Denisov handed him the security card and placed his thumb under the light. The young man examined the whorls in the thumb, the whorls in the picture of the thumb on the card. Denisov knew him: He was a second cousin to Brezhnev, through his wife’s family. Perhaps, he too, was not employable elsewhere — or perhaps he was merely secure, the second man at the gate of the zoo who examined your tickets.
“Enter,” the young man said.
Denisov put the card in his pocket and turned the handle of the last door and entered the office of the chief of operations of the Committee for External Observation and Resolution.
Gogol glanced up, nodded to a chair, and returned to the file in the manila folder on his vast, empty desk.
They did not greet each other.
Denisov sat down and noticed that both the space heaters and air conditioners were operating. The room was cool and dry, without windows.
Gogol was thin with almost Oriental features drawn finely on his flat face. Denisov did not understand how a child from the Ukraine — he knew that much about Gogol — looked so much like an Asian Soviet. He was certainly not from Ukrainian stock: He was almost hairless, his eyebrows thinly etched on the ridge of bone that protruded above the deep, brown eyes. He seemed like nothing so much as what he was: a man made for this game, a man for secrets.
The cold room at the end of the dark hall. Final doll in the series; final reality.
“This man,” Gogol said, his voice raspy as sandpaper, breaking the silence as though it had not existed and overwhelmed the senses a moment before. He pushed a black-and-white photograph across the expanse of the desk to Denisov who was forced to half rise to take it. He studied the photograph, memorizing the face and background depicted, and then he placed it back on the desk top, carefully out of Gogol’s reach.
“Thomas Dooley,” Denisov said.
Another man might have registered surprise at Denisov’s memory but Gogol merely inclined his head slightly. All his movements were small and economical. “You remember him.”
“Quite a long time ago. The first posting I had after the Language Institute, when I came to the section. It was in Laos, when I was liaison and courier to our man in Vientiane. Doctor Thomas Dooley.” Denisov paused, more for effect than for anything else. He must not show Gogol how easily memory worked, how much of a trick it was. “He was one of the most famous white men in Laos at the time. That would be… 1957, I think.”
Gogol said, “A medical doctor.” He made a face. “Famous. A man from the United States who became a hero. And not until recently did anyone admit he was an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Denisov waited, his hands folded in his lap. He knew all this but Gogol was building toward something, like a storyteller.
“He made weekly reports,” Gogol said, “on movements of the Pathet Lao. It was an unusual situation because he had a great reputation both inside Laos and especially in the United States.”
“Mystical,” said Denisov.
Gogol frowned.
“Mystical,” Denisov repeated.
“He died of cancer in 1959 and the President then, Eisenhower, awarded him a medal. None of this — this that we know of him, about his connection with the CIA — was exposed then.”
“And if it had been,” Denisov said, “what purpose would it have served?”
Both men lapsed into an uneasy silence; the air conditioner thumped into the cooling mode and they listened to the condenser crackling. Denisov felt his feet becoming warm from the heat of the space heater set up along the baseboard.
Gogol opened the second file on his wide desk and this time he shoved the entire contents across to Denisov. Again, Denisov was obliged to rise awkwardly and retrieve it.
It contained another black-and-white photograph of a young man in the long cassock of a priest. The features were open and smiling in the bright sunlight. The young man was thin, nearly gaunt, and his face was unmarked, like a new chalkboard.
Denisov began to read the attached report printed on yellow paper when Gogol again interrupted, his dry voice scratching out sounds above the hum of the air conditioner.
“Leo Tunney. Also a young man at that time. A priest in the Roman Church who belongs to one of their religious orders, called the Order of the Fathers of the Holy Word. He was sent to Laos and Cambodia at the time Doctor Dooley was being sent home, to treat his cancer.”
Denisov searched his memory. “Sent by his order? This religious order?” he asked.
“Yes. But there was more than that. It was not coincidence that this priest was sent to Laos at the time Doctor Dooley was sent to the United States.”
“No?”
More silence. Denisov had played the game very often; he waited and stared placidly at the nervous man across the desk from him.
Gogol said, “No. The order, this Fathers of the Holy Word. We have another file on them, separately. We have all the records.” He smiled. “Since 1948, they have used their religious pretexts to act as agents for the Central Intelligence Agency in Asia. They have headquarters now in the United States, in Clearwater, in Florida.”
“Where?”
“You will discover that soon enough.”
For a moment, Denisov was surprised and let the emotion cross his face. It had been a long time, yet he had known from the moment Luriey summoned him that he was going back into the field again.
And to the United States, a place he had read about, heard about, talked about, probed in a thousand books — and never seen.
“When I was in Laos,” he began carefully, “I was not aware of this order. Rather, I was aware of it but not the connection to the CIA.”
“No? Perhaps you should have been, especially in your position there.”
“Your predecessor, Gogol, never thought to inform his agents of any but a few facts pertaining to the mission. My ignorance might be lamentable now but it is understandable.”
Gogol made a dry noise and Denisov glanced down at the file again. He read the yellow sheet slowly, twice, and then closed the folder and placed it back on Gogol’s desk.
“Tunney was captured by the Pathet Lao in 1961. What happened after that?”
“Yes,” said Gogol.
Denisov waited, hands in his lap.
“In the time since his disappearance, despite our own efforts and despite the efforts by the American espionage agencies, no one could find him. We assumed he had died.”
“And he hadn’t.”
The words came from Denisov flat and certain. Gogol now seemed surprised but Denisov did not explain: The nature of Gogol’s statement had dictated the guess.
“You’re right, of course, Denisov. Not dead. Discovered five days ago, when he literally walked into the city of Bangkok from the Cambodian jungle border. No papers, no explanation. Still, in fact, a secret. The CIA took him to the United States and he has been in Washington for the past two days, in a hotel room there. They are debriefing him but we can’t get the slightest flutter on what has happened and why have they brought him back from the dead, as it were.”
“Did they do it?”
“If this wasn’t planned, why has it happened?”
“And that is what we want to know, Gogol?”
“Yes.”
Again, silence, made more palpable by the humming of the air conditioner.
“But you must have been aware of this,” Gogol said at last.
“I wasn’t.”
“You didn’t monitor this news? On your shortwave radio? It has been broadcast on the BBC—”
Denisov opened his hands. “The radio is broken. It has been broken for a month. And it’s impossible to find the parts I need for it.”
Gogol smiled. “Is that the truth?”