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Petersberg and beyond to Finland. Later, on the Finnair flight from Helsinki to Paris, Nikolayev thought that by now his abandoned car would have either been stolen or certainly stripped to the bare chasis.

It would make it more difficult for the SVR to pick up his trail when Budakov reported him missing. A lot would depend on how soon they discovered that he’d switched files, but in the meantime he was able to relax for the first time in days with a glass of good white wine, safe for the moment. There had been no one to notice him parking his car two blocks from the Leningradsky vokzal, packing the file in his overnight bags in the trunk, destroying his old passport and papers after retrieving his new identity from a hollow behind a body panel and going the rest of the way on foot. Just another old man on a journey; with a serious heart problem and the fear that he might be too late to stop what could well turn out to be a blood bath from which no one would come out the winner; not the United States and certainly not Russia. Everything depended on what was in the file names, operational details, timetables. All that would have to wait until he reached Paris, and safety. But Martyrs had lain dormant for all these years, another day or two would not make a difference. Hopefully.

THREE

PROMISES

The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise.

Moss Hart

SUNDAY

FOUR

BUT SOMETHING OR SOMEONE WAS COMING AGAIN.

CHEVY CHASE

It was the beginning of one of the coldest, snowiest winters in Washington, D.C.‘s history. The house backing on the fifteenth fairway of the Chevy Chase Country Club was long, low; a modern colonial with a swimming pool, covered now, the patio snowbound; but with long lawns and bright flowers in hanging baskets from the broad eaves in the summer. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac of similar houses seven miles north of the capital. A few minutes before noon of a Sunday morning a stereo softly played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Kirk Cullough McGarvey was seated at his desk in his study reading copies of some never-been-published letters of Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire that an old friend at the Sorbonne in Paris had sent over on loan. Kathleen, his wife, was at church, and he was waiting for her to come home. As had happened several times in the past hour, his concentration was broken, and he looked up, his wide, honest, gray-green eyes narrowing in concentration. Had he heard something? He listened intently, but there was nothing except for normal house sounds; the rush of warm air through the vents, the music. Falling snow blanketed sounds from outside. No one was sneaking up on them from across the golf course as had happened before. There was no reason for it this time. He got up and went into the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee, his moccasins whisper soft on the tile floor. He looked out across the snow-covered fairway. No one there. No tire tracks or footprints. And nothing from the air; visibility was less than a few hundred feet. He was a tall, well-built man with the rugby player’s physique, a thick shock of brown hair starting to go gray at the temples, and an air about him that when he was around everything would be okay. He exuded self-confidence, and the easy, relaxed manner of the consummate professional that he was, even dressed in faded jeans and a worn pullover sweater. But sooner or later paranoia comes to all intelligence officers, even the pros. It was the old line. Awareness, heightened perceptions, hair trigger reflexes, an automatic processing of information as fast as it arrived to find the out-of-place bits and pieces that if you were not careful could suddenly rise up to kill you.

Sometimes he felt like a besieged king who was trying to make this place a fortress. A lot of Americans felt the same since the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. It had almost become a national obsession. In the stair hall he looked up at the landing.

The Russian clock he’d been given from a Typhoon class submarine kept perfect time except that its red second hand was permanently stuck at four. He’d not gotten around to taking it to a clock maker From some points of view the world was a more dangerous place than it had ever been. Terrorists could strike anywhere. But as terrible as that had become, no country seemed to be on the verge of starting an all-out global thermonuclear war. Not North Korea or Iran, and not Pakistan or India. That’s what the Cold War had been all about, he thought, staring at the Russian clock. We won, the bad guys lost. But something was coming. He could feel and taste the menace on the air like smoke from a not-so-distant forest fire. At fifty he had been appointed as the youngest director in the history of the Agency; a job that he was uneasily settling into since Roland Murphy had retired two months ago. His Senate confirmation hearings were scheduled to start on Tuesday, and he could not say which he dreaded most, being rejected or being confirmed.

He wanted out. After twenty-five years of service he wanted to go back to teaching Voltaire, even to bored young undergraduates who wouldn’t recognize a line worth remembering if it came up and bit them on the ass. Good years, some of them, and very bad some of the others. In his mind’s eye he could see the face of every man he’d ever killed in the line of duty. Bad men all of them, but just men for all that.

They’d been in pain, surprised that the end had come; the looks haunted him every day of his life. Especially at night when he couldn’t sleep; especially at this moment when he couldn’t concentrate. “I’ve seen things and done things that I’m not proud of,” he’d told Katy one late night when he’d awakened in a cold sweat. She’d been holding him in her arms like she would a troubled child. “Things that I can never take back.” It was a sentiment that Minnesota senator Thomas Hammond, Jr.” would agree with. Hammond, who was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was telling anyone who would listen that McGarvey was exactly the wrong sort of person to become DCI. “This is a job for a man of the very highest moral principles. A wild card is exactly the kind of person we do not want providing intelligence summaries to the leadership of this nation. He is a bad apple in an already suspect barrel. The CIA needs to be cleared of the thugs and criminals who have given this country a bad name.” But something or someone was coming again. Goddammit, he knew it. He went to the corridor and at the head of the stairs glanced toward the bedroom at the other end of the house where their daughter Elizabeth used to stay when she came over. Now she had a husband, and in a few months there would be a baby. After all the sadness in their lives, her pregnancy was an oasis for them all. There’d been nothing in the directorate summaries over the past few weeks to indicate that trouble was brewing.

Not so much as a hint. McGarvey sincerely wanted to be happy with his life, optimistic about his future with Katy. But he couldn’t be. Not yet. Something, some whisper of trouble nagged at the edge of his consciousness. Once a spy always a spy: Was it as simple as that?

Sometimes in the field he would develop an almost preternatural awareness of his surroundings: a van with silvered windows; a car with too many antennae; the glint of binocular lenses on a rooftop; a window shade open when it was usually closed; a stranger in the crowd; something, an accumulation of things. Anomalies. The pieces that no longer seemed to fit the puzzle.