, himself; from time to time the two boys would wave imperiously at some peasants along the route to Peredelkino, where his father had purchased a Ministry dacha. Now, in the Zil, the driver leaned on the horn and pedestrians scattered out of his way. The car slowed, but never stopped, for red lights. When they spotted the Zil, militiamen sweating in tunics b.u.t.toned up to the neck brought cross traffic to a standstill with their batons and prevented the swarm of pedestrians from surging across the boulevard. As the car flew by people gazed at the tinted windows, trying to figure out which member of the Politburo or Central Committee might be behind them.

After a time the Zil turned onto a narrow one-lane road with a sign at the edge reading, "Center for Study-No Admittance." They drove for three or four minutes through a forest of white birches, the bark peeling from the trunks like discarded paper wrapping. Through the trees Yevgeny caught sight of a small abandoned church, its door and windows gaping open, its single onion-shaped dome leaning into the heat wave from Central Asia. The limousine swung into a driveway paved with fine white gravel and pulled up in front of a small brick building. A high chain-link fence topped with coils of barbed wire stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. Two gray-and-tan Siberian huskies prowled back and forth at the end of long ropes fastened to trees. An Army officer came around to the rear window. A soldier with a PPD-34 under his arm, its round clip inserted, watched from behind a pile of sandbags. Yevgeny rolled the window down just enough to pa.s.s Starik's calling card to the officer. A hot blast of outside air filled the back of the car. The officer looked at the card, then handed it back and waved the driver on. At the end of the gravel driveway loomed a pre-revolutionary three-story mansion. Around the side of the house, two little girls, barefoot and wearing short smock-like dresses, were crying out in mock fright as they soared high or dipped low on a seesaw. Nearby, a mottled white-and-brown horse, reins hanging loose on his neck, cropped the gra.s.s. A young man in a tight suit, alerted by the guards at the gate, was waiting at the open door, his arms folded self-importantly across his chest, his shoulders hunched against the heat. "You are invited to follow me," he said when Yevgeny came up the steps. He preceded the visitor down a marble hallway and up a curving flight of stairs covered with a worn red runner, rapped twice on a door on the second floor, threw it open and stepped back to let Yevgeny through.

Pasha Semyonovich Zhilov, cooling himself in front of a Westinghouse air conditioner fixed in a window of the antechamber, was reading aloud from a thin book to two small girls curled up on a sofa, their knees parted shamelessly, their thin limbs askew. Starik broke off reading when he caught sight of Yevgeny. "Oh, do continue, uncle," one of the little girls pleaded. The other sucked sulkily on her thumb. Ignoring the girls, Starik strode across the room and clasped the hand of his visitor in both of his. Behind Yevgeny the door clicked closed.

"Do you have any idea where you are?" Starik inquired as he gripped Yevgeny's elbow and steered him through a door into a large sitting room.

"Not the slightest," Yevgeny admitted.

"I may tell you that you are in the Southwestern District near the village of Cheryomuski. The estate, originally tens of thousands of hectares, belonged to the Apatov family but, it was taken over by the CHEKA in the early 1920s and has been used as a secret retreat since." He gestured with his head for Yevgeny to follow him as he made his way through a billiard room and into a dining room with a large oval table set with fine china and Czech gla.s.s.

"The mansion is actually divided into three apartments - one is used by Viktor Abak.u.mov, who is the head of our SMERSH organization. The second is set aside for the Minister of Internal Security, Comrade Beria. He uses it as a hideaway when he wants to escape from the bedlam of Moscow."

Starik collected a bottle ofNarzan mineral water and two gla.s.ses, each with a slice of lemon in it, and continued on to a s.p.a.cious wood-paneled library filled with hundreds of leather-covered volumes and several dozen small gold- and silver-inlaid icons. On the single stretch of wall not covered with bookcases hung a life-sized portrait of L.N. Tolstoy. The painters name-I.E. Repin-and the date 1887 were visible at the bottom right. Tolstoy, wearing a rough peasant's s.h.i.+rt and a long white beard, had been posed sitting in a chair, a book open in his left hand. Yevgeny noticed that the great writer's fingernails, like Starik's, were thick and long and cut off squarely.

A large wooden table containing a neat pile of file folders stood in the center of the room. Starik set the mineral water and gla.s.ses on the table and dipped into a seat. He motioned for Yevgeny to take the seat across from him. "Comrade Beria claims that the calm and the country air are an a.n.a.lgesic for his ulcers-more effective than the hot-water bottles he keeps applying to his stomach. Who can say he is not right?" Starik lit one of his Bulgarian cigarettes. "You don't smoke?"

Yevgeny shook his head.

A man with a shaven head, wearing a black jacket and black trousers, appeared carrying a tray. He set a saucer of sugar cubes and another with slices of apple on the table, filled two gla.s.ses with steaming tea from a thermos and set the thermos down. When he had left, closing the door behind him, Starik wedged a cube of sugar between his teeth and, straining the liquid through it, began noisily drinking the tea. Yevgeny could see the Adam's apple bobbing in his sinewy neck. After a moment Starik asked, "Do Americans think there will be war?"

"Some do, some don't. In any case there is a general reluctance to go to war. Americans are a frontier people who have grown soft buying on credit whatever their hearts desire and paying off their mortgages for the rest of their lives."

Starik opened the file folder on top of the pile and began to leaf through the report as he sipped his tea. "I do not agree with your a.n.a.lysis. The American Pentagon thinks there will be war-they have actually predicted that it will start on the first of July 1952. A great many in the American Congress agree with the Pentagon forecast. When it was organized in 1947, the CIA was treated as a stepchild in matters of financing; now it is getting unlimited funds and recruiting agents at a feverish pace. And there is nothing soft about the training phase. The Soviet Russia Division, which is our glavni protivnik-how would you say that in American?"

"Princ.i.p.al adversary."

Starik tried out the words in English. "The princ.i.p.al adversary"-and quickly switched back to Russian-"organizes realistic kidnappings of their own officers by Russians on its staff pretending to be KGB agents, who then menace the recruits with death if they refuse to confess that they work for the CIA. The test is shrewd in as much as it establishes which of the new officers can survive the psychological shock of the episode and move on."

Starik looked up from the folder. "I am impressed by the questions you don't ask."

"If I asked how you knew such a thing you would not tell me, so why bother?"

Starik gulped more tea. "I propose that we speak as if we have known each other as long as I have known your father." When Yevgeny nodded a.s.sent he continued: "You come from a distinguished family with a long history of service to Soviet intelligence organs. In the twenties, at the time of the Civil War, your father's father was a Chekist, fighting alongside Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky when he created the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage. Your father's brother is head of a department in the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB-ah, I see you were not aware of that."