The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 7

"I was told that he worked for.. .but it doesn't matter what I was told."

"And your father-"

"My father?"

"He has worked for First Chief Directorate for years while he held diplomatic posts, the most recent of which, as you know, was an Under Secretary Generals.h.i.+p in the United Nations Secretariat. For the past twelve years I have been his conducting officer, so I can personally attest to his enormous contribution to our cause. I have been told you take a rather cynical view of this cause. At its core, what is Communism? A crazy idea that there is a side to us we have not yet explored. The tragedy of what we call Marxism-Leninism is that Lenin's hope and Zinoviev's expectation that the German revolution would lead to the establishment of a Soviet Germany were foiled. The first country to try the experiment was not proletarian-rich Germany but peasant-poor Russia. The capitalists never tire of throwing in our faces that we are a backward country, but look where we come from. I hold the view that our Communists can be divided into two groups: tsars who promote Mother Russia and Soviet vlast, and dreamers who promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit."

"My mother spoke often about the genius and generosity of the human spirit."

"I have nothing against expanding Soviet power but, in my heart of hearts I belong, like your mother, to the second category. Are you at all familiar with Leon Tolstoy, Yevgeny? Somewhere in one of his letters he says"-Starik threw back his head and closed his eyes and recited in a melodious voice-'"the changes in our life must come, not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life, but rather from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience.'" When he opened his eyes they were burning with fervor. "Our political system, in as much as it comes from a mental resolution to try a new form of life, is flawed. (I speak to you frankly; if you were to repeat what I tell you I could be prosecuted for treason.) The flaw has led to aberrations. But which political system hasn't its aberrations? In the previous century Americans collected blankets from soldiers who died of smallpox and distributed them to the native Indians. Southerners exploited their Negro slaves and lynched the ones who rebelled against this exploitation. French Catholics tied weights to the ankles of French Protestants and threw them into rivers. The Spanish Inquisition burned Hebrew and Muslim converts to Christianity at the stake because it doubted the sincerity of the conversions. Catholic Crusaders, waging holy war against Islam, locked Jews in temples in Jerusalem and burned them alive. All of which is to say that our system of Communism, like other political systems before it, will survive the aberrations of our tsars." Starik refilled his gla.s.s from the thermos. "How long were you in America?"

"My father began working for the UN immediately after the war. Which means I was in the states, let's see, almost five-and-a-half years-three and a half years at Erasmus High School in Brooklyn, then my junior and senior year at Yale thanks to the strings my father got Secretary-General Lie to pull."

Starik extracted a folder from the middle of the pile and held it so that Yevgeny could see the cover. His name-"Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Tsipin" was written across it, with the notation: "Very secret. No distribution whatsoever." He opened the folder and pulled out a sheet filled with handwritten notes. "Your father was not the one who got Secretary-General Lie to pull strings. It was me, working through Foreign Minister Molotov, who pulled the strings. You obviously have no memory of it but you and I have met before, Yevgeny. It was at your father's dacha in Peredelkino six years ago. You were not quite fifteen years of age at the time and attending Special School Number 19 in Moscow. You were eager, bright, with an ear for languages; you already spoke American well enough to converse with your mother-it was, I remember, your secret language so that your brother would not understand what you were saying."

Yevgeny smiled at the memory. Talking with Starik, he understood what it must be like to confess to a priest; you felt the urge to tell him things you didn't normally reveal to a stranger. "For obvious reasons it was not something that was spoken of, but my mother was descended from the aristocracy that traced is lineage back to Peter the Great-like Peter she was forever turning her eyes toward the West. She loved foreign languages-she herself spoke French as well as English. She had studied painting at La Grande Chaumiere in Paris as a young woman and it marked her for life. I suspect that her marriage turned out to be a great disappointment to my mother, though she was thrilled when my father was sent abroad."

"That day at Peredelkino six years ago your father had just learned of the United Nations posting. Your mother talked him into taking you and your brother with them to America-he was reluctant at first, but your mother turned to me and I helped convince him. Your brother wound up studying at the Soviet Consulate school in New York. As you were older than Grinka your mother dreamed of enrolling you in an American high school, but the Foreign Ministry apparatchiki refused to waive the standing rules against such things. Once again your mother turned to me. I went over their heads and appealed directly to Molotov. I told him that we desperately needed people who were educated in America and were steeped in its language and culture. I remember Molotov's asking me whether you could survive an American education to become a good Soviet citizen. I gave him my pledge that you would."

"Why were you so sure?"

"I was not, but I was willing to take the risk for your mother's sake. She and I were distant cousins, you see, but there was more than a vague family tie between us. Over the years we had become-friends. It was the friends.h.i.+p of what I shall call, for want of a better expression, kindred spirits. We didn't see eye to eye at all on everything, and most especially on Marxism; but on other matters we saw heart to heart. And then-then there was something about you, a l.u.s.t lurking in the pupils of your eyes. You wanted to believe-in a cause, in a mission, in a person." Starik's eyes narrowed. "You were like your mother in many ways. You both had a superst.i.tious streak." He laughed to himself at a memory. "You were always spitting over your shoulder for good luck. Your mother always sat on her valise before starting on a voyage-it was something right out of Dostoyevsky. She never turned back once she crossed the threshold or, if she did, she looked at herself in a mirror before starting out again."

"I still do these things." Yevgeny thought a moment. "At Erasmus High we were not sure I would get permission to apply to Yale; not sure, when they accepted me, that my father could raise the hard currency to pay the tuition."

"It was me who organized for you to receive permission to apply to Yale. It was me who arranged for your father's book-From the Soviet Point of View-to be published by left-wing houses in several European and Third World countries, after which I made sure that the book earned enough for him to afford the tuition."

Yevgeny said, in a m.u.f.fled voice, "What you are telling me takes my breath away"

Starik sprang to his feet and came around the table and gazed down at his young visitor. His peasant jacket swung open and Yevgeny caught a glimpse of the worn b.u.t.t of a heavy naval pistol tucked into his waistband. The sight made his heart beat faster.

Starik demanded, abandoning the formal "vui," switching to the intimate "ti." "Have I misjudged you, Yevgeny? Have I misjudged your courage and your conscience? Your command of the American language, your knowledge of America, your ability to pa.s.s for an American, give you the possibility of making a unique contribution. You know only what you have read in books; I will teach you things that are not in books. Will you follow in your grandfather's and your fathers footsteps? Will you enlist in the ranks of our Chekists and work with the dreamers who promote the genius and generosity of the human spirit?"

Yevgeny cried out, "With all my heart, yes." Then he repeated it with an urgency he had never felt before. "Yes, yes, I will follow where you lead me."

Starik, an austere man who seldom permitted himself the luxury of expressing emotions, reached over and clasped Yevgeny's hand in both of his large hands. His lips curled into an unaccustomed smile. "There are many rites of pa.s.sage into my world, but by far the greatest is to demonstrate to you how much I trust you-with the lives of our agents, with state secrets, with my own well-being. Now I will relate to you the story behind my Order of the Red Banner. The tale is a state secret of the highest magnitude-so high that even your father does not know it. Once you hear it there will be no turning back."

"Tell me this secret."

"It concerns the German Martin Dietrich," he began in a hoa.r.s.e whisper. "He was a Soviet spy in the Great Patriotic War. His real name"- Starik's eyes burned into Yevgeny's-"was Martin Bormann. Yes, the Martin Bormann who was. .h.i.tler's deputy. He was a Soviet agent from the late twenties; in 1929 we pushed him to marry the daughter of a n.a.z.i close to Hitler and thus gain access to the Fuhrer's inner circle. When the war started Bormann betrayed Hitler's strategy to us. He told us which of the German thrusts were feints, he told us how much petrol their tanks had on hand, he told us that the Wehrmacht had not brought up winter lubricants for their tanks in 1941. From the time of the great German defeat at Stalingrad Bormann was instrumental in pus.h.i.+ng Hitler, over the objections of the generals, to make irrational decisions-the Fuhrer's refusal to permit von Paulus to break out of the Stalingrad trap resulted in the loss of eight hundred and fifty thousand Fascist troops. And during all that time I was Martin's conducting officer."

"But Bormann was said to have died during the final battle for Berlin!"

"Some weeks before the end of the war German intelligence officers stumbled across deciphered intercepts that suggested Martin could be a Soviet spy. They confided in Goebbels, but Goebbels was unable to work up the nerve to tell Hitler, who by then was a ranting madman. In the final hours of the final battle Martin made his way across the Tiergarten toward the Lehrter Station. For a time he was pinned down in a crossfire between advance units of Chuikov's 8th Guards and an SS unit dug in next to the station, but during the night of first to second of May he finally managed to cross the line. I had arranged to meet Martin at the station. Our front line troops were told to be on the alert for a German officer dressed in a long leather coat with a camouflage uniform underneath. I took him to safety."

"Why have you kept the story secret?"

"Martin brought with him microdots containing German files on Western espionage services. We decided it was to our advantage to have the world think that Bormann had been loyal to Hitler to the end and had been killed while trying to escape Berlin. We changed his appearance with plastic surgery. He is retired now but for years he was a high-ranking officer of our intelligence service."

Starik released Yevgeny's hand and returned to his seat. "Now," he said in a triumphant voice, "we will, together, take the first steps in a long journey."

Part 7

In the weeks that followed, Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin disappeared through the looking gla.s.s into a clandestine world peopled by eccentric characters who had mastered bizarre skills. The trip was exhilarating; for the first time in memory he felt as if the attention being showered on him had nothing to do with the fact that he was his father's son. He was given the code name Gregory; he himself selected the surname Ozolin, which Starik immediately recognized as the name of the stationmaster at Astapovo, the G.o.dforsaken backwater where Tolstoy, on the lam from his wife, had breathed his last. ("And what were his last words?" Starik, who had been something of a Tolstoy scholar in his youth, challenged his protege. '"The truth-I care a great deal,"' Yevgeny shot back. "Bravo!" cried Starik. Bravo!") Without fanfare Gregory Ozolin was inducted into the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, card number 01783753 and a.s.signed to a small Interior Ministry safe house on Granovskiy Street, batiment number 3, second entrance, flat 71, which came with a refrigerator (a rarity in the Soviet Union) filled with pasteurized koumis belonging to the Tajik maid with a mustache on her upper lip. Six mornings a week a bread-delivery van fetched Yevgeny from the alleyway behind the building and whisked him to an underground entrance of the First Chief Directorate's Shkloa Osobogo Naznacheniva (Special Purpose School) in the middle of a woods at Balas.h.i.+kha, some fifteen miles east of the Moscow Ring Road. There Yevgeny, segregated for reasons of security from the scores of male and female students attending cla.s.ses in the main part of the compound, was given intensive courses in selecting and servicing tayniki (which the Americans called dead drops), secret writing, wireless telegraphy, cryptography in general and one-time pads in particular, photography, Marxist theory, and the glorious history of the Cheka from Feliks Dzerzhinsky down to the present. The curriculum for this last course consisted mostly of maxims, which were supposed to be memorized and regurgitated on demand.

"What was the dictum of the Cheka in 1934?" the instructor, a zealous time-server whose shaven skull glistened under the neon lamp in the cla.s.sroom, demanded at one session.

"A spy in hand is worth two in the bush?"

Pursing his lips, clucking his tongue, the time-server scolded his student. "Comrade Ozolin will simply have to take this more seriously if he expects to earn a pa.s.sing grade." And he recited the correct response, obliging Yevgeny to repeat each phrase after him.

"In our work, boldness, daring and audacity..."

"In our work, boldness, daring and audacity..."

"...must be combined..."

"...must be combined..."

"...with prudence."

"...with prudence."

"In other words, dialectics."

"In other words, dialectics."

"I honestly don't see what dialectics has to do with being a successful espionage agent," Yevgeny groaned when Starik turned up, as usual, at midday to share the sandwiches and cold kva.s.s sent over from the canteen.

"It is the heart of the matter," Starik explained patiently. "We cannot teach you everything, but we can teach you how to think. The successful agent is invariably one who has mastered Marxist methodology. Which is to say, he perfects the art of thinking conventionally and then systematically challenges the conventional thinking to develop alternatives that will take the"-his eyes sparkling, Yevgeny's conducting officer dredged up the English term-"'princ.i.p.al adversary' by surprise. The short name for this process is dialectics. You came across it when you studied Hegel and Marx. You develop a thesis, you contradict it with an anthesis and then you resolve the contradiction with a synthesis. I am told that the practical side of the curriculum comes quickly to you. You must make more of an effort on the theoretical side."

On the even days of the month, a sinewy Ossete with a clubfoot and incredibly powerful arms would lead Yevgeny to a windowless room with mattresses propped up against the walls and wrestling mats on the floor, and teach him seven different ways to kill with his bare hands; the absolute precision of the Ossete's gestures convinced Yevgeny that he had diligently practiced the subject he now instructed. On the odd days, Yevgeny was taken down to a soundproofed sub-bas.e.m.e.nt firing range and shown how to strip and clean and shoot a variety of small arms of American manufacture. When he had mastered that he was taken on a field trip to a KGB special laboratory at the edge of a village near Moscow and allowed to test fire one of the exotic weapons that had been developed there, a cigarette case concealing a silent pistol that shot platinum-alloy pellets the size of a pinhead; indentations in the pinhead contained a poisonous extract from the castor oil plant, which (so Yevgeny was a.s.sured by a short, myopic man in a white smock) invariably led to cardiovascular collapse.

Evenings, Yevgeny was driven back to his apartment to eat the warm meal that had been set out for him by the Tajik maid. After dinner he was expected to do several hours of homework, which involved keeping abreast of all things American, and most especially sports, by carefully reading Time and Life and Newsweek. He was also ordered to study a series of lectures ent.i.tled "Characteristics of Agent Communications and Agent Handling in the USA," written by Lieutenant Colonel I. Ye. Prikhodko, an intelligence officer who had served in New York under diplomatic cover. Fortifying himself with a stiff cognac, Yevgeny would settle into a soft chair with a lamp directed over his shoulder and skim the Prikhodko material. "New York is divided into five sections," one chapter, clearly intended for neophytes, began, "which are called boroughs. Because of its isolation from the main city-one can reach the island only by ferry from Manhattan and from Brooklyn-Richmond is the least suitable of the five boroughs for organizing agent communications. New York's other four sections-named Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens-are widely used by our intelligence officers. Department stores, with their dozens of entrances and exits, some directly into the subway system, are ideal meeting places. Prospect Park in the borough of Brooklyn or cemeteries in the borough of Queens are also excellent places to meet with agents. When organizing such meetings do not specify a spot (for example, the southwest corner of Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue) but a route, preferably a small street along which he is to walk at a prearranged time. In this manner one can determine whether or not he is under surveillance before establis.h.i.+ng contact."

"I skimmed several of the Prikhodko lectures last night," Yevgeny told Starik one morning. They were in a brand new Volga from the First Chief Directorate's motor pool, heading out of Moscow toward Peredelkino for a Sunday picnic at Yevgeny's father's dacha. As Starik had never learned to drive, Yevgeny was behind the wheel. "They strike me as being fairly primitive."

"They are intended for agents who have never set foot in America, not graduates of Yale University," Starik explained. "Still, there are things in them that can be useful to you. The business about meetings with agents, for example. The CIA is known to favor safe houses because of the possibility of controlling access and egress, and of tape recording or filming what happens during the meeting. We, on the other hand, prefer doing things in open areas because of the opportunities to make sure that you are not being followed."

On the car radio, the sonorous voice of a newscaster reporting from the North Korean capitol of Pyongyang could be heard saying that the American aggressors, who had debarked the day before at Inchon, were being contained by the North Koreans.

"What do you make of the American landing?" Yevgeny asked his conducting officer.

"I have seen very secret briefings-there is no possibility the Americans will be thrown back into the sea. But this outflanking stratagem of the American General MacArthur is a perilous gambit. In fact the Americans are threatening to cut off the North Korean troops in the south, which will oblige the North Koreans to pull back rapidly if they hope to avoid encirclement. The strategic question is whether the Americans will stop at the thirty-eighth parallel, or pursue the Communist armies north to the Yalu River in order to reunify Korea under the puppet regime in Seoul."

"If the Americans continue on to the Yalu what will the Chinese do?"

"They will certainly feel obliged to attack across the river, in which case they will overpower the American divisions with sheer numbers. If the Americans are facing defeat they might bomb China with atomic weapons, in which case we will be obliged to step in."

"In other words we could be in the verge of a world war."

"I hope not; I hope the Americans will have the good sense to stop before they reach the Yalu or, if they don't, I hope they will be able to arrest the inevitable Chinese attack without resorting to atomic weapons. A Chinese attack across the Yalu that eventually fails to defeat the Americans will benefit Sino-Soviet relations, which are showing signs of fraying."

Yevgeny understood that Starik's a.n.a.lysis of the situation was not one that would appear in Pravda. "How would a Chinese setback benefit SinoSoviet relations?"

"For the simple reason that it will demonstrate to the Chinese leaders.h.i.+p that they remain vulnerable to Western arms and need to remain under the Soviet atomic umbrella."

Yevgeny drove dirough the village of Peredelkino, which consisted mostly of a wide unpaved road, a Party building with a red star over its door and a statue of Stalin in front, a farmer's cooperative and a local school. At the first road marker beyond the village he turned off and pulled up next to a line of cars already parked in the shade of some trees. A dozen chauffeurs were dozing in the back seats of cars or on newspapers spread out on the ground. Yevgeny led the way along a narrow gra.s.sy padi to his father's country house. As they approached they could hear the sound of music and laughter drifting dirough the woods. Four unsmiling civilians wearing dark suits and fedoras stood at the wooden gate; they parted to let Yevgeny past when they spotted Starik behind him. Two dozen or so men and women stood around the lawn watching a young man playing a tiny concertina. Bottles of Armenian cognac and a hard-to-find aged vodka called starka were set out on a long table covered with white sailcloth. Maids wearing white ap.r.o.ns over their long peasant dresses pa.s.sed around plates filled with potato salad and cold chicken. Munching on a drumstick, Yevgeny wandered around to the back of the dacha and discovered his father, naked from the waist up, sitting on a milking stool inside the tool shed. An old man with a pinched face was pressing the open mouth of a bottle filled with bees against the skin on Tsipin's back. "The peasants say that bee stings can alleviate rheumatism," Tsipin told his son, wincing as the bees planted their darts in him. "Where have you disappeared to, Yevgeny? What hole have you fallen into?"

"Your friend Pasha Semyonovich has given me work translating American newspaper articles and the Congressional Record into Russian," Yevgeny replied, repeating the cover story Starik had worked out for him.

"If only you had a decent Party record," his father said with a sigh, "they might have given you more important things to do." He gasped from a new sting. "Enough, enough, Dmitri," he told the peasant. "I'm beginning to think I prefer the rheumatism."

The old man capped me bottle and, tipping his hat, departed. Yevgeny rubbed a salve on the rash of red welts across his father's bony neck and shoulders to soothe the ache of the stings. "Even with a good record I wouldn't get far in your world," Yevgeny remarked. "You have to be schizophrenic to live two lives."

His father looked back over his shoulder. "Why do you call it my world?"

Yevgeny regarded his father with wide-eyed innocence. "I have always presumed-"

"You would do well to stop presuming, especially where it concerns connections with our Chekists."

By late afternoon the nonstop drinking had taken its toll on the guests, who were stretched out on ottomans or dozing in Danish deck chairs scattered around the garden. Starik had disappeared into the dacha with Tsipin. Sitting on the gra.s.s with his back to a tree, enjoying the warmth of the sun through the canopy of foliage over his head, Yevgeny caught sight of a barefoot young woman talking with an older man who looked vaguely familiar. At one point the older man put an arm around the waist of the girl and the two of them strolled off through the woods. Yevgeny noticed that two of the unsmiling men at the gate detached themselves from the group and followed at a discreet distance. For a time Yevgeny could see the girl and her companion fleetingly through the trees, deep in conversation as they appeared and disappeared from view. He finished his cognac and closed his eyes, intending only to rest them for a few moments. He came awake with a start when he sensed that someone had come between him and the sun. A musical voice speaking a very precise English announced: "I dislike summer so very much."

Yevgeny batted away a swarm of insects and found himself staring at a very shapely pair of bare ankles. He saluted them respectfully. "Why would anyone in his right mind dislike summer?" he responded in English.

"For the reason that it is too short. For the reason that our Arctic winter will be upon us before our skin has had its provision of summer suns.h.i.+ne. You must excuse me if I have awaked you."

"An American would say woken you, not awaked you." Yevgeny blinked away the drowsiness and brought her into focus. The young woman looked to be in her early or middle twenties and tall for a female of the species, at least five-eleven in her bare feet. Two rowboat-sized flat-soled sandals dangled from a forefinger, a small cloth knapsack hung off one shoulder. She had a slight offset to an otherwise presentable nose, a gap between two front teeth, faint worry lines around her eyes and mouth. Her hair was short and straight and dark, and tucked neatly back behind her ears.

"I work as a historian and on the side, for the pleasure of it, I translate English language books that interest me," the girl said. "I have read the novels of E. Hemingway and F. Fitzgerald-I am in the process of translating a novel ent.i.tled For Whom the Bell Tolls. Have you by chance read it? I have been informed that you attended a university in the state of Connecticut. I am pleased to talk English with someone who has actually been to America."

Yevgeny patted the gra.s.s alongside him. She smiled shyly and settled cross-leeged onto the ground and held out a hand. "My name is Azalia Isanova. There are some who call me Aza."

Yevgeny took her hand in his. "I will call you Aza, too. Are you here with a husband?" he asked, thinking of the older gentleman she had been talking to. "Or a lover?"

She laughed lightly. "I am the apartment-mate of Comrade Beria's daughter."

Yevgeny whistled. "Now I know where I've seen the man you were with before-in the newspapers!" He decided to impress her. "Did you know that Comrade Beria suffers from ulcers? That he applies hot water bottles to his stomach to ease the pain?"

She c.o.c.ked her head. "Who are you?"

"My name is... Gregory. Gregory Ozolin."

Her face darkened. "No, you're not. You are Yevgeny Alexandrovich, the oldest son of Aleksandr Timofeyevich Tsipin. Lavrenti Pavlovich himself pointed you out to me. Why do you invent a name?"

"For the pleasure of seeing your frown when you unmask me."

"Are you familiar with the work of Hemingway and Fitzgerald? Speaking from a stylistical point of view, I was struck by the dissimilarity of Hemingway's short, declarative sentence structure and Fitzgerald's more complex network of interconnected sentences. Do you agree with this distinction?"

"Definitely."

"How is it that two American writers living during the same period and on occasion in the same place-I refer, of course, to Paris-can end up writing so differently?"

"I suppose its because different folks have different strokes."

"I beg your pardon?"

"That's an American slang epigram-"

"Different folks have different strokes? Ah, I see what you are driving at. Strokes refers to rowing. Different people row differently. Do you mind if I copy that down." She produced a fountain pen and pad from her knapsack and carefully copied the epigram into it.

A black chauffeur-driven Zil drew up to the wooden gate. A second car filled with men in dark suits pulled up right behind it. On the porch of the dacha Lavrenti Pavolovich Beria shook hands with Tsipin and Starik and waved to his daughter, who was deep in conversation with three women. Beria's daughter, in turn, called, "Aza, come quickly. Papa is starting back to Moscow."

Aza sprang to her feet and brushed the gra.s.s off of her skirt. Yevgeny asked with some urgency, "Can I see you again?" He added quickly, "To talk more of Hemingway and Fitzgerald."

She looked down at him for a moment, her brow creased in thought. Then she said, "It is possible." She scribbled a number on the pad, tore off the sheet and let it flutter down to Yevgeny. "You may telephone me."

"I will," he said with undisguised eagerness.

The next morning Yevgeny's tradecraft cla.s.ses started to taper off and he began the long, tedious process of creating (with the help of identical twin sisters who didn't look at all alike) two distinct legends that he could slip into and out of at will. It was painstaking work because every detail had to be compartmentalized in Yevgeny's brain so that he would never confuse his two ident.i.ties. "It is vital," the sister whose name was Agrippina told him as they set out two thick loose-leaf books on the table, "not to memorize a legend-you must become the legend."

"You must shed your real ident.i.ty," the other sister, whose name was Serafima, explained, "the way a snake sheds its skin. You must settle into each legend as if it were a new skin. If you were to hear someone call out your old name, the thought must flash across your mind: Who can that be? Certainly not me! With time and many many hours of very difficult work you will be able to put a mental distance between the person known as Yevgeny Alexandrovich Tsipin and your new ident.i.ties."

"Why two legends?" Yevgeny asked.

"One will be a primary operating legend, the second will be a fallback legend in the event the first legend is compromised and you must disappear into a new ident.i.ty," Agrippina said. She smiled in a motherly fas.h.i.+on and motioned for Serafima to commence.

"Thank you, dear. Now, in building each legend we will start from the cradle and work up to the young man who will be roughly your present age, or at least near enough to it so as not to arouse suspicion. To distinguish the two legends from each other, and from your genuine ident.i.ty, it will be helpful if you develop different ways of walking and speaking for each persona-"

"It will be helpful if you comb your hair differently, carry your wallet in a different pocket, wear clothing which reflects different tastes," her sister added.

"Eventually," Serafima offered, blus.h.i.+ng slightly, "you might even make love differently."

Working from their loose-leaf books, the sisters-both senior researchers in Starik's Directorate S, the department within the First Chief Directorate that ran agents operating under deep cover abroad-began to set out the rough outlines of what they dubbed "Legend A" and "Legend B." "A" had spent his childhood in New Haven, which Yevgeny knew well; "B" had grown up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, which Yevgeny-with the help of maps and slides and personal accounts published in the American press-would come to know intimately. In each case, the sisters would use the addresses of buildings that had been torn down so that it would be practically impossible for the American FBI to verify who had lived there. The foundation for the legends would be birth certificates that were actually on record in New Haven and in New York in the names of two young Caucasian males who, unbeknownst to the American authorities, had been lost at sea when the Allies ran convoys to Murmansk during the war. Two frayed Social Security cards were the next building blocks of the legends. Serafima was an expert on the American social security system; the first three digits of the numbers, she explained, indicated the state in which the number had been issued; the middle two digits, when it had been issued. The cards Yevgeny would carry were actually on file with the United States government. As he would be pa.s.sing for men two or three years older, there would be voter registration cards in addition to the usual paper identification-drivers licenses, library cards, laminated American Youth Hostel cards with photographs, that sort of thing. The legends would be backstopped by educational records in existence at a New Haven high school and at Erasmus in Brooklyn (which Yevgeny knew well), along with an employment history that would ring true but would also be unverifiable. Medical and dental histories would be built into each legend-they would involve doctors who were dead, which would make the stories impossible to check. And each legend would have a working pa.s.sport with travel stamps on its pages.

"You have obviously thought of everything," Yevgeny commented.

"We hope for your sake that we have," Agrippina said. "Still, I must draw your attention to two minor problems."