Before he saw the car, he heard the motor.

  It purred into life at the far end of the parking level.

  Hanley stood still and saw the auto suddenly rush down the narrow aisle toward him.

  He waited. The car did not have lights though the parking level was lit dimly.

  The Cadillac stopped a few feet from him. He automatically took notice of the diplomatic plates and the license number; he had a remarkable memory for such things.

  The door of the car opened and a young man got out of the driver’s seat and walked around the front of the car and opened the right rear door. He then glanced at Hanley. With a shrug, Hanley bowed his head and stepped inside.

  The automobile was very quiet, and a low musical sound seemed to come from hidden speakers buried in the black, plush depths of the interior. Hanley assumed they were musical bafflers, designed to shut out the probes of any directional microphones that might have been placed outside to spy on the conversations carried on inside the car.

  The face of the Soviet agent was gray, as though he had been ill. His bulk was still massive, but there was a slackness in the body that indicated disease. He smelled sweet in the closed air of the car’s interior, as though he had doused himself with cologne to cover up a smell of corruption. His eyes were gray but rimmed in red around the irises.

  For a moment neither man spoke, and then the Soviet—he was, in fact, the third man in the intelligence section that worked out of the Soviet embassy—began without preamble. He spoke in a soft, whispery voice that was accented heavily.

  “We had nothing to do with Cacciato.”

  “Why do you tell me?”

  “Because he was your agent.”

  “No. We have no one there. He was Langley.”

  “No, Hanley.” The bulk shifted next to him, but Hanley did not move. “We do not read Italian newspapers for information, as you do.”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “But you came.”

  “I am always ready to listen.” Hanley stared at the back of the leather cushion on the front seat. The Cadillac contained amenities, including a small bar that snapped open now from behind the front seat.

  “You would have lunch now. I am sorry.” The Russian seemed to speak with regret. “But we can give you a martini. I do not have food, but perhaps a glass of Russian vodka?”

  “No thank you. I prefer the Polish vodka, since they invented it.” It was childish and Hanley knew it, but he felt offended by the presumption of the other man.

  The Russian rumbled into what was a brief flurry of laughter; it was punctuated by coughs. At the end, he wiped his lips with a well-used handkerchief. He studied the handkerchief for a moment and then pulled it away. Hanley noticed the gesture; when he returned to Section, he would make a memorandum about the health reports concerning the seldom-seen third man at the Soviet intelligence section of the embassy. Belushka was definitely ill.

  “We would have provocation, Hanley. Felker murdered our man in England. You know this. And you were willing to make contact with him, to buy what he had.”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “I am talking about your dead agent. Cacciato. We do not eliminate him. Do you understand?”

  “Why do you insist on telling me this?”

  “Because we do not want a mistake. Like the matter in Gdansk. There was too much at stake there and too many wrong moves. On both sides.”

  Hanley said nothing.

  “We do not want retribution, as there was after Gdansk. This was not our doing.”

  “I am supposed to believe you?”

  “Yes.” Softly. “You see, they have sent me. I never leave the embassy. In a little while, Hanley, I am going home. I have been relieved.” The voice was hollow, turned in on itself. “I am ill. I know you see this, that you will make a report on it. It does not matter.” He was silent. “I do not matter.”

  Hanley said nothing.

  “It is important we do not misunderstand each other,” the Soviet said again.

  “Where is Felker?”

  “I am not permitted to speak of anything but this matter. We did not kill Cacciato.”

  “But you brought up Felker.”

  “It was mistake,” the Russian said heavily.

  “And you have Felker now.”

  “You may believe what you wish.”

  “But Felker is part of the problem of the death of Cacciato.” Said almost casually, slyly.

  “I do not know this,” Belushka said.

  Hanley was puzzled; Belushka might be telling the truth, and that would be the most puzzling aspect of all.

  “Will you tell them this? At R Section?” Belushka said with effort at breath.

  “Perhaps,” Hanley said. He realized with a start that it was Devereaux’s usual response when pressed for a specific answer or commitment. Devereaux had never answered except in his own time and never explained. He had never accepted the role assigned to him.

  “All right, Hanley,” Belushka said with heaviness. “I give you this message and it is true; if you do not choose to respond, then it will be on your head. If you begin war with us over this, if you kill our agents, then we will kill yours.”

  “All right,” Hanley said. He had agreed to nothing. He reached for the handle of the car and the door was opened by the young driver, who had stood outside and waited for the conversation to be concluded.

  “Oh.” Hanley turned in his seat back to Belushka. “One thing. Who follows me to lunch to see what I eat? Why would that be important?”

  Belushka smiled. “Why do you think anyone follows you, Hanley?”

  Hanley blinked and did not speak.

  “Perhaps,” Belushka said, “they are already there.”

  9

  PARIS

  Jeanne Clermont was quite certain she had not been followed, especially by Manning, but the rules required certain procedures. She had entered the gray five-story apartment building at six o’clock and waited ten minutes until the door that led to the little garden in the back was opened. She had followed her conductor across the back to the red building on the opposite street, the rue Thénard. They had silently climbed the five flights to the garret rooms and shaken hands in that formal Parisian manner only at the door.

  When she entered the low room, Le Coq was at the window, staring at the city.

  She came to him and extended her hand, and he shook it; they might have been fellow workers meeting in the morning at the factory. Traces of the bourgeoisie always lingered, even in radicals.

  “You’re late.”

  “I was on time,” Jeanne Clermont said, sitting down on a wooden chair. The large room with the low ceiling was badly lit by a single dim bulb hanging over the sink in the back of the room. It was covered with dust and old paintings; it had once been an artist’s studio, but the artist had died, penniless and undiscovered. His paintings were quite bad in any case, and Le Coq saw no reason to get rid of them. Some in the cell occasionally took some of the pictures on Sundays to the quays along the Seine and sold them to tourists. Le Coq disapproved of this—it seemed so middle-class—but he did not intervene.

  “In any case, how is it going with him?”

  “It goes,” she said.

  “Has he made love to you?”

  “That’s not important. Not to you.”

  “Everything is important, Jeanne, you know that. I’m not asking you for any prurient reason, I assure you. I’m…attempting to gauge the degree of confidence he has in you.”

  She stared at Le Coq without speaking until he emerged from the shadows. In the half-light, he stood before her: tall, his face distorted by a vivid red scar that cut down his left cheek, drawing the skin in different ways, right through the socket of his left eye. For a long time, he had worn nothing in the socket, speaking of a glass eye as vanity. But the horror of his appearance—heightened by the eyeless socket, which seemed to stare with more accusation than his good right eye at those he confronted—finally drove his comrades to persuade him that a little vanity could be tolerated, for the sake of the cause.

  His gaze was lopsided now as he held her fixed by his glittering right eye. He moved toward her, dragging the broken, healed remains of his right foot behind him.

  Le Coq had red hair that stood in short, spiky clumps on his round head. “You look like a bantam rooster with your red coxcombs,” Verdun had once joked of his appearance; and so “Le Coq,” which was a not particularly appropriate nickname, had been given him. He was German, from Bremen, but he had no real home now except Paris. He had been in the city thirteen years and still spoke French with the peculiarly heavy German accent that seems to trample the delicate distinctions in the language. He was frequently misunderstood when he spoke, but Le Coq had become accustomed to patience. And to repeating himself until what he wanted was very clear. Many people, even some who had known him longest, were afraid of him, though no one could remember any harm that Le Coq had done to them.

  “The liaison has begun. That’s all,” she said. “William is not so foolish; I have to proceed cautiously in this—”

  “Jeanne…”

  She waited for him. She rested her elegant hands on the lap of her soft blue dress.

  “Is there urgency to this?” she asked at last. Le Coq turned and looked at her.

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because you’ve summoned me twice in the past three weeks. Twice you’ve asked me the same question.” She paused. “If this is more testing of me or my loyalty, then it has become tedious.”

  “I am not a waiter at Les Deux Magots,” Le Coq said. “Don’t treat me as one.”

  “I’m sorry if my manner offends you; your questions offend me.”

  “It was the Company that gave you information about William Manning in the first place…”

  Now it was her turn to rise restlessly and go to the windows away from him and look out over the city. The view was cramped by a modern, white university building thrown up at the end of rue des Écoles as one of the half-reforms the university promised the students after the riots of 1968. Its stark lines clashed hideously with the gentle, seedy, century-old buildings all around it.

  “That he was an American intelligence agent,” Le Coq said.

  “Yes.”

  “It was not a test of you, Jeanne Clermont; we trusted you with information that you could have given to Manning, that would have allowed Manning to avoid our trap.”

  “Yes.” Dully, not looking at Le Coq.

  “And so we want reports, reports of progress.”

  “My life is my own,” she said, turning her blue eyes shining with dark contempt. It was as though Le Coq’s mundane utterances had offended her more than his first questions.

  “Madame, your life is our life. La Compagnie Rouge. When you know of us, you accept us.” It was meant as a threat, but she did not seem frightened. He took a step toward her, advancing slowly by dragging his broken foot behind him. “Madame, you gave your life to the revolution in 1968 and it was spared; have you grown so comfortable in living that you shrink from a total commitment now?”

  “Why do you talk to me like this? As though I were a child at the Sorbonne you sought to recruit to ideals that you utter as meaninglessly as a priest muttering the blessings at Mass? I’m not a child, Le Coq; I’m older than you.”

  “But Manning. You were his lover; perhaps you are again. It’s what we wish, but perhaps you shrink from the commitment to what we intend.”

  “What do you intend?”

  “In time.”

  “I won’t kill him; I won’t lead you to kill him.”

  “Kill him? Why do we want his life? He is useful only alive.” Le Coq smiled, but it was a more horrible face than his frown.

  She stared at him still with her eyes fixed on the horrible expression of his sunken face.

  “The newspapers say the Red Brigade killed the American agent in Venice.”

  “Newspapers are tools, madame. You should understand that, you of all people. Who said it? Le Matin? Le Monde?”

  “L’Humanité,” she replied, pronouncing the name of the newspaper of the Communist Party of France.

  “What the Brigate Rosse does is not what we do. We are brothers in a cause, but brothers go their own ways at times.”

  “Where did you get information on William? Why did you give it to me?”

  “No. The question is, why did William Manning seek you again? To seduce you again? Or to discover your liaison with our organization? Madame, why do you flatter yourself? To think that Manning came back to love you.” Again, Le Coq smiled. “Are there no women in his life? Did he live like a monk for fifteen years after he betrayed you?”

  “You tell me he betrayed me—”

  “I can assure you he did. We know that.”

  “Why do you know? Why must I take what you tell me on your word?” She stepped toward him, and Le Coq retreated a step to the shadows along the outer wall of the room. “What will you do with Manning? I must know.”

  Silence.

  And then Le Coq shrugged.

  “We won’t harm him. We have no reason to.”

  “That is not what I asked you.”

  “Madame, if it is a matter of kidnapping him, we’ll do it.” The voice was harsh. “We will do what we have to do to learn what mission he has come for. But there is no reason to kidnap him now.”

  “How can I believe that?”

  “Madame, he is an intelligence agent. He has no propaganda value. When we kidnap an American general or a diplomat, at least it draws the attention of the masses to the American presence here. Who does not love to see an American brought low from his place of power? But an American spy? The agencies would disavow him and say he was not a spy, that he was a journalist or a tourist or some other occupation that does not interest the mass of people.”

  “So you would kidnap him. And question him. And then kill him.”

  “Certainly, madame. We would never let him go.” The voice was soft, rushing like ice along a river in spring. She felt cold at his words but was determined not to show her fear.

  “But if I can determine his mission…”

  “Yes. Now you see, madame.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Le Coq stepped into the light again. “You see, it is your responsibility.”

  And she realized, more profoundly than Le Coq, that Manning’s life was in her hands.

  10

  MOSCOW

  All the previous day, the probes by elements of the Czech and Polish army divisions had sliced deeply into the southern and central sections of West Germany. The probes had been devastating—a large section of the restored center of Nuremberg had been destroyed by a Czech artillery battalion—but in the end, the Warsaw battalions had been stopped dead. During the night, when the generals of the East were congratulating themselves with wine and vodka in the buffet room at the central building, General Garishenko had ordered a new series of combination moves, including a daring penetration across the Czech supply lines by only a brigade from the 101st Airborne Division of the United States. In the morning, when the war resumed, it had been successful.

  “Do you see? Do you see, Vasili Dmitrovich?”

  General Garishenko could not contain his enthusiasm; all the months of study of the work of the Allied commanders, particularly over this same European ground in World War II, had paid off with the surprise drop by the United States airborne soldiers behind the Czech lines.

  But Vasili, who was a captain seasoned by his work both within the Frunze War College and in the field in Afghanistan, could not be enthusiastic. He detested the idea of the war games played on computers; he detested the paper victories and the hollow flat result summaries flashed on the terminals. There was no real war, no blood, no smell of death and reeking flesh, no earth to win by inches, no clank of armor or bite of tank treads across the wet spring grounds; it was reduced to a game, and real war could not be reduced.

  Still, Vasili said nothing; it was not wise to refuse promotions, even into sections of the army where no fighting was ever done.

  “I cannot believe they didn’t anticipate the orders,” Vasili said at last.

  “But they didn’t, they never do, the strategy always remains conventional when the unconventional action is taken. They are the invaders, and from that act of daring they devise the most pedestrian strategy,” Garishenko said.

  “I still am waiting for the counterstroke,” the younger man said with something like sullenness.

  Garishenko smiled at him suddenly. “Poor Vasili. You have been picked to be on the wrong side. You cannot work up enthusiasm for our cause.”

  “Our cause?” The voice was sharp.

  “In the game,” Garishenko said, a smile still frozen on his small, round face. “We must do the best we can, you know, even if it is our lot to be the NATO forces. The validity of the games depends on it.”

  “Perhaps I am not suited to such games,” the younger man said. He had a thick neck and a broad, Slavic face and dark hair; his appearance was almost brutish, but he was considered one of the best young commanders in the Red Army, and it was thought that some experience with computer planning, as well as working with General Alexei Ilyich Garishenko, would round his continuing education.

  They were seated in a bunker beneath the ground of Frunze War College in the southwest section of Moscow, not far from the Indian embassy. The bunker was without windows, without any season beyond the walls of the gray room. The walls were made of concrete blocks, sealed against the deep frost line of a Moscow winter and the sudden violent spring, when water seeped deep into the earth. The room was official, neither pleasant nor unpleasant. The desks were gray, the chairs gray, the carpet made of some nonspecific fiber from a nonspecific source, of a nonspecific color. Summer and winter, the air conditioning and heating exchangers hummed steadily and kept the buildings connected beneath the war college grounds at a constant temperature of seventy-two degrees with forty percent humidity. The care taken with the heating system was not for the comfort of the generals and students and technicians who devised the games and worked on the computers; it was for Naya herself, a lighthearted nickname given to the complex computer that was the heart of the war games.