2
New York
Charlie Stone mounted the steps of the distinguished red brick town-house on a quiet, tree-lined block on the Upper East Side. Although it was nearly afternoon rush hour, it was still sunny, the sensuous amber light of a fall day in New York. He entered the high-ceilinged, marble-floored foyer, and pressed the single door buzzer.
He shifted his weight from foot to foot while they verified his identity by means of the surveillance camera discreetly mounted on the lobby wall. The Foundation’s elaborate security precautions had annoyed Stone until the day he caught sight of the working conditions over at Langley – the cheap gray wall-to-wall carpeting and the endless corridors – and he almost got down on his knees and shouted a hosanna.
The Parnassus Foundation was the name given, by a CIA wag no doubt enamored of Greek mythology, to a clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency charged with the analysis of the Agency’s most closely held intelligence secrets. For a number of reasons, chiefly the belief of one former Director of Central Intelligence that the Agency should not be entirely consolidated in Langley, Virginia, Parnassus was situated in a graceful five-story townhouse on East 66th Street in New York City, a building that had been specially converted to repel any electronic or microwave efforts to eavesdrop.
The program was enormously well funded. It had been set up under William Colby after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the so-called Church Committee hearings of the 1970s) tore the Agency apart. Colby recognized that the CIA needed to attract experts to help synthesize intelligence, which had traditionally been the Agency’s weak spot. Parnassus grew from a few million dollars’ worth of funding under Colby to several hundred million under William Casey and then William Webster. It engaged the services of only some twenty-five brilliant minds, paid them inordinately well, and cleared them for almost the highest level of intelligence. Some of them worked on Peking, some on Latin America, some on NATO.
Stone worked on the Soviet Union. He was a Kremlinologist, which he often considered about as scientific a discipline as reading tea leaves. The head of the program, Saul Ansbach, liked to call Stone a genius, which Charlie privately knew was hyperbolic. He was no genius; he simply loved puzzles, loved putting together scraps of information that didn’t seem to fit and staring at them long enough for a pattern to emerge.
And he was good, no question about it. The way baseball greats have a feeling for the sweet spot of the bat. Stone had an understanding of how the Kremlin worked, which was, after all, the darkest mystery.
It had been Stone who, in 1984, had predicted the rise of a dark-horse candidate in the Politburo named Mikhail S. Gorbachev, when just about everyone in the American intelligence community had his chips on other older and more established candidates. That was Stone’s legendary PAE #121, the initials standing for Parnassus Analytical Estimate; it had gained him great renown – among the four or five who knew his work.
He had once casually suggested, in a footnote to one of his reports, that the President should be physically affectionate with Gorbachev when the two met, as demonstrative as Leonid Brezhnev used to be. Stone felt sure this sort of gesture would win over Gorbachev, who was far more “Western” (and therefore reserved) than his predecessors. And then Stone had watched, gratified, as Reagan threw his arm around Gorbachev in Red Square. Trivial stuff, maybe, but in such small gestures is international diplomacy born.
When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, almost everyone at the Agency was caught by surprise – even Stone. But he had virtually foreseen it, from signals out of Moscow he’d parsed, communications between Gorbachev and the East Germans that the Agency had intercepted. Not much hard data, but a lot of surmise. That prediction sealed his reputation as one of the best the Agency had.
But there was more to it than seat-of-the-pants instinct. It involved pick-and-shovel work, too. All kinds of rumors came out of Moscow; you had to consider the source and weigh each one. And there were little signals, tiny details.
Just yesterday morning, for instance. A Politburo member had given an interview to the French newspaper Le Monde hinting that a particular Party secretary might lose his post, which would mean the rise of another, who was much more hard-line, much more stridently anti-American. Well, Stone had discovered that the Politburo member who’d given the interview had actually been cropped out of a group photograph that ran in Pravda, which meant that a number of his colleagues were gunning for him, which meant that, most likely, the man was just blowing smoke. Stone’s record of accuracy wasn’t perfect, but it was somewhere around ninety percent, and that was damn good. He found his work exhilarating, and he was blessed with an ability to concentrate intensely when he wanted to.
Finally, there was a buzz, and he stepped forward to pull open the inner doors.
By the time he passed through the vestibule’s black-and-white harlequin-tiled floor and walked up the broad staircase, the receptionist was already standing there, waiting for him.
“Back so soon, sweetie?” Connie said with a dry cackle, immediately followed by a loose bronchial cough. She was a bleached blonde in her late forties, a divorcée who dressed, unconvincingly, as if she were twenty-five; who chain-smoked Kool menthols and called each of the men at Parnassus “sweetie.” She looked like the sort of woman you would meet sitting on a bar stool. Hers was not a difficult job: mostly, she sat at her desk and received top-secret courier deliveries from the Agency and talked on the phone with her friends. Yet, paradoxically, she was as discreet as they came, and she oversaw the Foundation’s connections to Langley and the outside world with an iron discipline.
“Can’t stay away,” Stone said without breaking stride.
“Fancy outfit,” Connie said, indicating with a grand sweep of her hand Stone’s dirt-encrusted jeans, stained sweatshirt, and electric-green Scarpa climbing shoes.
“There’s a new dress code, Connie – didn’t they tell you?” he said, proceeding down the long Oriental rug that ran the length of the corridor to Saul Ansbach’s office.
He passed his own office, outside of which sat his secretary, Sherry. She had been born and raised in South Carolina but, having ten years ago spent one summer in London when she was eighteen, she had somehow acquired a reasonable facsimile of a British accent. She looked up and raised her eyebrows inquiringly.
Stone shrugged broadly. “Duty calls,” he said.
“Indeed,” Sherry agreed, sounding like a West End barmaid.
Saul Ansbach, the head of the Parnassus office, was seated behind his large mahogany desk when Stone entered. He stood up quickly and shook Stone’s hand.
“I’m sorry about this, Charlie.” He was a large, beefy man in his early sixties with steel-gray hair cut en brosse and heavy black-framed glasses, the sort of man usually described as rumpled. “You know I wouldn’t call you back if it weren’t important,” Saul said, gesturing to the black wooden rail-backed Notre Dame chair beside his desk.
Ansbach had been a quarterback at Notre Dame, and he had never quite fit in with the proper, careful Ivy League types that once dominated the CIA. Perhaps that was why they had sent him to New York to run Parnassus. Still, as with most CIA men of his generation, his clothes were more Ivy League than the president of Harvard’s: a blue button-down shirt, a rep tie, a dark suit that had to have come from J. Press.
Ansbach’s office was dominated by a marble fireplace almost four feet high. It was suffused by the orange light of the late afternoon, which sifted in through the double-glazed, soundproof windows.