5

Wednesday, April 5

It was three minutes past midnight and raining. An upper-floor window of the embassy building was lit, a thin glow behind drawn drapes. Inside the room, Brinkerhoff was walking up and down and pausing now and then to peer through the drapes as if to reassure himself that the world outside did not cease to exist even if he was not perceiving it.

The undersecretary, a stout man whose present relations with the Politburo were outstanding and who therefore could not be crossed, was seated behind his desk and drawing swastikas on his blotter pad. The scientific attaché, whose relations with the Politburo were equally shining, sat slumped in a chair with his legs crossed. On his lap there was a sheet of paper; he was writing something, stopping every so often to suck the end of his pen or to run his fingers, in an agitated way, through his thinning hair.

“It’s beyond me,” he said finally.

“I don’t understand,” the undersecretary said. “What is beyond you?”

“This … this information,” the scientific attaché said.

“The question is not whether it defeats your brain,” Brinkerhoff said. “The problem is one of its possible authenticity.”

“It isn’t in my field,” the scientist said. “It would have to be examined by experts.”

“Like who?”

“Berganin would be the best,” the scientist said. “It’s his sphere of interest.”

“Berganin is in Moscow,” the undersecretary said.

“It would take days,” Brinkerhoff said. “I don’t think Hollander is a man of much patience. He’s going to pressure me soon. I have to tell him something.”

The undersecretary yawned. “I should wake the ambassador,” he said.

“The ambassador is doing what he knows best,” Brinkerhoff said. “He’s out. He’s at a party. And even if he were here he would leave the decision to you, you know that.”

The undersecretary yawned again. He looked at the scientific attaché. “Is it conceivable? Answer me that.”

The scientist sucked his pen. “Anything’s possible—”

“Don’t give me answers from the ether,” the undersecretary said. “I’m an idiot. Explain to me as you would answer an idiot.”

The scientist shrugged. “It’s possible. I don’t understand it. But it’s possible. The consequences, if this were true, would be devastating.”

Brinkerhoff turned from the window. He had been watching the rain fall through the streetlamps. “Then we must act on Hollander, because even if there’s only the slightest possibility—”

“Look, this is one sheet of paper out of many. We would need the rest.”

“Which we will get when we have made certain commitments to Hollander,” Brinkerhoff said.

“It smells,” the undersecretary said. “He wants to defect. I don’t buy it.”

Brinkerhoff said, “I don’t think he wants to defect. If he stays, he’s a traitor. If he leaves, he’s a traitor but alive. It’s simple.”

“And if he’s a plant?” the undersecretary asked. He was wearing pajamas under a dressing gown. American pajamas, American gown, Brinkerhoff noticed.

“If he’s a plant then what have we lost?”

“Your reasoning is wild,” the undersecretary said. “A plant is a danger.”

“A disposable danger,” Brinkerhoff said. “There’s nothing to lose and much to gain.” He looked at the scientific attaché. “Am I right? Am I being reasonable?”

“Reasonable,” the scientist said. “If this is a part of Asterisk, then it’s very reasonable.”

“Asterisk,” the undersecretary said. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard something about this marvelous Asterisk.”

Brinkerhoff said, “Asterisk or not, do we act on Hollander?”

The undersecretary shrugged. “I can’t take the responsibility for this on my own. It needs to be cleared.”

“You’re talking again of days—two, perhaps three, days.”

“This Hollander,” the undersecretary said. “I don’t like the sound of it. He thinks his information is going to make the world safe—”

“Perhaps,” Brinkerhoff said. “All this information can be evaluated later. His personality can be dissected. But I urge you to act now, Secretary. But not by diplomatic bag.”

The undersecretary stared at his rows of penciled swastikas, then reached for the telephone. “I will make a call. Then we will see.”

Brinkerhoff sat down. He placed the tips of his fingers together. Everything was so slow, so slow.

The meeting had gone on too long. Dilbeck was very tired. The air in the conference room was thick with tobacco smoke; papers were strewn across the surface of the long table, ashtrays crammed, people yawning. He looked across the faces, waiting for an opportunity to bring the meeting to a close. Burlingham, the man from the RAND Corporation, was still holding forth. The problem with Burlingham was you couldn’t easily shut him up. Dilbeck sighed. Some people were in love with their own noises, just as his daughter, bless her, thought she was really making progress with her music. Noise, everything was noise. It was what the modern world manufactured best of all. The six people of the Asterisk Project Committee were especially adept. Through the lens of a telescope you could sense the peace of space, that was something, even if a freeway droned in the distance. And plants; plants grew silently, patiently. He wanted to go home.

He stood up and tried to bring the thing to order. He had considered bringing up the subject of Thorne before the committee, but if he could contain that for the time being it would be best. Thorne was, as yet, only a small nuisance. And besides, the real reason for this meeting was Ted Hollander.

Burlingham, finally, had stopped talking. Dilbeck looked around the room. Marvell, of the National Security Agency, sat with his necktie undone and, in his shirtsleeves, had the appearance of a hotshot newspaper reporter hanging on a dramatic deadline. Whorley of Aerospace Defense Command looked his usual alert self. Razor-sharp, Dilbeck thought. You could imagine cutting yourself on Whorley. Nicholson, from the U.S. National Space Board, was gaunt and ghostly. You could see him suddenly fading away around the edges.

“I don’t think we’ve really touched on the reasons for Hollander sending a man out there,” Dilbeck heard himself say. He was hoarse now; the smoke was in his throat. “I’ve heard a great deal of wild speculation—”

Burlingham interrupted: “You’re in charge of security, Dilbeck. Let’s hear it from you.”

Marvell sarcastically clapped his hands. “What’s your feeling, Dilbeck?” he said. “Let’s have it.”

Dilbeck closed his eyes. Security, he thought. You tried to sit on something, keep the lid closed: but it was the first law of security that nothing in the world was airtight. This is what the others did not understand. They thought you could create a vacuum, a perfect vacuum.

“Hollander had charge of intelligence, as you all know,” he said. “For personal reasons, as he put it, he quit. Who knows why?”

“Why wasn’t there an investigation?” Marvell asked.

“He quit,” Dilbeck said. “The strains of the job, I daresay. His wife found somebody else. Divorce. That kind of thing tells on a man.”

“This is history,” Burlingham said.

“History,” Dilbeck said. Could he ever get Emily married off? he wondered. Fatigue: the most random thoughts came in like birds. “History,” he said again, feeling for threads. “Hollander’s history is important here. For one thing, in the course of his job, he might have stumbled across some information. We can speculate further and say that he must have. Otherwise, why send a man out to that godforsaken place? Why go to that trouble? So Hollander has some information on Asterisk. How much? And what does he plan to do with it?”

Marvell rolled his shirt sleeves up in the manner of someone who faces a long night ahead. Dilbeck watched him and thought: No, I want to wrap it up, I want to go home.

“There’s nothing in his background to suggest any association with foreign powers,” Dilbeck said. “His record is exemplary. I wish, in fact, we could find men of his caliber these days. Anyhow, somewhere along the way he discovered something about Asterisk—”

“And who do we blame for that?” General Whorley asked.

“Blame?” Dilbeck said. “Who do we blame for Major General Burckhardt? You people live in dreams. You think something like this is—is easily contained. You can put it in a box and tie it with a ribbon and nobody gets to look inside. But that’s a fallacy. Hollander isn’t a fool. The man is naturally curious. Some people take orders, don’t ask questions, but Hollander—”

He watched Whorley get up and open a window a little way. Security, he thought. What did these people know? A little smoke and Whorley has to open a window. A mindless gesture. They were trying to pin every security breach on him, Dilbeck realized: I won’t take the blame because there isn’t any blame.

“Hollander,” Nicholson said. “I just don’t see any viable alternative in a situation like this.”

Burlingham looked at his papers and nodded. “Nor do I,” he said.

Whorley had returned to his seat. Cold, damp air was dissolving the smoke in the room. “Asterisk is more important than Hollander,” he said. He had a way of saying things with finality, leaving no margins for argument. “And as far as Walter Burckhardt was concerned, I don’t think that’s my baby. I’m on record, I didn’t want him to go any further, I wanted him out—”

“We’re not discussing Burckhardt,” Marveil said. “It’s Hollander. I think it’s a problem we can safely leave to you, Dilbeck.”

Pontius Pilate, Dilbeck thought. He looked around the table. Hollander. He had always liked Ted. But that was the run of things. Death was no more significant than spitting a fishbone from your mouth. Nothing was permitted to get in Asterisk’s way. Not even Ted.

Sometimes he felt he was scrambling up an impossible slope or being made, like Sisyphus, to fulfill a horrible task. You could not cover everything, you could not create a blueprint that would account for every single contingency. Poor Ted.

“I think we can assume that Hollander has some vital information on Asterisk,” he said. “I think we can also assume that he means to go public with it eventually.”

“Nobody would print such a thing,” Nicholson, somewhat shocked, said.

“Wrong,” Dilbeck said. “You have an underground press in this country, a fact that may have escaped your attention. You have alternative news media. If Hollander went public, he would find plenty of takers.”

“You’re ruling out the Soviets?” Whorley asked.

“In Ted’s case, yes.” Dilbeck felt his shoulders sag. He badly needed to be home, in bed, dreaming. Away from all this. Away. This was the moment he hated. “You’re all agreed to leave this with me?”

The other faces nodded. Mob rule, he thought. The committee and the donkey. The whole and its parts.

He looked to the opposite end of the table. “Congressman?”

The congressman also nodded. As chairman of the House Science and Astronautics Committee he had some pull with this crew.

“I agree,” he said. “Deal with it as you like, Dilbeck.”

“I will,” Dilbeck said. He turned his face away from the congressman. It had been obvious to him for some time that Leach was a dying man. So are we all, he thought, so are we all dying men.

“Thank you for your confidence,” Dilbeck said in a hollow way, and gathered his papers together. The ball had been already set rolling; and even if they had disagreed he wasn’t sure he could have stopped its momentum anyhow.

It made Tarkington sick. Ted Hollander, Not Ted Hollander. He had had to ask Sharpe three times if there was some misunderstanding. There was none. Ted Hollander. What the fuck was going on? He got out of the Catalina. Lykiard emerged a moment later, having taken a length of nylon rope from the glove compartment. They stood in the rain outside the apartment building. This was no Nazi, Tarkington thought. This was no funny Greek patriotic business, dead of night, blow away a couple of Gestapo babies. This was Ted Hollander.

He stared gloomily through the rain. Christ was not in his heaven tonight. Jesus, he thought. Hollander had stood by him during that whole London business when everyone else was screaming for his head or his resignation, preferably both. Even Lykiard, with the soul of a barracuda, even the Greek had to feel some twinge.

Holy fuck. His stomach was going to turn. He had taken more white crosses and he was jangling, sick and jangling. He beat his fist into the open palm of his hand and watched Lykiard stick the sliver of rope into his coat pocket. The fucking Greek, no feelings, nothing in his heart.

The Greek nodded.

A car had drawn up outside the building. He saw the familiar figure of Hollander get out, slam the door, move toward the entrance-way. According to Sharpe it was apartment number thirty-six. Hollander had some cutie stashed away up there. Which figured, Tarkington thought. The wife was long since gone. It was an emptiness that Tarkington, in a dulled way, understood.

I can’t hack this, he thought.

The Greek had already begun to cross the street. The rope in his pocket. Hand over the rope. Lykiard’s eagerness was revolting, loathsome. Oh, shit, Ted, what have you done to bring this on yourself? He put his fingers inside his jacket to the holster. Pray you don’t need to use it. Pray the Greek can do it fast with his nylon doodah.

He followed Lykiard. It was warm inside the building. You climb the stairs, make believe it’s a stranger you’re going to see. To eliminate.

Ted, sweetheart.

They used the stairway, reached the third floor.

“Lykiard, wait,” Tarkington said.

The Greek paused. He turned to Tarkington, who saw nothing in those eyes but hardness. He said nothing. He looked up the stairwell. At the very top there was a black skylight smeared with rain. A night like this, Tarkington thought. Fuck it all. You had to feel sick.

They went along the corridor. Thirty, thirty-two, thirty-four.

Thirty-six.

Yeah, Tarkington thought. To be an insurance salesman right now. Excuse this late call, my dear fellow, but your policy contains a slight anomaly.

Your expiration date has been somewhat altered.

Christ on crutches.

“Wait,” he whispered to the Greek. But the Greek wasn’t much good at waiting.

She was asleep. Hollander bent over, kissed her lightly. He wondered how many had been here tonight. How many had come and gone? He took off his jacket. He hung it on the back of a chair. She didn’t wake. He went into the kitchen. He turned on a light, looked at the messages on the blackboard. Dave 12:30. Cancel karate. Susie’s answering service 342/2050. At least she didn’t walk the streets, it hadn’t come to that. What was the phrase they used? An escort service? Lonely businessmen burning with lust at conventions in slick hotels. Out-of-town strangers, carrying a telephone number furtively tucked inside their billfolds all the way from Reno to D.C. It was hardly more than one a night and, on some nights, not even that. What did it matter to him? He would have vanished out of her life soon enough. Time would pass. Things would continue. It didn’t matter.

I knew him intimately, I didn’t think he was capable of such an act. They would interview her. She might even make money. I was a traitor’s mistress. He took off his shoes. He opened the refrigerator and found a half-empty bottle of retsina and he poured himself a small glass. It tasted sour. He would have to get used to vodka, there was nothing else for it.

The right thing, he thought. It was too late for doubt.

Too late for that.

He raised his face. Someone was on the other side of the door. In the corridor. He went quickly and quietly into the bedroom and woke the girl.

“Ted,” she said. She put her arms around his neck. He drew away from her and put a finger to his lips.

“Sshh,” he said.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

He put his hand over her mouth. Say nothing.

He went into the sitting room and sat in the darkness.

From the pocket of his pants he took out a switchblade knife and released the spring. He waited. He stared at the door. The girl appeared in the bedroom doorway, drawing a nightgown over her shoulders; a flimsy garment. It would flutter hearts in Cedar Rapids.

He motioned her away.

She stood, with the light falling behind her, and looked at him in a puzzled manner.

“Ted—”

He saw the front door handle turn. They were at the lock. He could hear the faint scratch of metal on metal, the tumblers of the lock clicking. He got out of the chair.

“Go back to bed,” he told the girl.

She was staring at the doorknob. “Ted,” she whispered.

The door opened.

He recognized the ropeman, Lykiard, and behind him, moving as slowly as ever, Billy Tarkington. Lykiard had the nylon taut between his two hands, the hands extended. The Greek was strong.

He came forward.

He stepped into darkness.

Grunting, Hollander thrust the blade upward between the ribs, dead into the chest cavity. In the bedroom doorway the girl was retching. The Greek went down on his knees and Hollander reached across the space in the dark and seized the hair and snapped the head backward, pushing Lykiard aside.

“Tarkie,” he said.

Tarkington stood with his hands at his side.

“Ted, look,” Tarkington said.

“Orders,” Hollander said.

“Fucking orders,” Tarkington said.

Hollander saw terror in the fat face.

“What’s it going to be, Tarkie?”

Tarkington looked at the Greek. “I didn’t want this, Ted.”

“You take orders, that’s all you do, Tarkie. Don’t ask questions.” Hollander felt a curious stabbing pain in his side, a stitch, he was beyond this kind of exertion. His lungs worked furiously. His eyes, there were dark spots floating before his eyes.

“I didn’t ask for this,” Tarkington said.

“No,” Hollander said. “What’s it going to be?”

Tarkington glanced at the girl. Hollander’s cutie. She had her hand across her lips. He looked down at the Greek who was staining the rug. Old Ted; you had to hand it to him, he still knew the moves, coming up through the darkness before the Greek knew the time of day.

When he spoke his voice was shaky: “Ted, listen—”

“I could kill you,” Hollander said. “Before you had time to reach your holster, I could kill you.”

It was bluff, pure bull, Hollander felt weak, all his strength draining out of him.

“Or you could drag your dead friend out of here, go back, make up some convincing fiction, and give me a little time.”

Tarkington had thoughts of death. The girl in the doorway moved, went out of his vision; he heard water run and a toilet flush. He could, he supposed, do what Hollander wanted. He could do that. It was a problem with Sharpe.

“What do I say to Sharpe?” Tarkington asked.

“That’s your business,” Hollander said.

Tarkington looked at the dead man. He was glad it wasn’t Hollander.

“Make it up, Tarkie,” Hollander said. “It wouldn’t be the first time, would it?”

“No,” Tarkington said. He reached down, felt for the Greek’s pulse. Still and silent.

“Take him,” Hollander said.

“Okay.” Tarkington got down on his knees. He wasn’t even sure he could drag Lykiard, never mind get him down several flights of stairs.

The alternative was to go for his holster.

But Ted: Ted was too fast. Ted still knew his stuff.

“Okay,” he said.

“Go someplace, fire your gun a couple of times,” Hollander said. “If Sharpe wants to know, you can always say you took a couple of quick ones at me while I was running away.”

Hollander waited. He wasn’t sure that Tarkington would go for it; he was counting on the fat man’s inborn fear. Tarkington straightened up, dragged the Greek by the heels toward the door. The toilet flushed again.

Hollander held the knife distastefully. In the doorway, Tarkington paused, sweating. He was already thinking of Sharpe, Sharpe’s face, the whole fuck-up he would have to suffer through. The holster, he thought. Would there be time?

He knew there wouldn’t be before Hollander was on him with the knife.

“Maybe,” Tarkington said. “Maybe we’ll run into one another again, huh?”

“I doubt it,” Hollander said.

Tarkington looked down at the Greek a moment. “I’m glad you got him first, Ted. I’m glad about that much.”

2

The Post’s editorial was sharply critical. Thorne cut it out and put it aside. Maybe, maybe not, he thought. It was headlined “Appealing to Nobody.”

President Foster, in attempting to be all things to all men, runs the grave risk of being nothing to anybody. It would probably bring Bannerman down on his head, as well as Farrago, but he would send it up in his summary anyhow.

His telephone rang.

Farrago, on the other end, said: “Your cold better?”

“A bit,” Thorne said.

“Guys like you,” Farrago said. “You spend too much time on the nest. It weakens your resistance to germs. Take vitamins, John. Especially the B₁₂ complex and a healthy dose of C.”

“It works for you?” Thorne asked.

“Nothing works for me,” Farrago said. “Including you. You finished yet?”

“Almost.”

When Thorne hung up he called Sally Winfield in and raced through his dictation to her. At the last moment he included the Post editorial. There was some critical stuff from the New York Times and an article in the Star that wouldn’t do Foster’s blood pressure much good. He put them all together, added something pleasant he found in yesterday’s Phoenix Gazette. He may be a Democrat but he has the solid fiscal instincts of a conservative. There, Thorne thought: your open-ended policy is paying off in the sticks. Next thing would be a letter of praise from Senator Goldwater.

When he had finished his dictation, he put on his jacket and went out. He told Sally he would be back in thirty minutes. He drove to the same seafood restaurant he had gone to before, the Shrimp’s Hideaway. Erickson was already at the table, a cup of coffee in front of him. Fidgeting, looking somewhat like a nervy Clark Kent.

Thorne slipped into the seat facing Erickson.

“Did you get me the stuff?”

Erickson was flustered. “Man, you’re going to skin me, I tell you no lies. This is the second favor this week. I can’t keep this kind of thing up, you know that.”

“I know,” Thorne said. “I appreciate.”

Erickson opened his briefcase and took out a bulky envelope. He slid it across the table, then picked up his coffee. “What the hell’s going on anyhow?” he asked.

Thorne picked up the envelope and put it into his own briefcase, locking it.

“First it’s Major General Whatsisname, now it’s the heavy shit. What gives?”

“It’s something Bannerman wants,” Thorne said.

“You expect me to buy that one? Bannerman only has to pick up his telephone. He doesn’t send out an errand boy. He doesn’t go in for this kind of crap.”

Erickson, narrowing his eyes in a look of both scrutiny and disbelief, finished his coffee. “Don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know. Okay? And do me a favor.”

“If I can,” Thorne said.

“No more favors,” Erickson said. “Store’s closed. Gone to lunch. Savvy?”

“I’m with you,” Thorne said. He watched Erickson rise and leave the restaurant. After a few moments he picked up his briefcase, went outside, unlocked the VW, drove away. A black Mercury that had followed him down Pennsylvania Avenue slipped away from the sidewalk and tracked him back to the White House.

In his office he found a telephone message on his desk. It said simply: Senator Jacobson called. Call back. He asked Sally to get him the senator’s office. What did Jacobson want? Another old friend of his father’s, Jacobson had fitted neatly into the slots left vacant by Senator Thorne’s death. Politically, both men had been the closest of allies; but whereas Ben Thorne had been open, gregarious, and sometimes, according to his critics, indiscreet, Jacobson was the kind of man who played whatever cards he held in a furtive way. Thorne realized that he had not seen the senator in more than a year—so why this call now?

He heard a woman’s voice say, “Senator Jacobson’s office.”

“John Thorne, I’m returning—”

“Ah, Mr. Thorne. The senator wanted to know if you would be free for lunch today.”

Thorne looked at his desk diary. The day was blank. He had intended seeing Marcia between her classes. But that could wait.

“I think I am,” he said.

“Fine. The senator has a meeting that ought to finish around twelve fifteen, twelve thirty. Shall I call you back when he’s free?”

“Fine,” Thorne said.

Senator William Jacobson: in cartoons he was always characterized as having the collar of his raincoat turned up, as if he had something dreadful to hide. He had an oddly bland face, the kind you had to concentrate on to remember. How does a man go so far in politics with such a curious anonymity? He was in the papers a great deal, usually in connection with Senate investigations of organized crime. He had published a book on the Mafia. Before entering politics, Thorne remembered, he had been a professor of law at Columbia.

His telephone was ringing again. It was Farrago.

“I just had Bannerman chewing my balls off,” he said. “What the fuck are you playing at? Can’t you find something in the fucking papers to cheer the Old Man up?”

“I’m doing my best,” Thorne said.

“Try a little harder—”

“If I tried any harder, I’d be sending up obituaries,” Thorne said. “In case you hadn’t noticed it, the papers aren’t exactly falling over themselves to give the Old Man merit marks—”

“Fuck,” Farrago said. “Go back to sleep.”

Thorne heard the click of a dead line.

He sat back, put up his feet, and thought about the briefcase. It was tempting to open it here and go through Erickson’s envelope—but that would be running a needless risk. Farrago could come in, or the oleaginous Duncannon, or even Bannerman himself on one of his irregular tours. Later, he thought. There would be plenty of time.

“Lykiard’s in the fucking Potomac,” Tarkington was saying.

But Sharpe was hardly listening; there was a time for excuses and a time for explanations, but right now was a time of planning what to say to Dilbeck. His anger was a slow fuse.

“I don’t give that”—he snapped his fingers—“I don’t give a monkey’s fuck about the Greek. What I don’t get is how two of you couldn’t deal with Hollander. That’s what I don’t get.”

Tarkington was trying to look through the slats of the blind. He wanted to believe it was daylight out there and not the continuation of some endless night.

“I might have wounded him,” Tarkington said. “Look, he surprised us. He knifed the Greek. Before I could get my gun out …” He shrugged his shoulders. Was it going to wash? You could never tell with Sharpe. He was sitting behind his desk, his fists clenched.

“So where’s Hollander now?” Sharpe said.

“I don’t know.”

“You know what you’re good at, Tarkington? You know what?”

Tarkington waited, holding his breath.

“You’re good at sweet fuck all,” Sharpe said. “That’s what you do best. You couldn’t operate a pinball machine without the help of a Guide Dog.”

Tarkington screwed up his eyes. There was sun out there. Over D.C., a flat white sun. A brand-new day.

“Okay,” Sharpe said, rising from his desk.

“I said I think I wounded him,” Tarkington said.

“By the same token, Tarkington, you might have been a fucking astronaut,” Sharpe shouted at him. “You know what I’m going to do with you?”

Reykjavik, Tarkington thought. Ceylon, maybe. He had an overwhelming desire to get laid.

“I’m putting you back on Thorne as of now,” Sharpe said. “Brandt’s on him, but I want Brandt back here. You can’t fuck up a simple thing like keeping an eye on Thorne, I guess.”

It might have been worse, Tarkington thought. Surveillance could be a drag but Thorne didn’t seem to move around a great deal so there was a chance to breathe, unwind a bit. It might have been goddamn Iceland. Or worse.

“Tell Brandt I want him in,” Sharpe said. “Now get your ass out of my office before I puke.”

Tarkington went out.

Sharpe unclenched his fists, noticing that the blood had drained from his fingers, that his fingers now looked the way they did after a long swim, white and drained and wrinkled. They were everywhere: you only had to knock once on the woodwork and there were incompetents everywhere. He would have to face Dilbeck again, maybe even the daughter.

Hollander, he thought. I ought to have known better. The old dog had learned all the old tricks. And he hadn’t forgotten them.

It was a cheap hotel, a place for rummies, potential suicides, cut-rate whores, the unretreadable rejects of a Great Society. Hollander had checked in during the hours of darkness, noticing that the thin neon that burned outside had shed some of its letters, leaving impenetrable gaps in the sky: Hotel T j na. An inscrutable hieroglyphic, like something seen on the side of a passing boxcar. The clerk had been asleep at his desk. Hollander had paid in advance for one night, gone up to the fifth floor in an elevator he had last seen in a 1940s movie, locked himself in a room decorated in faded chintz, and fallen asleep. He slept for three or four hours and when he woke it was daylight and the sun was coming in beneath the brown blind. He woke thinking of Davina, how she had been sitting in a scared crouch in the corner of the bedroom, quite beyond explanations. Well. It could only have come through Myers, he thought. It could only have happened that way. But it was insignificant to him now, a trifle; it was enough for him to know that they had uncovered him.

They want me dead, he thought. It was quite a discovery to know that somebody had your number. But even that seemed unimportant. The only real thing was how Brinkerhoff’s people would react to his offering. How quickly they would respond. And then there was Escalante; the realms of endless speculation. Since they had failed to kill him, would they go to the trouble of moving it from Escalante? Would they go to that trouble?

He pulled up the blind. His body was stiff. There was a white sun over the tenements and, in the street below, a black in a long coat crossing the pavement with a brown bag clutched against his chest. The room smelled. The flowers on the wallpaper had long faded. There was a stain on the white sheets. It was a place you came to when there was nowhere left to go: a dead end.

But how much did they think he knew? Just how much? Enough, obviously, if they wanted him dead. Enough.

Did they know about Brinkerhoff? They couldn’t, unless from time to time they exercised a little random surveillance. But he hadn’t ever felt that strange intuition he always experienced when he was being followed. Maybe that meant nothing except the fact he was getting old, loosening up, letting his guard down.

No. They couldn’t know about Brinkerhoff. If they did, they wouldn’t have put out the death warrant. They would have hauled him in for questions. They would have wanted to know how much of it had gone to Brinkerhoff.

Reasonable. But this wasn’t a place for reason.

If you started in on the hunt for reason, you wound up on a paper chase. I would have to look back into the crystal ball of my infancy, he thought, to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing. Selling out my country. Going over the wall. Giving things away, things they didn’t want to give away, the Secrets. Later, they’ll say: He must have been a communist, a red, why the fuck didn’t anybody notice?

He smiled faintly. Streaks of light from the morning sun glinted on the windows of the tenements. In Moscow there would be snow. A cold wind coming off the Volga.

All I am, he thought, is the plus sign in a necessary equation.

Tired, he lay down on the bed. He had a picture of the Greek coming at him, the blade going in, the quick escape of Lykiard’s breath from his open mouth and that look, that weirdly stunned look, in the eyes, like the astonished expression of a prizefighter who has walked straight into a sucker punch. It had been a long time since he had killed. What he hoped was that he wouldn’t have to do it again. Ever.

They ate a lunch of lobster and salad. The senator talked small talk, a craft at which he was a master. Thorne imagined him moving with ease through fund-raising barbecues or cutting ribbons for new shopping malls. It was an art, this small talk. A part of it was how you paused, drew your breath, used your eyebrows during the silences; as if you were assimilating information of colossal import.

How have you been? What do you like about Foster? How is the work? Have you seen your mother lately?

They drank white wine and Thorne looked around the restaurant. It was the kind of place that made him uncomfortable; the waiters were gliding flunkies who seemed to approach your table on roller skates. And the senator had obviously developed a form of imperceptible semaphore with them; they came to the table even when it was not apparent to Thorne that Jacobson had called them. He felt somewhat suffocated by it all, the silent rugs, the heavy curtains, the burnished brass of the interior.

Over coffee, the senator lit a cigar and sat back in his chair.

“Are you happy with your work, John?” he asked.

“It’s interesting,” Thorne said. He placed an invisible “sir” at the end of each sentence he spoke, while he tried to keep in mind Marcia’s distaste: They’re only interested in the freebies that go with the job, John. They’re the number one fuckers of the democratic ideal.

“You sound, ah, not altogether fulfilled,” Jacobson said.

“I don’t imagine myself doing it for the rest of my life, if that’s what you mean,” Thorne said.

“Of course not.” Jacobson touched his spectacles. He was looking furtive all at once, turning his head this way and that; a world of potential eavesdroppers. “It’s a start, not a bad start, some might say.”

“It’s a start,” Thorne agreed. Where was this going?

“I daresay you entertain other ambitions.”

“Well,” Thorne said. “I guess.”

“Politics?” The senator was smiling in a benign way.

“Maybe, I don’t know.”

“It isn’t a bad life,” Jacobson said. “If you’ve got the constitution of a buffalo, don’t need much sleep, and don’t court scandal.”

Court scandal, Thorne thought. Quaint was the word for that one. This was Scandal City.

Jacobson blew a smoke ring and watched it drift off. Thorne was tempted to put his finger through it. From the corner of his eyes he noticed a waiter about to pounce on their table.

“There’s a matter I’ve been asked, ah, to approach you about,” the senator said.

Thorne looked suitably perplexed.

“It’s not my province, of course. But since I know you personally, I agreed to speak with you—”

“Yes?” Thorne leaned forward, elbows on the table. What was coming next?

“Are you interested in running for the House of Representatives?”

“Do I hear you right?” Thorne asked.

“You do,” said the senator. “I was approached, if that’s the word, by a certain party. They sounded me out, so to speak. I told them frankly that I didn’t know your feelings. This is all pretty much backroom stuff, John, and I’m not happy with it, but I think it’s what your father might have expected of me.”

Congressman Thorne, he thought. It would make a good TV series. He watched Jacobson relight the cigar with a slight flourish of his gold lighter. Why did everybody speak of his father as if they were talking about the pope? It was always the same reverential hush.

“The point is, Lindstrom is not running this year,” Jacobson said. “And since that’s your father’s old congressional district, you can see how useful your name would be.”

“I can see,” Thorne said.

“Lindstrom’s retiring. He would have been reelected anyhow. It would be a safe thing for you, I imagine.” The senator stared at the tip of the cigar as if it suddenly irritated him. “If you’re at all interested.”

“I don’t know,” Thorne said. It sounded off somehow, it didn’t ring true to him. What was behind it? Or was it just the family name? Was he catching that contagious paranoia that had begun, like some wretched virus, in a leather attaché case?

“Of course, it would mean full-time campaigning,” the senator said. “You would have to resign from the White House.”

“Of course,” Thorne said.

“And other, ah, pursuits would be out of the question, naturally.”

There it was. There. Laid on the line. Visible as all hell. Other pursuits.

Other pursuits.

“I don’t think I follow,” Thorne said. Push it, he thought. “Other pursuits?”

“What I mean is that congressional campaigning isn’t just a matter of shaking hands.” Jacobson laughed, as if at some intensely private joke. “It’s demanding, it can be grueling, it consumes most of one’s time. There just isn’t the time for much else besides.”

It was clumsy and obvious. Thorne felt awkward. He sat back in his chair and realized he was sweating, that his forehead was damp, his armpits moist. Diversionary tactics, didn’t they call it that? You simply change the road signs around. They wanted him to change direction. Somebody else was sweating apart from himself.

“I’d like to think it over,” he said.

Jacobson put out his cigar and looked apologetic. “I’m afraid it’s not like that, John. There just isn’t time. My party wants an answer immediately. I regret the haste of all this, but sometimes these things won’t wait. What’s it to be? Yes or no?”

He looked into Jacobson’s eyes, saw there a blatant discomfort; it was as if he had a rash he was unhappy about scratching in public. He had been pressured. He had been pushed into this. It was all written on his face.

“No,” Thorne said.

“Think again, John.”

Thorne was silent for a moment. “I’ve thought,” he said.

“Say yes, John.”

Thorne got up from the table. “I’m too young for politics, Senator,” he said. “But convey my thanks to your party, please.”

He walked out of the restaurant.

The sunlight on the street was unexpectedly hot on his face. He went in the direction of his VW. He unlocked it but didn’t step inside immediately. He allowed the warm trapped air to escape, leaving the door open awhile. The United States Congress. What in the name of Christ had he stumbled into here?

He got inside the car, closed the door, remembered sitting with Anna Burckhardt in the rain and watching the back of the house as if there were unwanted strangers inside—that was the feeling he had now. That there were rooms you expected to be empty until you opened doors and crossed thresholds.

From the coin-operated telephone in the lobby of the Hotel T j na, Hollander dialed Brinkerhoff’s number. He got a girl who spoke English as if she had devoured a phrase book.

“Brinkerhoff,” he said.

“One moment, if you please,” she said.

There was buzzing, static, then Brinkerhoff came on the line.

“Have you decided?” Hollander asked.

“These things take time,” Brinkerhoff said.

“Time isn’t what I’ve got,” Hollander said. “They’re on to me.”

Brinkerhoff was silent a moment.

“How did it happen?”

“Does that matter?” Hollander looked along the lobby. A redhaired woman was talking to the desk clerk. She had her arm around the waist of a man who was so drunk that any sexual performance on his part would have been a minor miracle.

“They know about our conversations?” Brinkerhoff asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“Good.”

“When can you come through?” Hollander asked.

“You must be patient. Bureaucracy is an elephant.”

“You better start cracking whips, baby,” Hollander said.

“Cracking whips?”

“I’ll call you back.” Hollander put the telephone down. The woman was helping the man into the elevator. He glanced in a bleary way at Hollander; momentarily, Hollander felt the edge of suspicion. I can be certain of nothing from here on in, he thought. Trust nothing, accept nothing. Out there, somewhere, they’re looking for me.

“Our friend may very well be anxious,” the undersecretary said. “It does not alter the fact that until the situation is clarified I can do nothing.”

Brinkerhoff gazed up at the portrait of Lenin. The sun struck it, causing the glass in the frame to gleam.

“When can we expect this … clarification?” Brinkerhoff asked.

“I’m not a mind reader,” the undersecretary said. “Does our friend think we just open our arms and embrace anybody who wants to defect? Does he imagine that just because he’s an American we will be ecstatic to have him? A defector is an expensive commodity, Brinkerhoff. They don’t come cheaply.”

Brinkerhoff sat down. What could he do but wait? He chewed on a fingernail, then, annoyed with himself, put the hand inside a pocket where it might be safe from further mastication.

3

She was scared. It was not the physical punishment, it was the fear that came from not knowing how it would end, a terrible consciousness of dying. Over and over she had told them she knew nothing. She had screamed it at them. Now, while one of them stood in the bathroom doorway and watched her, she examined her own reflection in the mirror. Her upper lip was swollen, there was a cut beneath her eye, a bruise on her throat. She splashed cold water on her face. What was the other one doing? Going through the apartment as if he might still be here?

She turned to the man in the doorway: “Why don’t you look under my bed?”

The man said nothing, watched her impassively.

She moved past him. He followed her into the living room. She sat down, took an English Oval from the pack he had left behind, lit it.

“You guys have really cramped my style, you know that?” she said. She could not keep the quiver out of her voice no matter how hard she tried.

The other guy came out of the bedroom and glared at her. It was this one, the one with the square, clean looks of the hometown jock, who had hurt her the most. Now he looked as if he might hit her again.

“Are you jokers through?” she asked.

“One more time,” the jock said. “He left no address. You don’t know where to get in touch with him.”

“Yeah yeah,” she said. “I told you once, I told you like a thousand times. He went. Under the circumstances, I didn’t expect him to hang around.”

The man stared at her. She had rarely seen, even in her short lifetime of encountering kooks, such an open expression of violence. He could kill, she knew that at a glance. He could kill, go home, eat dinner as if nothing had even happened. Her lip really hurt. She would be out of work for days. She stubbed the cigarette, desperately trying to keep her hand from shaking. She didn’t want them to know they had got through to the target, she wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.

“Okay,” the jock said. “You better keep your nose clean.”

The two men went to the door.

She said, “Stick it, jack. Stick it up your ass.”

The jock laughed, the other goon looked grim. They closed the door quietly behind them.

Hollander, she thought. You must have done something pretty bad in your time.

Sharpe let Dilbeck ramble on for a time, barely listening to the man’s tirade. He lowered his eyes, like a schoolboy in trouble, studied the floor, shifted his weight around. Finally, when it seemed Dilbeck had run out of power, he said: “I lost a man, a good man.”

“Do you want me to say my heart bleeds for you, Sharpe? You may have lost a man. But I’ve lost Ted Hollander, which is far more important—”

“Look,” Sharpe said, shutting his eyes, fumbling around in the darkness of his head as if he were trying to locate an extra shot of strength; “Look, I have my people going through this town right now. I have them looking for Hollander. And if he’s still around we’ll find him. You can be assured of that—”

“Your assurances have a hollow ring, Sharpe, if I may say so.” Dilbeck turned to a plant like someone seeking solace after a funeral. He picked up the pot, held the plant to the light. Something he saw on a leaf displeased him. He held it between thumb and forefinger, rubbing the tips of the two fingers together. “God, a mealybug. All I need right now is an epidemic of that.”

“Listen,” Sharpe said, thinking: Screw your mealybug. “I’m understaffed and underbudgeted—”

“Damn your budget. Appropriate what you want. Ask. Just ask. You’ll get it.”

“I don’t need money, I need well-trained men,” Sharpe said, his voice rising. “You know how long it takes to train a guy? It takes forever. These aren’t the old days, if you don’t mind my saying. We don’t get men like we used to—”

“It’s a familiar song,” Dilbeck was saying. He had wandered off between the trestle tables, and it looked as if he was intent on examining every leaf in his search for the bugs. “It’s a familiar song and it’s rather late in the day to be singing it.”

“Okay,” Sharpe said. He wanted badly to sit. There was nowhere to sit. He felt a quick muscular pain in his left calf. “Okay, I agree. But we’re doing everything we can.”

“With incompetents, clowns, and buffoons,” Dilbeck said. He was reaching into a plant that looked to Sharpe like some kind of ivy. “Got you!” he exclaimed, rubbing out another bug.

The fucking plants. What was important here? Sharpe wondered.

“Then, of course, there’s the problem of our young friend Thorne,” Dilbeck said. “It won’t go away simply by wishing. I’ve been reading your surveillance briefs. Why is he seeing Erickson? What’s the connection there? Thorne is getting to be a bad nuisance.”

“I’ve got him watched, twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four,” Sharpe said.

“Watched,” Dilbeck said, not without contempt. “I want a little pressure there.”

“Like how?” Sharpe asked.

“I’ll handle that end,” Dilbeck said. “With all due respect, Sharpe, a certain finesse is needed.”

Finesse, Sharpe thought. Sometimes the only finesse people understood was a five-pack in the teeth.

Thorne spread the papers on the kitchen table. Marcia stood behind him, watching. She put her hands on his shoulders and said: “More top-secret shit?”

Thorne said nothing.

“It looks like a computer printout,” she said. “Is that what it is?”

“That’s what it is,” he said.

“Of what?”

“Secret,” he said.

She wandered around the kitchen, poured herself a glass of milk, said something about calcium. She paused by the edge of the table.

“Why don’t you think Jacobson was on the level? I mean, I don’t want to see you in the crap of politics, John, but at the same time I don’t want to see you on the long boulevard that leads all the way down to the schizo factory—”

“I’m not being schizo,” he said. “I just don’t like it when things don’t add up.”

“Nothing ever adds up,” she said.

“Nothing ever adds up. What kind of gradschool mumbo jumbo is that?” he asked.

“Suit yourself, honey,” she said. She went into the living room to her books.

He straightened the papers. They were stats of printouts from a Pentagon computer. They listed, one by one, the personnel data of the hard missile sites. He began to go down the list.

Adamson, Idaho

Badger, Montana

Caledonia, Nebraska

Davenport, Utah

Escalante, Arizona

He looked closer.

He skipped over the names listed under STAFF, SECURITY and went directly to those that came under the heading STAFF, TECHNICAL. At first, he did not believe what he saw; at first, it seemed to him that what he had discovered was just another enigma. If Escalante was a hard missile site, then these names made no sense. If, on the other hand, it was something else … but what?

He paused, raised his head, stared at the wall.

Then he looked back at the sheets again. He looked at the technical-staff data for the sites apart from Escalante. Predictable. Missile engineers. A nuclear physicist or two. But none of the other sites had anything that remotely approached the technical personnel at Escalante.

He walked up and down the kitchen for a time.

Why? Why?

He returned to the table and reread the listings again.

Beneath the list of these names, in the margin at the side of the printout, there was the character *. A footnote, Thorne thought. Somewhere there would be an explanatory footnote. He turned the pages. He found Zelda, Montana, the last listing. Then nothing. Nothing. The asterisk went nowhere. It led to zero. An asterisk that was not explained.

And those names, those Ph.D.s—Christ, what connection could they have with a hard missile site? A cryptanalyst, two linguists, an astronomer? Space, language, and space, codes to be cracked—what did that add up to?

He went into the living room.

Marcia was lying on the sofa, reading a book.

“Well?” she said. “What’s the score?”

Thorne was looking along the bookshelves. “Haven’t we got an old Who’s Who somewhere?”

“Bottom shelf to your right,” Marcia said.

He found it and gave it to her.

“I get to play?” she asked.

“I want you to check four names for me,” he said.

She sat up on one elbow. He read the names to her. She checked each, reading the entries aloud. When she had finished, she looked at him curiously.

“Okay. What’s what?”

“Those guys are listed as the technical staff at Escalante, which is supposed to be a hard missile site,” Thorne said.

“And?”

“Come on—don’t you think it damned odd? What kind of connection is there between a linguist, for example, and a nuclear missile?”

Marcia shrugged. “Listen, we live in a world where educated guys talk to dolphins—”

Thorne felt exasperated. “Think,” he said.

“Well,” Marcia said. “I noticed one tiny detail about the four.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

Thorne closed his eyes. “Tell me.”

“Unless I’m much mistaken,” she said, and paused, “they’re all over the age of sixty-five.”

“Are they?”

“According to their dates of birth, they are.”

He sat on the arm of the sofa, looking down at her.

“There isn’t a young man among them,” she said. “You might call that coincidence.”

“You might,” Thorne said. “Or there might be a reason for it.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

Marcia closed Who’s Who and put it down on the floor. She stared at Thorne for a time. He was thinking: Old men, all of them, all of them past the statutory age of retirement. Why? What was there about Asterisk that needed old men?

“John,” she said, “ever since you got involved in this—shall I call it the Burckhardt affair—I’ve been worrying about you. Our sex life is practically dead. Which is bad enough—”

“It’s easily remedied,” he said.

“Not when you’re spending all your time chasing around after loose ends and trying to fit the pieces together. You should take up painting by numbers, or something less strenuous.”

“Come to bed,” he said.

“And make love and know your head’s filled with the old men of Escalante?” She stuck her tongue out at him. “I need total concentration—”

“No old men, I promise.”

She raised her hand and he gripped it, helping her to her feet. They went into the darkened bedroom. He undressed her, drew her toward the bed—but when he closed his eyes, when he sought that necessary dark, that sense of relaxation, all he could see were afterimages of the computer printout behind his eyelids—and it was a long time before they disintegrated.

“You’re not concentrating, are you?” she said. “Sex should be savored. You’re rushing it, lover.”

“I wasn’t aware of it—”

“Slow down, okay? There’s no hurry. I’m not going anywhere. And your old men—well, they’ll still be there in the morning, won’t they?”

“I guess,” he said. He put his arms around her and pulled her back toward him.

Brinkerhoff saw it come through on the IBM, 7 A.M. Moscow time. Decoded, from the difficult priority code, it read:

ACCEPT HOLLANDER INFORMATION REQUIRED AFFIRMATION ACTION URGED VASHILIKOV ACADEMY OF SCIENCES CODE ASSIGNED APRIL FIVE DASH NINETY DASH LETTER H M K L DASH TWELVE NUMBER 12 PRIORITY ROUTE SIX NUMBER 6 URGENTLY SUGGESTED ZAKUNIN MINISTRY OF SCIENCE