BOOK I (24 page)

Various highly placed people would phone to see if progress had been made. There would be pregnant pauses on the other end of the line when G. Sprowls hedged. The impression would then be conveyed that time was of the essence. If, as the superficial facts seemed to suggest, the Sisters had set in motion an operation on their own, the aristocrats in the Company's front office wanted to know about it, and fast. The point being that they could then exercise the option of either cancelling it-or taking credit for it.

Which is why G. Sprowls decided, several days before he was as ready as he would have liked to be, that the time had come to hook Francis up to a lie detector.

"I thought you said you wouldn't get around to this until the end of the week," Francis remarked absently as the technician inflated the rubber tube around his chest that would measure his breathing rhythm. Francis might have been getting his annual electrocardiogram for all the attention he paid.

G. Sprowls disregarded the comment, as usual. "Is that too tight?" he asked, his half-smile frozen on his face.

"Not at all," Francis said politely.

The technician, a man in his early sixties, hovered over the black box so that he could read the trace produced by the three styluses. "Anytime you are, I am,' he told G. Sprowls.

"For what it's worth," Francis said pleasantly, "I am ready too."

G. Sprowls turned to the first page in his loose-leaf book. He studied what he had written for several minutes, then nodded at the technician, who threw a switch setting the styluses in motion. "We'll begin with some control questions, if you don't mind," G. Sprowls said. "Would you be so kind as to state your full name as it appears on your birth certificate."

"Francis Augustus," Francis said, and he added his family name.

"State your marital status."

Francis adjusted the knot of his mauve bow tie. "Happily, blissfully, single," he replied.

"State your age, your home address, the model of the car you drive."

II am, at last count, forty-four years of age. I live at-" He gave the address of his downtown residence hotel. "I am the proud owner of a rather beat-up but serviceable fifty-nine Ford."

The technician looked up from the trace and nodded.

"We will turn now," G. Sprowls said, "to the details surrounding the defection from Russia of Feliks Arkantevich Turov, known also as the Potter."

"By all means," Francis agreed heartily.

"Will you tell us where the idea that the Potter might want to defect originated?"

"Either Carroll or I, I forget who, noticed an item in one of the West German Y summaries that mentioned that Turov had been put out to pasture. We had more or less followed his career; we were, you might say, fans of his. We knew he had suffered a series of setbacks in recent months."

"Can you he more specific?" G. Sprowls ordered,

"I can try to be," Francis agreed, flashing an innocent smile. "Three of the sleepers that Turov had trained had bitten the dust, as they say in the wild west. Turov was bound to be blamed for their loss."

"You and Carroll contributed to the Potter's downfall when you ferreted out one of his sleepers, I remember."

"So did you," Francis shot back. "We exposed him, you broke him."

G. Sprowls ignored him. "Aside from the loss of the three sleepers, and the subsequent disgrace of the Potter, was there any other reason to think he might be ripe for defection?"

Francis swallowed a yawn. "We knew in a very general way that he was married to a woman much younger than he was who was likely to put a great deal of pressure on him."

"What kind of pressure?"

"The money that had been available, the apartment overlooking the Moscow River, the chauffeured limousine, the access to Western products, all of these would disappear. If he wanted to keep the woman, and we suspected he did, he would have to come up with the equivalent."

G. Sprowls glanced at the technician, who lifted his eyes to gaze through the upper part of his bifocals. "So far, so good," he said.

"Let's talk about authorization for a moment," G. Sprowls suggested.

"Let's Francis repeated amiably.

"The effort to get the Potter to defect was authorized, according to my notes, by the Deputy Director for Operations. Is that your understanding?"

"We proposed, he disposed."

"When you proposed, as you put it, did you also tell the Deputy Director precisely what you expected to get from the Potter if he could be induced to defect?"

"Absolutely," Francis replied.

"His version is that you said you expected to get odds and ends."

"Odds and ends are what we thought we would get," Francis agreed. A smile of transparent innocence spread across his features. "You are not thinking this through," he chastised G. Sprowls. "If we had been operating behind the Deputy Director's back, why would we have sent our man Friday to Vienna to skim off the cream? Surely one of us would have gone in his place."

G. Sprowls leaned forward. It was precisely this point that baffled him.

"The fact of the matter is that your man Friday did skim off the cream,"

he went on. "The fact of the matter is that he was acting on your specific instructions. The fact of the matter is that you wound up with more than odds and ends."

Francis shook his head in mild frustration. "The Potter trained sleepers. What could have been more logical than to ask him, at the moment he came across the frontier, if he would have the kindness to give us, as a token of his good faith, the names and addresses of any sleepers who might still be in circulation?"

"You acknowledge that that was the cream that your man Friday was sent to skim off?"

"We would have been idiots if we hadn't sent him to try," Francis insisted.

G. Sprowls flipped to the next page in his loose-leaf book and studied it for a long moment. "Your man Friday," he said without looking up,

"has told us that the Potter gave him the name and address and awakening signal of a Soviet sleeper living in Brooklyn Heights, and that he passed this information on to you. Is his version of events correct?"

"Perfectly correct, yes."

"Yet your Op Proposal updater filed with the Deputy Director, a photocopy of which I have before me, contained no mention of the fact that you had come into possession of this information," G. Sprowls drawled.

It struck Francis that G. Sprowls tended to slip into a drawl when he thought he had a nibble and was starting to gently reel in the line. "No mention at all," he acknowledged cheerfully.

"Of course you can account for this discrepancy," G. Sprowls said in his slow drawl.

"Of course."

G. Sprowls looked up from his loose-leaf notebook and issued a formal invitation. "Feel free to do so," he said.

Francis actually sighed here. "We naturally attempted to verify the information when our man Friday- our former man Friday is probably more accurate- passed it on to us," he said. "There was a person by that name living at the address in Brooklyn Heights specified by the Potter-Except that he had decamped-Skedaddled. Flown the coop. A discreet phone call elicited the information that he was off somewhere on a business trip. Quite obviously, there were only two ways of confirming the Potter's information. We could have hooked the Potter up to one of these contraptions"- Francis cast a benign smile at the black box behind him-"over in Austria. Except the Potter had slipped through our man Friday's not very sticky fingers and was no longer available. Or we could wait for the alleged sleeper to return to his nest in Brooklyn Heights, then send him the awakening signal, along with an order or two-tell him to scratch his ass in front of the information booth at Grand Central station at high noon, for instance-and see if he responded. In any case, it would have been ridiculously premature for us to have put any of this into our Op Proposal updater-surely even you can understand that. People of our caliber only deal with confirmed information.

Consider this: perhaps the Potter was not a defector, but someone planted on us in order to make us swallow false information. Perhaps he was a genuine defector who, once across, decided to give us bubbles that burst when you tried to get a grip on them. Perhaps our former man Friday was inventing the whole thing."

G. Sprowis looked Francis in the eye. "And you are willing to state categorically that neither you nor Carroll awakened the alleged sleeper and sent him on his merry way?

"Categorically, yes."

The technician shrugged uncertainly. "Could he make a positive declaration? 'I state categorically that neither I nor to my knowledge Carroll'-that sort of thing-"

G. Sprowls focused his half-smile on Francis.

Francis exhaled sharply through his nostrils and nodded. "I state categorically that neither I nor to my knowledge Carroll awakened the alleged sleeper residing in Brooklyn Heights and dispatched him on a mission. Does that do the trick?"

On the spur of the moment (the question was not in his loose-leaf book!

G. Sprowls asked, "Have you had any contact with agents or representatives of another country?"

Francis face glistened with innocence as he replied, "I have not had any contact with agents or representatives of another country."

G. Sprowls glanced at the technician, who bent over the styluses scratching away in the black box. Finally the technician looked up.

"He's telling the truth," he concluded.

"All of it and nothing but," Francis added cheerfully, "so help me God."

And he added mischievously, "You are barking up the wrong tree."

Carroll didn't fare as well as Francis when G. Sprowls put him through his paces that very same afternoon. "He's lying," the technician announced evenly, staring at the telltale traces through the bottom half of his bifocals.

G. Sprowls cleared his throat. Curiously, he seemed embarrassed for Carroll, almost as if he had stripped him of his clothing. "So you are up to something after all," he said.

A muscle twitched in Carroll's cheek. "We are not up to anything we should not be up to," he declared.

"Whatever you're doing," G. Sprowls filled in the gap, "you have authorization to do it?"

"We are good soldiers," Carroll insisted, his eyes staring vacantly at some point on the far wall. "We are patriots-the word is not used lightly. We serve the best interests of our country in ways that our superiors indicate to us." Unable to control himself any longer, Carroll burst out, "The first war I fought in was the wrong war. The next one will be the right war. We must at all costs be prepared for it."

"I see," G. Sprowls said, although he didn't see at all what Carroll was getting at. He decided to let the business of wrong wars and right wars go for the moment, and concentrate on the question of authorization. If he could discover who Carroll thought had given him authorization, perhaps he could uncover what Carroll felt authorized to do.

"It is fairly simple," Carroll replied in answer to another question. He seemed eager to justify himself, "Things were said by highly placed people in public places-at in-house pours, at a reception for a British colleague, at a medal-pinning ceremony honoring the fellow down the corridor from us who was retiring."

G. Sprowls appeared to sympathize completely with Carroll. "You read between the lines," he suggested in a slow drawl.

"The Director was obviously in no position to give an explicit order,"

Carroll said. "So he did the next best thing. It is out of the realm of possibility that he would have said what he did if he hadn't expected someone to take his words to heart; and if he hadn't expected someone to act on them." He arched his neck to relieve the pressure from his starched collar. "We are, Francis and I, old hands. We were, as Francis likes to say, pointed in the right direction. Where is the crime if we marched?"

"When you marched," G. Sprowls drawled softly, his half-smile inviting confession, offering absolution, "you mean that you organized the defection of the Potter in order to get access to the identity and awakening signal of a Soviet sleeper; that you then used this signal to awaken him and send him off on an assignment that you knew your superiors would approve of."

For an endless moment the styluses scraped noisily away in the black box. Again a muscle twitched in Carroll's cheek. "That's roughly it," he acknowledged wearily.

On a hunch, G. Sprowls slipped in a question. "Have you had any contact with agents or representatives of another country?"

Carroll closed his eyes in frustration. "You don't understand anything I've told you, in the end," he said.

"Would you like me to repeat the question?" G. Sprowls asked.

"No contact with agents or representatives of another country," Carroll said in a dull voice.

The technician looked up at G. Sprowls and nodded. Carroll was telling the truth.

"And Francis is involved in this with you?" G. Sprowls wanted to know.

"Francis speaks for Francis," Carroll snapped. "I speak for myself."

"About the assignment you gave to the Soviet sleeper," G. Sprowls said casually.

"When he carries it out," Carroll replied carefully, self-justification unfurling across his face like a flag, "you will know it instantly.

Everyone will know it instantly. People we don't even know will stop us in the corridor and shake our hands."

The technician tried to catch G. Sprowls's attention; to indicate to him, with a roll of his eyes, that Carroll was stark raving mad. But G.

Sprowls was concentrating on making Carroll think he sympathized with him. Exaggerating his drawl, he started to pose another question.

Carroll cut him off. "I can't tell you any more than I've already told you," he said curtly. And he closed his mouth in a way that indicated he had no intention of opening it again in the immediate future.

G. Sprowls ate cold sandwiches in his office that evening, and worked late into the night. Seeing the light through his transom, the night security officer knocked on the door to make sure he had authorization.

G. Sprowls, irritated at the interruption, showed him a chit signed by none other than the Director himself.