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  “Bob, that wouldn’t work,” Admiral Greer put in. “He’s not the sort of guy you can warn off with lawyer talk, is he?”

  “No,” Ritter admitted. This Pope was not a man to compromise on issues of great importance. He’d seen himself through all manner of unpleasantness, from Hitler’s Nazis to Stalin’s NKVD, and he’d kept his church together by circling the wagons, like settlers against Indian attacks in those old Western movies. He hadn’t managed to keep his church alive in Poland by giving in on important issues, had he? And, by holding his ground, he’d maintained enough moral and political strength to threaten the other of the world’s superpowers. No, this guy wasn’t going to fold under pressure.

  Most men feared death and ruin. This one didn’t. The Russians would never understand why, but they would understand the respect it earned him. It was becoming clear to Bob Ritter and the other senior intelligence officers in this room that the one single response that would make sense to the Politburo was an attack on the Pope. And the Politburo had met today, though what they had discussed and concluded were frustratingly unknown.

  “Bob, do we have any assets who can find out what they talked about in the Kremlin today?”

  “We have a few, and they will be alerted in the next two days—or, if they come up with something important, they can decide to get the information on their own hook. If they become aware of something this hot, you’d expect them to figure it out on their own and get a packet of information out to their handlers,” Ritter told the DCI. “Hey, Arthur, I don’t like waiting and not knowing any more than you do, but we have to let this thing take its course. You know the dangers of a balls-to-the-wall alert to our agents as well as I do.”

  And all three of them did. That sort of thing had gotten Oleg Penkovskiy killed. The information he’d gotten out had probably averted a nuclear war—and had assisted in the recruitment of CIA’s longest-lived agent-in-place, CARDINAL—but that hadn’t done Penkovskiy much good. On his discovery, no less a figure than Khrushchev himself had demanded his blood—and gotten it.

  “Yeah,” Greer agreed, “and this isn’t all that important in the great scheme of things, is it?”

  “No,” Judge Moore had to admit, though he didn’t especially look forward to explaining that one to the President. But the new Boss did understand things once you made them clear. The really scary part was what the President might do if the Pope were to die unexpectedly. The Boss, too, was a man of principle, but also a man of emotions. It would be as enraging as waving the Soviet flag in front of a fighting bull. You couldn’t let emotion get in the way of statecraft—it only called out more emotion, frequently the mourning of the newly dead. And the miracle of modern technology only served to make the number of such people all the larger. The DCI reproached himself for that thought. The new President was a thoughtful man. His emotions were the servant of his intellect, and his intellect was far larger than it was generally believed, especially by the media, who only saw the smile and the theatrical personality. But the media, like a lot of politicians, was a lot more comfortable dealing with appearances than reality. It was a lot less intellectually demanding, after all. Judge Moore looked at his principal subordinates. “Okay, but let’s remember that it can be lonely facing him in the Oval Office when you don’t have what he wants.”

  “I’m sure it is, Arthur,” Ritter sympathized.

  HE COULD STILL TURN BACK, Zaitzev told himself, as sleep still had not come. Next to him, Irina was breathing placidly in sleep. The sleep of the just, it was called. Not the sleeplessness of the traitor.

  All he had to do was stop. That was all. He’d taken two small steps, but no more. The American might know his face, but that was easily fixed—take a different metro, walk onto a different carriage. He’d never see him again; their contact would be as broken as a water glass dropped to the floor, and his life would return to normal, and his conscience . . .

  . . . would never trouble him again? He snorted. It was his conscience that had gotten him into this mess. No, that wasn’t going to go away.

  But the other side of that coin was perpetual worry and sleeplessness, and fear. He hadn’t really tasted the fear yet. That would come, he was sure. Treason had only one punishment. Death for the traitor, followed by ruin for his survivors. They’d be sent off to Siberia—to count trees, as the euphemism went. It was the Soviet hell, a place of eternal damnation, from which death was the only escape.

  In fact, it was exactly what his conscience would do to him if he didn’t follow through on his action, Zaitzev realized, finally losing his battle and sliding off into sleep.

  A SECOND LATER, so it seemed to him, the alarm clock went off. At least, he hadn’t been tormented with dreams. That was the only good news this morning. His head pounded, threatening to push his eyeballs out of their sockets. He staggered into the bathroom, where he splashed water onto his face and took three aspirin, which, he forlornly hoped, might ease his hangover in a few hours.

  He couldn’t face sausages for breakfast, since his stomach was also irritated, and so he settled for cereal and milk with some buttered bread on the side. He thought about coffee, but decided a glass of milk would be easier on his stomach.

  “You drank too much last night,” Irina told him.

  “Yes, darling, I know that now,” he managed to say, not unpleasantly. His condition wasn’t her fault, and she was a good wife to him, and a good mother for Svetlana, his little zaichik. He knew that he’d survive this day. He just wouldn’t like it much. Worst of all, he had to get going early, and this he did, shaving very badly along the way, but becoming presentable with a clean shirt and tie. He tucked four more aspirin into his coat pocket before walking out the door, and, to get his blood moving, he took the stairs down instead of the elevator. There was a mild chill in the morning air, which helped somewhat on the way to the metro. He bought a copy of Izvestia and smoked a Trud, and that helped move him along, too.

  If anyone recognized him—well, few would. He was not in the usual carriage, and he was not on the usual train. He was usually fifteen minutes later. He was just one more anonymous face on a subway train filled with anonymous people.

  And so no one would note that he was getting off at the wrong station.

  The American Embassy was just a couple of blocks away, and he headed that way, checking his watch.

  He knew the proper timing because he’d been here once before, as a cadet in the KGB Academy, brought here early one morning in a bus along with forty-five other members of his class. They’d even worn their official uniforms for the trip, probably to remind them of their professional identity. Even then, it had seemed a foolish waste of time, but the academy commandant back then had been a hard-liner, and now the trip served a purpose that would have outraged the man. Zaitzev lit another cigarette as the building came into view.

  He checked his watch. At precisely 0730 hours every day, they raised their flag. The academy commandant, ten years before, had pointed and said, “See there, comrades, that is the enemy! That is where he lives in our fine city of Moscow. In that building live spies which those of you who enter the Second Chief Directorate will endeavor to identify and expel from our fair land. There live and work the ones who spy on our country and our people. That is their flag. Remember it always.” And then, exactly on time, the flag had been hoisted to the top of a white pole with a bronze eagle at the top, hauled up by members of the United States Marine Corps in their pretty uniforms. Zaitzev had checked his watch in the metro station. It should be right about . . . now.

  A BUGLE BLEW a tune that he didn’t know. He could just make out the white caps of the Marines, barely visible above the stone parapet of the building’s flat roof. He was on the other side of the street, just by the old church, which KGB had crammed full of electronic devices.

  There, he thought, staring, along with a handful of other passersby on the cracked cement sidewalk.

  Yes, he saw. The top part of the flag as it appeared was
red and white horizontal stripes, not the blue canton with its fifty white stars. The flag was being hoisted upside down! It was unmistakably wrong. And it went all the way to the top of the pole that way.

  So, they did as I asked. Quickly, Zaitzev walked to the end of the block and turned right, then right again, and back to the metro station he’d just left, and, with the payment of a large five-kopeck copper coin, he boarded another subway car for the trip to Dzerzhinskiy Square.

  Just that quickly, his hangover went away, as though by magic. He scarcely even noticed until he took the escalator up to the street level.

  The Americans want to help me, the communications officer told himself. They will help me. Perhaps I can save the life of that Polish priest after all. There was a spring in his step as he entered The Centre.

  “SIR, what the fuck was that all about?” Gunnery Sergeant Drake asked Dominic Corso. They’d just fixed the flag back properly atop its pole.

  “Gunny, I can’t say,” was the best Corso could do, though his eyes said a little more.

  “Aye aye, sir. How do I log it?”

  “You don’t log it, Gunny. Somebody made a dumb mistake, and you fixed it.”

  “You say so, Mr. Corso.” The gunnery sergeant would have to explain it to his Marines, but he’d explain it in much the same way in which it had just been explained to him, though, in his case, rather more profanely. If anyone in the Marine Embassy Regiment asked him, he’d just say he’d gotten orders from somebody in the embassy, and Colonel d’Amici would just have to deal with it. What the hell, he could hand the colonel off to Corso. They were both wops, maybe they’d understand each other, the sergeant from Helena, Montana, hoped. If not, then Colonel d’Amici would tear him and his Marines each a new and bloody asshole.

  ZAITZEV TOOK HIS seat after relieving Major Dobrik. The morning traffic was a little lighter than usual, and he began his normal morning routine. Forty minutes later, that changed again.

  “Comrade Major,” a newly familiar voice said. Zaitzev turned to see Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy.

  “Good morning, Comrade Colonel. You have something for me?”

  “This.” Rozhdestvenskiy handed over the message blank. “Please send it out immediately, on the pad.”

  “By your command. Information copy to you?”

  “Correct.” Rozhdestvenskiy nodded.

  “I presume it’s permissible to use an internal messenger to get that to your hand?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Very well. I’ll have it out in a few minutes.”

  “Good.” Rozhdestvenskiy took his leave.

  Zaitzev looked at the dispatch. It was agreeably short. Encryption and transmission took only fifteen minutes.

  MOST SECRET

  IMMEDIATE AND URGENT

  FROM: OFFICE OF CHAIRMAN, MOSCOW CENTRE

  TO: REZIDENT SOFIA

  REFERENCE: OPERATIONAL DESIGNATOR 15-8-82-666

  OPERATIONAL APPROVAL EXPECTED TODAY, VIA CHANNELS

  DISCUSSED IN OUR MEETING. REPORT WHEN PROPER CONTACTS

  ESTABLISHED.

  And that meant that operation -666 was going forward. The day before, that notice had chilled Zaitzev, but not today. Today he knew he’d be doing something to prevent it. If anything bad happened now, it would be the fault of the Americans. That made a considerable difference. Now he just had to figure how to establish some sort of regular contact with them. . . .

  UPSTAIRS, Andropov had the Foreign Minister in his office.

  “So, Andrey, how do we go about this?”

  “Ordinarily our Ambassador would meet with their First Secretary, but, in the interests of security, we might want to try another method of approach.”

  “How much executive authority does their First Secretary have?” the Chairman asked.

  “About as much as Koba did thirty years ago. Bulgaria is run in a very tight way. Their Politburo members represent various constituencies, but only their Party First Secretary really has decision-making power.”

  “Ah.” That was good news to Yuriy Vladimirovich. He lifted his desk phone. “Send in Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy,” he told his secretary.

  The colonel appeared through the dresser door in two minutes. “Yes, Comrade Chairman.”

  “Andrey, this is Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy, my executive assistant. Colonel, does our Sofia rezident talk directly to the Bulgarian head of government?”

  “Rarely, comrade, but he has done so occasionally in the past.” Rozhdestvenskiy was surprised that the Chairman didn’t know that, but he was still learning how field operations worked. At least he had the good sense to ask questions, and he was not embarrassed to do so.

  “Very well. For security reasons, we would prefer that the entire Bulgarian Politburo not know the scope of this operation -666. So, do you think we could have Colonel Bubovoy brief in their party chief and get approval by a more direct route?”

  “To that end, a signed letter from Comrade Brezhnev would probably be necessary,” Rozhdestvenskiy answered.

  “Yes, that would be the best way to do it,” the Foreign Minister agreed at once. “A good thought, colonel,” he added approvingly.

  “Very well. We’ll get that today. Leonid Ilyich will be in his office, Andrey?”

  “Yes, Yuriy. I will call ahead and tell him what is needed. I can have it drafted in my office if you wish, or would you prefer it to be done here?”

  “With your permission, Andrey,” Andropov said graciously, “better that we should do it. And we’ll have it couriered to Sofia for delivery tomorrow or the day after.”

  “Better to give our Bulgarian comrade a few days, Yuriy. They are our allies, but they remain a sovereign country, after all.”

  “Quite so, Andrey.” Every country in the world had a bureaucracy, whose entire purpose was to delay important things from happening.

  “And we don’t want the world to know that our rezident is making a highly important call on the man,” the Foreign Minister added, teaching the KGB Chairman a little lesson in operational security, Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy noted.

  “How long after that, Aleksey Nikolay’ch?” Andropov asked his aide.

  “Several weeks, at least.” He saw annoyance in his boss’s eyes and decided to explain. “Comrade Chairman, selecting the right assassin will not be a matter of lifting a phone and dialing a number. Strokov will necessarily be careful in making his selection. People are not as predictable as machines, after all, and this is the most important—and most sensitive—aspect of the operation.”

  “Yes, I suppose that is so, Aleksey. Very well. Notify Bubovoy that a hand-delivered message is on the way.”

  “Now, Comrade Chairman, or after we have it signed and ready for dispatch?” Rozhdestvenskiy asked the question like a skilled bureaucrat, letting his boss know the best way without saying it out loud.

  This colonel would go far, the Foreign Minister thought, taking note of his name for the first time.

  “A good point, Colonel. Very well, I will let you know when the letter is ready to go.”

  “By your command, Comrade Chairman. Do you need me further?”

  “No, that is all for now,” Andropov answered, sending him on his way.

  “Yuriy Vladimirovich, you have a good aide.”

  “Yes, there is so much for me still to learn here,” Andropov admitted. “And he educates me every day.”

  “You are fortunate in having so many expert people.”

  “That is the truth, Andrey Andreyevich. That is the truth.”

  DOWN THE HALL in his office, Rozhdestvenskiy drew up the brief dispatch for Bubovoy. This was moving fast, he thought, but not fast enough for the Chairman of the KGB. He really wanted that priest dead. The Politburo certainly seemed fearful of political earthquakes, but Rozhdestvenskiy himself was doubtful of that. The Pope, after all, was just one person, but the colonel had tailored his advice to what his boss wanted to hear, like a good functionary, while also letting the Chairman know the things
he needed to know. His job actually carried great power with it. Rozhdestvenskiy knew that he could break the careers of officers whom he did not like and influence operations to a significant degree. If CIA ever tried to recruit him, he could be an agent of great value. But Colonel Rozhdestvenskiy was a patriot, and besides, the Americans probably had no idea who he was and what he did. The CIA was more feared than it deserved to be. The Americans didn’t really have a feel for espionage. The English did, but KGB and its antecedents had enjoyed some success at infiltrating it in the past. Less so today, unfortunately. The young Cambridge communists of the 1930s were all old now, either in British prisons or drawing their government pensions in peace, or living out their years in Moscow, like Kim Philby, considered a drunk even by Muscovites. He probably drank because he missed his country—missed the place in which he’d grown up, the food and drink and football games, the newspapers with which he’d always philosophically disagree, but he’d miss them even so. What a terrible thing it must be to be a defector, Rozhdestvenskiy thought.

  WHAT WILL I DO? Zaitzev asked himself. What will I ask for?

  Money? CIA probably paid its spies very well—more money than he would ever be able to spend. Luxuries beyond his imagination. A videotape machine! They were just becoming available in Russia, mainly made in Hungary, patterned after Western machines. The bigger problem was in getting tapes—pornographic ones were particularly in demand. Some of his KGB coworkers spoke of such things. Zaitzev had never seen one himself, but he was curious, as any man might be. The Soviet Union was run by such conservative men. Maybe the Politburo members were just too old to enjoy sex, and so saw no need for younger citizens to indulge.

  He shook his head. Enough! He had to decide what to tell the American in the metro. That was a task that he chewed on with his lunch in the KGB cafeteria.