In Washington, D.C., it was early evening. Harrington was in her office, paging through a fresh set of CIA serial reports on the interrogations of various minor defectors from the Soviet Union and its satellites. She needed more collateral. Gwynn was right. And not only Gwynn.
“Are you sure you have control of this thing?” Lorenz Niemeyer had asked over drinks at the Mayflower the other night. He was in town for a seminar at Georgetown and had dropped in to see how she was doing. Pudgier than ever, he still projected the easy hauteur that had headwaiters mistaking him for royalty. “Because they’re already talking about you in the past tense.”
That was his way of being clever. There were times when she found it difficult to believe that she had once been married to the man.
But the powers that be had chosen their messenger well. Gwynn’s screeching Harrington could ignore; Lorenz Niemeyer still knew people. If he felt he had to warn her that her star was falling, it could only mean that Langley and the White House felt the same way. That was why she was pressing so hard for answers. And during the past few days, Harrington had more than once been sure she had found what she was looking for: a hint in the testimony of a former East German military attaché; a discrepancy in the confession of a former Hungarian prison guard; a peculiar omission in one unimportant answer by a former Czech communications officer. But each time, when Harrington tried to press further, she met a blank wall. Though there were clues everywhere, she was unable to piece them together.
Harrington rubbed her eyes. Time for a break. She took herself off to the ladies’ room, washed her face, marveled at the pale, haggard woman glaring savagely from the mirror. She remembered, vaguely, having once been young.
Her moment of weakness dispensed with, she returned to her desk, and her research. She had just opened a fresh serial—the deposition of the estranged wife of a deputy commissar in Polish counterintelligence—when Borkland knocked and stepped in without waiting to be invited.
Harrington shut the folder with a snap and looked up … expectantly.
“A report, finally? It’s been hours since GREENHILL left the resort.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We have word from the Agency that GREENHILL has been arrested.”
Harrington digested this. “Are they sure?”
“They have it from the West Germans, who have an asset in the DS.”
Another beat. “And her minder?”
“Disappeared. She hasn’t checked in. Presumed arrested as well.”
She nodded. “Very well. Keep me informed.”
“Shouldn’t we—”
“I believe you saw the same memorandum I did, Bill.” Her tone was bitter. “If GREENHILL is caught, we do nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She read the reproach in his expression. She softened. “Don’t worry. I’ll make some calls.”
And she did. She called Gwynn. She called Gwynn’s boss. She called Gwynn’s boss’s boss. She called her friends at Langley. She called the office of the President’s national security adviser.
Nobody took her calls. Nobody returned them.
Niemeyer was right. Her star was falling indeed, and it was Margo Jensen who would suffer as a result.
Harrington moved to the window. Washington was enduring one of its misty gray drizzles, the sort where your umbrella is useless because the rain doesn’t so much fall as materialize. She lifted a hand to the heavy curtain, a war relic, as if to tug it closed, but hesitated. The gesture evoked a memory. The same wet fog had blanketed Vienna the night Carina disappeared. Carina was an agent Harrington had run during the war, a young Jewish woman who could pass for Aryan, and on the night in question, Harrington had waited in the wet, drafty safe house for hours past the appointed time. Carina never showed. She was never seen or heard from again, but it was easy to guess her fate.
Margo reminded her of Carina, not in appearance but in manner: the same swift intelligence, the same determination not to be bested by her fears. The difference was that Carina had a personal stake in her war. As for Margo, Harrington had played to her ambition and her vanity, to say nothing of her simple curiosity, and, as always, had played well. Yet she felt a punishing guilt that had never plagued her during the war, when she sent children much younger than Margo into battle.