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“Indeed.”

“My father was in a transport battalion in North Africa.”

“Quite.”

“Then how could you have known him?”

He tapped the face of his watch. “I believe your deadline is upon you, Miss Jensen.”

She had not anticipated how difficult her departure would be. Tom Jellinek, the only boyfriend she had ever had, was wounded: How could she have applied for the fellowship and not told him? How could she say yes and not ask him? For they had promised to keep no secrets from each other, not least because they were busily keeping each other secret from their families, neither of which would have approved dating outside the race. But he was a kind young man, and made her promise to write twice a week, even, given that she would be behind the Iron Curtain, though her letters would be read, as he put it, by both sides’ secret police—a comment he intended as a joke, although as it turned out he was right. Her roommate, Jerri, took the news more in stride. Jerri was a professor’s daughter and a professor’s niece, and her grandfather had been provost at Princeton. She fancied herself a great radical and talked incessantly of the coming revolution, but, given that she rarely attended classes and was usually high, she could not have expected to play a significant part in the struggle. Jerri made Margo promise to bring back oodles of revolutionary literature—that was what she said,
oodles
—and then she went back to her dope, which she called mezzroll. Margo’s only other real friend in Ithaca was Annalise Seaver, a blue-eyed South Carolinian. They were outsiders together on an Ivy League campus, the black girl from Westchester County and the Southern belle. Both were government majors, and both were enrolled in Niemeyer’s course. It was Annalise who raised the question Margo had not considered:

“Is Niemeyer going? Is that why he wanted to talk to you after class?”

“Why would Niemeyer be going?”

“Another girl told me the story. A couple of years ago, he had an absolute
thing
for one of his graduate assistants. Well, Niemeyer didn’t
want to try his chances on campus, so he got his buddies at State to arrange for the two of them to go to New Zealand together for a month. Supposedly, she came back pregnant.”

This caused Margo an uneasy moment: was it possible that Lorenz Niemeyer was the one who was being sent to Bulgaria, and refused to go without her? If so, she decided, she would never set foot on the plane. But she doubted it. The concern in his eyes just before he threw her to the wolves had seemed genuine.

Hardest of all was explaining to Nana. Margo called her, collect, from one of the booths across from the front desk in her dormitory foyer, and apologized that there would be no time to come home before she left for Bulgaria. But Nana, who spoke very loud because she assumed others were as deaf as she, was enthusiastic. She believed in traveling the world, and had been to Europe herself a number of times, always by ship, because those fancy airplanes were death traps—didn’t Margo read the papers?

“Get them to send you by ocean liner,” shouted Nana. “And make sure they give you a decent cabin. Oh, and tell them you want dinner at the captain’s table.”

Late that night, as her roommate slumbered noisily, Margo sat up in bed, clutching the snapshot of the father she had never met, clad in his Army uniform. She kept it in her desk drawer, along with the telegram that began, “Dear Mrs. Jesson.” They couldn’t even get the name right. It was impossible, of course, that Niemeyer would have known him. She supposed that he had mentioned her father as a kind of goad. Whatever his protestations, Niemeyer obviously wanted her to say yes.

Or else her imagination was running away with her. She thought again of the alumnus in the funny hat, and wondered whether she had really seen him twice; or even once.

“Go to sleep,” she whispered in her grandmother’s stern voice, but instead continued to study the photograph. It was wrinkled and smudged, because she had spent so many hours over the years holding it, wondering what he was like. His smile was bright and confident and, she liked to pretend, noble. Or maybe it was just that she wished he had died more nobly. The family seemed to consider the manner of Donald Jensen’s death an embarrassment. He had tried to volunteer for the war, said Nana, but they rejected him because he was colored, only
to draft him six months later. She was volunteering, too: still following in her father’s footsteps. She wasn’t sure why she felt like a fool.

In the morning, Tom drove her to the tiny Tompkins County Airport for the flight to Washington. Niemeyer was waiting in the lobby, and for a bad moment Margo was prepared to credit Annalise’s doleful speculations. But all the great man wanted was a private word before she left. They spoke in a corner, near the battered vending machines. She wanted to ask about her father, but he gave her no chance.

“I’ve been thinking things over since yesterday,” said Niemeyer. “Now, listen carefully. There’s only time to say this once. What you’re doing for them isn’t supposed to be dangerous. On the other hand, they’ve sort of thrown this thing together on the fly. A lot can go wrong even in the best-planned intelligence operation, and this one isn’t the best planned. You do understand that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Margo, voice suddenly faint.

“I don’t know what private instructions they’re going to give you, but, if the ploy goes to pieces? You don’t go back to your hotel. You don’t go to your minder. You march straight into the American consulate, nowhere else. Ask for a counselor named Ainsley. Mr. Ainsley is an associate of mine, and he’ll take care of you.” He put his good hand on her arm. “Borkland might make it all sound like sun and fun, Miss Jensen, but you’ll be behind the Iron Curtain. Remember that, and be careful.”

On the plane, she almost threw up.
Intelligence operation,
Niemeyer had said.

“There’s some kind of jurisdictional fight going on,” said the American. “Both State and the CIA want to run the operation.”

The Russian frowned. The two men were sitting in a car outside a small restaurant in Warrenton, Virginia, an hour or so from Washington. “I have never understood the chaotic nature of your bureaucracy. Surely there exist clear rules to determine the matter.”

“Rules are made to be broken, Viktor.”

“So your people are always saying. I find it a miracle that your country has survived this long.”

“Me, too.” The American laughed, but only for a second. “The point is, they’re going to put in an agent. It doesn’t matter whether Langley or Foggy Bottom winds up with the charter. Either way, we’ll be doing your work for you. You want to know who Smyslov was working for. They’ll find out, and I’ll let you know.”

The man called Viktor was uneasy. He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses. He didn’t much care for this rich country and its soft, pampered people. Certainly he didn’t like the man seated beside him. But the struggle to protect the Motherland often required compromise. Even Comrade Stalin had made temporary strategic alliances, first with the German fascists, then with the American capitalists.

“What do you know about the operation?” Viktor asked.

“Not much. Not yet. I understand that Langley is calling it
QKPARCHMENT
.”

“QK?”

“That’s the digraph for Bulgaria. I’m sure you know this stuff by heart. If it’s AE, it’s against the Soviets. You. If it’s JM, it’s Cuba.”

Viktor did indeed know the Agency’s digraphs by heart. Most Soviet intelligence officers did. Viktor had not been aware that the Americans officially conceded this. But, then, the man with whom he was negotiating was anything but official. His name, if anything at all, was Ziegler, and he represented that uniquely American species, the consultant, a man with connections everywhere and responsibilities nowhere.

“You do understand,” the Russian said, “that we will do all that we can to stop this operation.”

Ziegler’s laugh was humorless. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

A strange man, Viktor reflected. Betraying his country with such enthusiasm, when the only reward would be an intensification of the crisis. Presumably he had his reasons for cooperation, just as Viktor did.

“Tell me about the agent,” he said.

“I don’t have his identity yet, but I’m working on it.”

“And once the agent is identified?”

Again that strangely cruel laugh. “Bulgaria is on your side of the Curtain, Viktor. Your territory, your rules.”

The American left the meeting ground first. This was in accordance with their practice. Viktor returned to his borrowed vehicle and headed back toward the city, relying on his pickets to ensure that he was not being followed. He assumed that Ziegler had his own methods of detecting and avoiding surveillance, and he had no interest in them. They shared a temporary goal, to be sure, but they were enemies.

Viktor did not know precisely how contact had been established between his people in Moscow and the faction represented by the strange American. There were moments when he suspected that the approach must be a provocation, intended to create a diplomatic incident. But his superiors had ruled the task worth the risk. If matters went according to plan, the Motherland would enjoy a great success, and the cause of worldwide socialism would be immeasurably
advanced. A defeat would mean a catastrophe—not only for the Motherland but for Viktor personally, and perhaps for his family as well. He understood full well how his employers dealt with failure.

His full name was Viktor Borisovich Vaganian, and he was a captain in the counterintelligence unit of the First Chief Directorate of the Committee for State Security, commonly known in the West as the KGB. The Americans had a poor understanding of the workings of the Soviet intelligence service. The formal rank of captain meant nothing, reflecting only years of service. What mattered was the particular appointment one held in the hierarchy. Thus it was not unusual, for example, to be part of an operation in which a junior case officer who was a full colonel would take orders from a senior case officer who was a major. Vitkor was still a captain because he had been with the KGB only three years. But in those years he had developed both a particular specialty and a particular reputation. And as a member of Counterintelligence, he could, in the proper circumstances, give orders even to a general.

This authority mattered just now, and explained his presence in Washington. The Motherland was in the midst of the most important intelligence operation it had undertaken since the end of the Great Patriotic War, an operation that, if successful, would end once and for all the American strategic superiority—and there was a leak.

More than a leak.

Someone on the Soviet side intended to tell the Americans what the Soviets were doing in Cuba, and, presumably, to help them stop it. This was intolerable, and had to be prevented. Viktor and his team had been sent to Washington to trace the source, because efforts to find out the answer in Moscow were being frustrated. Whoever was betraying the country had powerful friends.

But their influence would not extend past Soviet borders. In America, Viktor could take whatever measures he deemed necessary to discover the source.

As for the agent heading to Bulgaria, well, that problem was for Viktor’s colleagues to deal with. It was just as Ziegler had said: Our territory, our rules.

“Have you ever heard of Vasily Smyslov?” asked the woman wearing the agate brooch on her jacket. She was prim and withdrawn and fifty, and dropped just enough “r”s to let you know how lucky Radcliffe was to have had her. She wore a schoolmarm bob and her father’s gold watch, and Margo had the sense that she kept the family heirlooms at home in the safe, but wore the cheap pin to work at the State Department because only new money showed off. Her name, she had announced as if in surprise, was Harrington, and her role, she said, was prep. Actually, Harrington was the fifth or sixth functionary Margo had met on her two-day trek through official Washington. Borkland had conducted her from one interview to the next, sneaking in the side entrance of some massive but anonymous government edifice, taking the freight elevator in a fancy Georgetown apartment building, and, once, crossing the back yard of a stately home just north of Washington’s unfinished cathedral. “We have to get you ready,” Borkland said. “On the other hand, you can’t actually meet the people you’re meeting.” And he smiled the warmly apologetic smile that, as Margo had learned ruefully, represented less an offer of compromise than a polite acceptance of your surrender. And so she answered questions and filled out forms and received travel documents and posed for mug shots and now, somewhere in the bowels of the Department of State, was to be briefed at last on what Harrington insisted on calling her “mission parameters.” Margo sat across from the older woman at a
conference table that would have done duty for twenty, although the two of them were alone. Unlike her other meetings, this one was conducted with a uniformed Marine outside the door, a change in routine that Margo found anything but reassuring.

“Smyslov,” Harrington repeated. “Vasily Vasiliyevich, born Moscow, R.S.F.S.R., 1921. Is that a name to you at all, my dear?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Margo.

“I read somewhere that your delightful young man is teaching you chess.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Your Tom was quite a chess player himself a couple of years ago. Went to the World Youth Championships when he was in high school. Did he mention that? Poor lamb, he finished eighteenth out of thirty. But it’s an honor to be invited, don’t you think?” Her trilling laugh was beginning to grate. Perhaps that was its purpose. “Yet your Tom has never mentioned any of the top Soviet players to you? Botvinnik? Tal? Petrosian?”

Margo hesitated. “I think Botvinnik is the world champion.”

“Why, so he is, my dear. So he is. Very well done.” She even applauded, to Margo’s secret fury. “So you have heard of one or two, it seems. But Smyslov you don’t know. Oh dear. Well, let’s get your information topped up, shall we?”