“He appeared far less familiar with his surroundings once he got to Brown University campus. He stopped several times to read the signposts indicating the way to the various faculties, and he also asked students and staff members he encountered for directions. He eventually found his way to the Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, a small, three-story, brick building, with ivy-covered walls. On display at the entrance to the building is a splendid Greek marble statue, the half-turned torso of a muscular man, probably swinging a sword or wielding a dagger, on the offensive. But you can’t tell for sure, because his arms are missing. Anyway, the closest member of the surveillance team saw Langham enter the building and walk up the stairs. He emerged again a few minutes later. The team then continued to follow him, leaving two of its members behind. Langham walked quickly back to his car, delayed his departure for a few minutes, presumably to activate the GPS device and enter his next destination, and then drove straight to Logan Airport in Boston. Like I said, we examined the GPS device and Langham did in fact enter only two destinations, Brown University in Rhode Island and the airport in Boston.
“And now,” Bill said with the self-satisfaction of a gifted storyteller rather than the dignified demeanor befitting an espionage official, “we return to the surveillance team members who were still at Brown. As you recall, both had remained outside the Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. Two young team members, a guy and a girl. Their instructions were very clear. Zero friction with their surroundings. So they didn’t enter the institute, didn’t make any inquiries, and didn’t check who was in the building. But they did exactly what they were supposed to do. They verified that the building had only one exit, and then took up a position on a bench some distance away from it. They sat there holding hands for three hours and looked just like any other student couple on campus, he in his sweatshirt and she with her red baseball cap and blonde ponytail, and they photographed everyone who either entered or left the building. They then called in a second couple to replace them and continue to monitor the entrance to the institute. The objective was to then analyze the photographs and pick out the people who were in the building at the time Langham had gone in. The photographs of the people who entered the building were intended to rule out some of those who were also captured leaving it. Only those who left the building but weren’t caught on camera going in were marked as suspects, as they were already in the building when Langham went in. We ruled out a group of eight young men and women who were indeed in the building when Langham went inside but were subsequently identified by the university’s chief security officer as students who were attending a seminar class in a lecture hall on the ground floor. You recall Langham was seen going up the stairs immediately on entering the building. In other words, whatever he did there, it wasn’t anything on the ground floor. The professor giving the seminar class at the time was also thus removed from the list of suspects.”
Bill was telling his story as if he had been a member of the surveillance team himself. Michael was sure he must have met with the team at least two or three times before arriving at an exact understanding of how everything had gone down, until he felt as if he himself had been there on the shaded lawn in front of the institute and until he had a clear grasp of the surveillance operation down to its very last detail. Someone like him surely went to Rhode Island himself to feel the campus slowly seep into his bones. That’s what he would have done, anyway. The place, any place, tells you its story. Teaches you things that are impossible to learn from afar.
Bill continued. “The results were surprising. Aside from the lecturer and the eight seminar students, there were only four other people in the Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at the time of Langham’s brief visit. Three researchers and the institute’s legendary secretary, whose name, if I’m not mistaken, is Mrs. Ascot-Giles.” He wasn’t mistaken. “The three researchers were two professors, Professor Julian Hart and Professor Linda Baer, and a doctoral student, a young German man by the name of Kurt Assenheim. From Darmstadt originally.”
“So what do we have?” Aharon asked, and then immediately answered. “On the one hand, Cobra’s handler, a man, in his fifties at least, a Russian intelligence officer deep undercover, an expert on the subject of the ancient world, or so he purports to be, who’s been living in the United States for a very long time, probably on the East Coast, or some other cold location, where it snows at Christmas. And on the other hand, a courier for the Russian intelligence service who meets briefly with someone from the Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. One of four possible suspects flagged by the FBI and the CIA. Probably someone in the service of the Russians. But we’re obviously groping around in the dark. It’s nice after all to tie loose ends together, but we all know there’s no definite link between the Cobra affair and the Russian agent in Rhode Island, and Cobra’s handler could very well be at Yale or Harvard or the University of Chicago or in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan or a thousand other places whose names I don’t even know.”
“Before you rush into a summation, dear Aharon, you’d be wise to listen to the rest of the story,” Bill said. “Look, we have just four suspects. Two women and two men. A very simple process of elimination: You’re not looking for a woman, as Cobra’s handler is a man. And of the two men, only one can be relevant, since the German is too young. We conducted a thorough inquiry, the FBI and ourselves. Because we were convinced we had stumbled onto something big. Think,” and he turned to look at the three people sitting in the room, “we know that Thomas Langham is working in the service of Russian intelligence. We know that he came to the United States to carry out an assignment of some kind at the Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University in Rhode Island. He did nothing else at all between the time he arrived at Logan Airport and the time of his departure from there, less than forty-eight hours later. His destination thus was clearly Brown University. They didn’t even bother to fabricate a cover for him: He didn’t participate in a conference, didn’t engage in a prolonged meeting with one of the scholars. He went in, left, and that’s it. Something took place there. Let’s assume he relayed an urgent instruction or received certain material. We have no evidence to indicate what he may have done there. Sometimes you have to make do with probable assumptions. We also don’t know why the SVR chose to assign a courier of another agent in Montreal to the mission in Rhode Island. He arrived in Rhode Island and appeared very unfamiliar with the territory. That’s unprofessional. The assignment in the U.S. was new to him. But, as all of you sitting in this room are well aware, intelligence agencies, even the very best of them, make mistakes. And the Russians made a mistake and led us to another of their agents. We exposed not only the engineer from Canada, but also another one of theirs at the institute at Brown University.”
Pausing at that point for dramatic effect, Bill Pemberton took a deep breath, gulped down the last sip of whisky in his glass, and waited as always to allow those around him to marvel at the extraordinary powers of his memory. Groaning, he then rose from the deep armchair in which he was sitting, his hand inadvertently reaching for a painful spot in his lower back, and took a few steps toward his large desk. He retrieved a key from a small silver box that was on the desk, and groaning again he bent over to open one of the drawers on its left side. From it he pulled out a leather-bound notebook, and then began browsing through its pages after returning to his armchair, stopping at one page and resuming his story in a voice that had become somewhat gloomy and slow.