“The colony odor?”
“Entomology. Ants. You remember my interest in ants.”
Toby had in fact studied to become an entomologist before World War II moved him very far afield, to military intelligence, the OSS, and later the CIA. But he’d kept up his interest in ants, reading voraciously in the professional journals, staying in contact with an old friend of his from Harvard, E. O. Wilson, who was one of the world’s great scholars of ants. Just about the only use for ants Toby had managed to find in his life, however, was in metaphors.
“I certainly do, Toby. The colony odor?”
“When one ant greets another, she runs her antennae over the other’s body. If the other is an intruder from another species, she will be attacked. But if she’s from the same species, and just, say, a different colony, she will be accepted. Yet she’ll be offered less food until she acquires the same odor-the same pheromone-that the others in the colony have. Then she’s one of them.”
“So, am I from a different colony?” I asked impatiently.
“Have you ever seen an ant offer its food? It’s very intimate, very touching. The attack is of course very unpleasant. One, or both, dies.”
I ran my fingers over the brown fake-wood-grain-Formica-topped conference table at which I had been placed. “All right,” I said. “Now, tell me this: Who came after me the other night?”
“In Boston?”
“Correct. And ‘we don’t know’ isn’t satisfactory.”
“But accurate. We really don’t know. We do know that there’s been a leak-”
“Goddammit, Toby,” I exploded. “We have to level with each other.”
He raised his voice to a shout, which surprised me. “I am leveling with you, Ben! As I told you, since my accident in Paris, I have been in charge of this project. They call it the Oracle Project-you know how the Covert-Op boys are so damned attached to their melodramatic code names-from the original Latin oraculum, from orare, to speak. The mind speaks, doesn’t it?”
I shrugged.
“The Oracle Project is the Manhattan Project of telepathy-expensive, intensive, ultrasecret, and considered a hopeless cause by just about everyone who knows of its existence. Since the Dutch gentleman’s several months of ESP-to be precise, 133 days, before he committed suicide-we have gone through more than eight thousand experimental subjects.”
“Eight thousand?” I exclaimed.
“The vast majority of these individuals, of course, knew only that they were undergoing medical experiments, for which they were reimbursed handsomely. Of all of them, two subjects emerged with some small manifestation of ESP, but the ability faded after a day or two. With you-”
“It’s two days, and nothing has changed.”
“Excellent. Excellent.”
“But what the hell is this for? The Cold War is over, Toby, the damned-”
“Ah,” he said. “Precisely wrong. Yes, the world has changed, but it’s just as dangerous a place. The Russian threat is still there, waiting for another coup d’état or a total crash of the system, the way Weimar Germany was lying in wait for a Hitler to restore its ruined empire. The Middle East remains a caldron. Terrorism is rampant-we’re entering the age of terrorism like we’ve never seen before. We need to cultivate this ability you now have-desperately. We need agents who can divine intentions. There will always be Saddam Husseins or Muammar Qadhafis or whoever the hell else.”
“So tell me this: Why the gunfire in Boston? The Oracle Project has been under way for-what?-five years?”
“Approximately.”
“And suddenly people are shooting at me. There’s an urgency, obviously. Some people want something very badly, and very quickly. It makes no sense.”
Toby sighed, touched his fingers to the glass separating us. “There’s no more Soviet threat,” he said slowly. “Thank God. But now we’re facing a much more difficult, more diffuse threat: hundreds of thousands of unemployed East Bloc spies-watchers, wet workers-a real nasty bunch, many of them.”
“That’s not an explanation,” I replied. “Those are assets. Who the hell do they work for? And why?”
“Damn it,” Toby thundered. “Who do you think took out Edmund Moore?”
I stared at him. Toby’s eyes were wide, frightened, teary. “You tell me,” I said very quietly. “Who killed him?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, the public version is that he swallowed the barrel of his gun, a 1957 Agency-issue Smith & Wesson Model 39.”
“And?”
“The Model 39 is chambered for the 9mm Parabellum, right? It’s the first 9mm made by an American manufacturer.”
“What the hell are you getting at?”
“The bullet that penetrated Ed Moore’s brain came from the special 9mm × 18 cartridge. The cartridge used in the 9mm Makarov pistol. Follow me?”
“Soviet,” I said. “Vintage late 1950s. Or-”
“Or East German. The cartridge was manufactured for the Pistole M. East German. I don’t think Ed Moore would have used ammunition issued by the East German secret police in his old Agency pistol. Do you?”
“But the goddamned Stasi doesn’t exist anymore, Toby!”
“East Germany doesn’t exist. The Stasi doesn’t exist. But Stasi assets exist. And someone is hiring them. Someone is using them. We need you, Ben.”
“Yes,” I said, raising my voice. “Obviously. But to do what, dammit?”
He went through his ritual of extracting a pack of Rothmans, tapping it against the side of his wheelchair until one protruded, lighting it, then speaking fuzzily through the smoke.
“We want you to locate the last head of the KGB.”
“Vladimir Orlov.”
He nodded.
“But surely you know his location? With all the Agency’s resources…?”
“We know only that he’s somewhere in northern Italy. Tuscany. That’s it.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“I never divulge sources and methods,” he said with a crooked smile. “Actually, Orlov is a sick man. He’s been seeing a cardiologist in Rome. That much we know. He’s seen this fellow for years, since he first visited Rome in the late 1970s. This doctor treats a number of world leaders, with great discretion. Orlov trusts him.
“Also, we know that after his consultations with this cardiologist, he is driven back to some undisclosed location in Tuscany. His drivers so far have been admirably skilled at shaking the tail.”
“So do a black-bag job.”
“On the Italian cardiologist? We tried his office in Rome. No success; he must keep the files on Orlov well hidden.”
“And if I find Orlov?”
“You’re Harrison Sinclair’s son-in-law. Married to Hal’s daughter. It’s not entirely implausible for you to have business with him. He will be suspicious, but you can work it. Once you’re in his presence, we want you to find out everything about whatever it was that he and Hal Sinclair discussed. Everything. Did Hal really steal a fortune? What did Orlov have to do with it? You speak Russian, and with your ‘talent’-”
“He doesn’t have to say a word.”
“In one fell swoop you may be able to locate the missing fortune and clear Hal Sinclair’s name. Now, it’s entirely possible that what you learn about Hal will not please you.”
“Unlikely.”
“No, Ben. You do not want to believe that Harrison Sinclair was a crook, nor does Alex Truslow, nor do I. But prepare yourself for the possibility that this is what you’ll discover, repugnant though it may be. This assignment will not be without risks.”
“From whom?”
He leaned back in his wheelchair. “The most treacherous people in the intelligence business are one’s own. You know, there was a great nineteenth-century entomologist named Auguste Forel who once observed that the greatest enemies of ants are-other ants. The greatest enemies of spies are other spies.”