“Oh Jesus. Now you’re waving the fucking flag at me.”

“You’re the only one who can get to him.”

“I didn’t ask for it.”

“Jaime, you didn’t ask to be born.”

“The answer’s still no. It ain’t my job.”

“Then think about this. Belsky knows your face. He’s got some connection with Ross Trumble and you’re also involved in something that Trumble’s involved in—the Phaeton project. It’s not unlikely you’ll cross Belsky’s path again. But in the meantime he’s not going to ignore the meeting you had. He won’t be able to let it alone, he’ll pick at it until he finds out what you were doing at the house and who you are and who you work for. He’ll find out you’re on Senator Forrester’s staff and he’ll decide there’s a chance you didn’t report the meeting to anybody else. You see what that could lead to? He’ll want to cover his tracks and he may decide he can do it by silencing you.”

“I’ve been shot at before.”

“What about Senator Forrester? You want him shot at too?”

“You bastard,” Spode said wearily.

“Belsky will look for you, Jaime. It’s not my fault, it’s just a fact. He’s going to look for you anyway so you may as well let him find you, because that’s the best way for us to find him.”

Spode sagged into the chair with the phone against his ear. “All right, George. Let’s have all of it.”

“We’ll put people on Trumble to try to find out what connection he’s got with Belsky. I’ll keep you up to date. We’ll put some men on Forrester to cover him. Is there any intermediary you usually report to on the staff or do you work direct with Forrester?”

“I work with him. Sometimes Lester Suffield’s in on it—the Senator’s aide.”

“All right. We’ll do the legwork. Maybe Belsky’s registered somewhere under the Meldon Kemp name—we’ll cover that. I’ll have Art put one or two people on you so you won’t have to feel too exposed.”

“Tell them not to get in my way. I hate tripping over eager beavers.”

“I wouldn’t use second-string people on this, Jaime. You know better than that.”

“Just keep them out of my hair,” Spode said with a good deal of force. “Tell them to stay out of my goddamn bathroom. I don’t like being spied on when I crap.”

“Look, we’ve been over all that before and I’ve apologized to you before. It was a mixup with the FBI, some crank anonymous accusation, and it shouldn’t have happened.”

“You’re damn right it shouldn’t.” Somebody had written a letter saying he was a fag and all the departments from FBI to the Agency were paranoid on that subject. Spode tightened his dark face into a savage grin. “Suppose I was a faggot, George?”

“Shut up and get to work.”

“Yeah.” He hung up and glanced at Belsky’s automatic pistol on the table and called back through the house. When Art Miller appeared Spode said, “I’ll see you. You may as well hang on to that iron. Might find out who it was registered to.”

“You back on the team, Jaime?”

“Let’s just say I’m free-lancing on a one-shot contract. The day I sign onto you guys’ payroll again is the day you better have me inspected for rabies.” He turned to the door. “You know my phone number,” he said morosely by way of parting, and went.

Chapter Ten

Friday in Moscow the snow was falling as if dumped out of shovels and scattered by big-bladed fans. The Chaika moved along the Official Cars Only lanes with its wipers thumping, snow building into little cakes in the lower corners of the windshield. Inside the car Rykov felt overheated, partly because of his overcoat and partly because of the big meal he had put under his belt at the Aragvi.

He had stuffed himself to the belching point with canakhi and shashlik and Georgian tea and watched Yashin pick at his chakhokhbili; the sword dancer had whirled by, fast pirouettes with the sword pointed at his own body, and the music had been high and frantic, and through it all Yashin had maintained his ascetic detachment and infuriated Rykov. Men without passions were abominations.

At the height of the featured dance Yashin had removed his rimless glasses to polish them. “My dear Viktor, surely you know the old Japanese proverb, ‘You can see another’s arse but not your own.’” The wintry glance, never quite a smile. “What you propose is a Carthaginian peace. Annihilation of peoples. Really I think you need a rest.”

“Comrade First Secretary, the news from China—”

“I have seen all your evidences and I am not impressed. Xenophobia is the root of the Chinese character, but there’s no reason for us to have it—it is not a communicable disease. Viktor, you suffer from messianic fantasies, you wish to think of yourself as the supreme player in an immense global chess game, you are obsessed by the notion that if power is disused it may atrophy and therefore it must be exercised—and since we are not at war with anyone at the moment we must go to war with someone.”

But the dark winter of Asia was ending; the Chinese war machine stirred with rumbling vibration; there were no responsible leaders to halt it: China was a country which boasted of its ancient civilization yet remained politically adolescent, full of immature ambitions to achieve rule over all of Asia. Yashin had rested his case on the supremacy of the Soviet retaliatory plan and that was that. In the Kremlin they made a Plan and the Plan was all, the Plan was always right and invincible, only people could be mistaken, and if people made mistakes they were punished. Yashin’s plan was the wrong plan and when it proved wrong Yashin would be punished—but that was no satisfaction: that would be too late.

Well, then, I too have a plan.

The Chaika crawled past the Moskva Hotel. Rykov sat drawn into himself with his fist locked over the clubbed handle of his walking stick. His scowl was filled with weltschmerz. They were never going to get a full and clear-cut revelation of precise plans from the Chinese, a people whose politics had been steeped in secrecy and intrigue and prestidigitatious misdirection for thousands of years.

Rykov was chief of KGB for the excellent reason that he had not only a brilliant mind but also the peculiar intuitive genius it took to bridge the rational gap between two separate clues that could appear to have no logical connection. And he was getting his clues every day from his mother-daughter team in Peking. In Beria’s day one word from the KGB would have been enough to galvanize the Soviet Far Eastern forces into intensive war preparations. But today there was no one with initiative enough to commit the nation to an attitude of preemptive self-defense. The ruling troika contained three men none of whom dared move before the others, and as a result there was no capability for instant reaction or decisive policy-making. They blundered into situations and they lacked a clear and single will.

He had thrashed it out with them singly and by twos and in group, and it was always the same. They were afraid of one another. They were afraid of making a mistake. They were above all afraid of the United States: “If we attack China the United States will come into it against us, on China’s side. We can’t afford that.” Over and over again. In the first place it was a dubious supposition: Washington, forewarned but not given enough time to react, might stay out of it altogether. But assuming it was true (and it probably was): there was still a way to forestall it.

Last night he had asked Kazakov, “Suppose I could guarantee that in the event of a war between China and the USSR the United States will come in as our ally. Regardless of who started the war. In that event what would you say?”

But Kazakov like the others had berated him for his primitive militarism: “You are living in the past, Viktor. Can you not comprehend the devastation of a nuclear exchange? Wars must be confined to limited conventional scope and total war must be avoided at whatever cost.”