Gale, who was in his mid-forties, pulled a damp handkerchief from a pants pocket and dabbed at his face. “I don’t have much time,” he said. “We’re busy. Very busy.”

Stripling waved a waitress over. Gale had an iced tea, too. Both men ordered shrimp Caesar salads.

“What do you want, Tim?” Gale asked, downing a glass of ice water. “As I said, we’re very busy. I shouldn’t even be here.”

“The Widmer hearings,” Stripling said, not looking at him.

“What about them?”

Stripling now faced him. “It’s like Los Alamos. What’s all the secrecy?”

“I don’t know. It’s Senator Widmer’s hearings. Ask him.”

“Your boss is on the committee, Jimmy. Of course you know what’s going on.”

Gale looked about nervously. His tea came and he eagerly drank it. Stripling sat back, glass in hand, and took a certain quiet pleasure in Gale’s overt anxiety. Exerting power over others was something he’d come to enjoy after years of creating the conditions under which such power was possible. There had been so many Jimmy Gales, each having made a single human misstep in their lives, an isolated indiscretion, a drunken moment, a loss of control over their passions, a mistake in judgment experienced by every person at some point in their lives. The difference was that these very human beings worked for the U.S. government.

Stripling had first learned of Gale eight years ago, while still on the payroll of the agency. His success at identifying and turning government employees into informants for the agency had been beyond expectations. The stable of men and women he’d developed, willing to pass on information if asked, had grown to more than a hundred. Of course, there were those who left government service, and by extension lost their usefulness to Stripling and the CIA. But there were always others to take their place. Amazing, Stripling often thought, how vulnerable people were to having their private lives exposed, how willing they were to risk their professional and personal reputations in the pursuit of a vice or secret pleasure.

He’d found Washington ’s brothels, call girls, and escort services to be a particularly rich source of recruits. Married men who frequented such services were easy targets, although Stripling was judicious in his selection of which ones to pursue. If he’d elected to enlist every married man who visited one of the prostitutes on his payroll-some of whom agreed to install a tiny camera in the bedroom in return for easier money than plying their usual trade-the stable would have been too large and unwieldy to control.

Prostitutes providing other than conventional sexual experiences had been especially good to Stripling over the course of his career. That certainly was the case with Jimmy Gale. Married and with three children, Gale had come from Colorado to Washington with his family a dozen years ago to work for the senator from Colorado, and had quickly established himself as one of the most respected staffers on the Hill, a man fiercely loyal to his boss and mentor and someone whose word could be trusted. His reputation in his community of Rockville, Maryland, was equally positive. Gale was active in civic affairs, Little League, his church, his kids’ schools, and the local Republican club.

He was also a man who’d questioned his sexuality since he was a teenager. He’d kept that question under wraps well into his adult years, through his marriage and the birth of his children, submerged, stifled, but always there below the surface.

One night, after a party at a restaurant popular with Senate and House staffers, and after he’d consumed more alcohol than he was accustomed to, he dragged out a number he’d been given for a Capitol Hill brothel that offered male prostitutes. He didn’t remember much about the experience, whether it had been pleasurable or not or whether it had validated his questions about his true sexual orientation. All he knew was that it had been wrong to seek sexual gratification outside his marriage. He tore up the phone number and put the event behind him, to be forgotten and never repeated.

Until he was contacted by one Timothy Stripling, who made it known that he knew about the visit to the male whorehouse, and who thought Gale would be willing, even anxious, to keep it between them in exchange for occasionally passing along information from the Hill. “After all,” Stripling had said, returning the black-and-white photos of Gale at the brothel to their envelope, “I’m not asking for you to divulge state secrets, Jimmy. It’s all in the interest of national security. Look at it this way; you’ll be doing a service to your country and adding to your bank account. What could be better?”

Gale looked at Stripling across the table and felt what he always did when in Stripling’s company. He hated this man who’d intruded into his personal life and who’d used a single, solitary incident to blackmail him into submission.

Although few had expressed such feelings to Stripling over the years, he was well aware that those emotions existed. He waited until the waitress had delivered their salads, slowly buttered a roll, leaned his elbows on the table, and said, “Now, Jimmy, let’s start over. The Widmer hearings. I know that you know what they’re all about.” He took a forkful of shrimp. “Let’s eat while we talk. While you talk. Shrimp shouldn’t sit out in this heat.”

Sasha Levine had debated long and hard about flying to Washington to claim Louis’s body.

Her initial reaction when called in the evening, Israel time, by someone from the Washington MPD, was resignation. Louis was a sick old man. His death was just a matter of time, and she’d mentally prepared for the day it would come. Still, projecting an acceptance of the inevitable and experiencing it in real time are quite different things, which she would soon discover.

She slowly lowered the receiver into its cradle, went to the small terrace on which they’d spent so many lazy evenings, looked up into a threatening sky, and bellowed a cry of anguish that stopped passersby on the street below. She collapsed into a chair and wept softly and steadily until there were no tears left to shed.

Dry-eyed and carrying a freshly lit cigarette, she returned to the living room and stared at the phone. The caller hadn’t said how Louis had died. Had he collapsed on the street? Been rushed to a hospital? She hadn’t asked and now wanted to know. The caller had left a twenty-four-hour number in Washington. It was morning there, and she made the call.

“Murder?” she said, incredulous. “He was shot dead?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The end of that second call did not result in any hysterical outburst by Sasha. In a sense, his having been gunned down fit more neatly into who he was. At least what she knew about him.

Russo had been living in Tel Aviv under the witness protection program for almost a year when he met Sasha at the Tango nightclub in the Tel Aviv Sheraton Hotel, on Hayarkon Street. It was 1993; he was sixty-one years old, still physically and mentally fit, virile and self-assured. Although he wasn’t tall-five feet, seven inches-he carried himself in such a way that he appeared to be. Shoes with built-up heels contributed to the effect. She noticed that he dressed nicely, although he was overdressed in the informal atmosphere of the club-an Italian-cut double-breasted black suit, a white shirt with a high collar, a black tie, and pointy, polished black shoes.