"I've heard."

He shook his head. "It's a pity. But from inside, there's little you can do about it. So I considered my options and in 2000, the new millennium, decided to work for the world at large, rather than my own nation's petty interests."

"Sounds commendable," she said, remembering her own brief thoughts in that direction. "But the UN must be frustrating."

He raised his bushy brows and conceded with a nod that this was true. "The failures are what reach your newspapers. The successes- those are just boring, aren't they?"

The waitress returned with two warm plates. Once the old man had begun eating, Simmons said, "I want you to tell me about it. I'm not interested in digging up dirt. I just want to know who Milo Weaver really is."

Chewing, Primakov stared at her. "Right. That Milo person you mentioned."

She gave him the most endearing a smile she knew how to make. "Yevgeny. Please. Let's start with Ellen Perkins."

Primakov looked at her, then at his food, and then, with an exaggerated shrug, set down his utensils. "Ellen Perkins?"

"Yes. Tell me about her."

The old man flicked something from his lapel-a woman's hair, it looked like-then snatched at his cheek. "Because you're so charming and beautiful, I have no choice. Russian men are like that. We're too romantic for our own good."

One more endearing smile. "I appreciate it, Yevgeny."

So he began.

"Ellen was special. You have to know that first of all. Milo's mother wasn't just another pretty face, as you say in America. In fact, she wasn't really that beautiful, physically. In the sixties, the revolutionary cells of the world were full of long-haired angels. Hippies who stopped believing in peace, though they still believed in love. Most of them had no real conception of what they were doing. Like Ellen, they were from broken homes. They just wanted a new family. If they had to die, so be it. At least they'd die for a reason, unlike those poor boys in Vietnam." He used his fork to point at Simmons. "Ellen, though-she saw through the romance. She was an intellectual convert."

"Where did you meet?"

"Jordan. One of Arafat's training camps. She'd spent the last few years being radicalized in America, and when I met her she was inspired by the PLO and the Black Panthers. She was a bit ahead of her time, you see. At that time-sixty-seven-there was no one in America she could talk to. So, with a couple of equally disenfranchised friends, she showed up in Jordan. She met Arafat himself, as well as me. She was far more impressed by Arafat."

He paused, and Simmons realized she was supposed to fill in the silence. "What were you doing there?"

"Spreading international peace, of course!" A wry smile. "The KGB wanted to know how much money to spend on these fighters, and who we could recruit. We didn't really care about the Palestinians;

we just wanted to stick a thorn in America's great Middle Eastern ally, Israel."

"Ellen Perkins became a KGB asset?"

He swiped at his cheek. "That was the plan, wasn't it? But Ellen saw right through me. She saw that I didn't care as much about world revolution as I did about keeping my job. The more names I added to my roster of friendly warriors, the more secure my pension became. She saw that. She called me a hypocrite!" He shook his head. "I'm not kidding. She started listing the atrocities the Soviet Union had committed. The Ukraine famine, trying to starve West Berlin, Hungary in fifty-six. What could I say? I dismissed the Ukraine as a madman's mistake-Stalin's, that is. For Berlin and Hungary, I talked up counterrevolutionaries from the West, but Ellen had no time for my excuses. Excuses-that's what she called them."

"So she wouldn't work with you," Simmons said, thinking she understood.

"Quite the contrary! As I said, Ellen was smart. Jordan was just foreplay. If you understand my meaning. Her little ragtag group would learn to shoot and blow things up, but afterward they would need support. At the time, Moscow was generous. She wanted to use me. I, on the other hand, was failing in my duty already. You see, I'd fallen in love with her. She was ferocious."

Simmons nodded, as if all this made sense to her, but it didn't. She was too young to have known the nuances of the cold war, and her parents' stories of the revolutionary sixties made it sound like the Decade of Cliche. Falling in love with a revolutionary meant falling in love with a suicide bomber chanting disconnected verses from the Qu'ran. That was a few steps beyond her imaginative abilities. "Her father, William-Ellen didn't talk to him, did she?"

All the good humor bled from Primakov's face. "No, and I never would have encouraged her to do so. That man is a true shit. Do you know what he did to Ellen? To Ellen and her sister, Wilma?"

Simmons shook her head.

"He deflowered them. At the age of thirteen. It was their comingof-age present." Decades on, the anger was still with him. "When I think of all the good people who died, who were killed by my people and your people over the last sixty years, I find it humiliating-yes, humiliating-that a man like that continues to breathe."

"Well, he's not living well."

"Living at all is too good for him."

She wouldn't make Weaver's ten o'clock interview at the MCC, so she excused herself and called from beside the cash register. Fitzhugh answered after two rings. "Yes?"

"Listen, I'm running late, maybe a half hour."

"What's going on?"

She almost told him, but changed her mind. "Please, just wait for me in the MCC lobby."

By the time she returned, Primakov had finished half his breakfast. She apologized for the interruption, then pushed on: "So. You became Ellen's lover."

"Yes." He wiped his lips with a napkin. "In the fall of 1968, for about two months, we were lovers, to my delight. Then, one day, she was gone. She and her friends had simply vanished. I was in shock."

"What happened?"

"Arafat himself told me. They'd tried to sneak out that night. They were caught, of course, and held in a little room on the outskirts of the camp. He was called to make a judgment. Ellen explained that she and her friends were taking the fight out of the Middle East and into America. They would attack U.S. support for Israel at its roots."

"You mean, kill Jews?"

"Yes," said Primakov. "Arafat believed it and let them go, but Ellen…" He raised and shook his hands in evangelical praise. "What a woman! She'd fooled one of the world's great liars. She wasn't interested in killing Jews-Ellen was no anti-Semite."

After a year in a PLO training camp, daily indoctrination, and maps of Israel marked up with targets? Simmons wasn't sure she believed that. "How do you know?"

"She told me herself. Six months later, in May 1969."

"And you believed her."

"Yes, I did," he said, and his sincerity almost made her believe as well. "By then, I'd been transferred to West Germany to look into those revolutionary student groups that were just starting to destroy banks and department stores. One day in Bonn, I heard that an American girl was looking for me. My heart leapt-really, it did. I wanted it to be her, and it was. She was alone now, on the run. She and her friends had robbed a bank and set fire to a police station. She fled to California, for help from her beloved Black Panthers. They told her she was insane. Then she remembered Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin's bombing of the Schneider department store the previous year. She thought she'd find some common sentiments in Germany." He sighed, licking his lips. "And that, my dear, she did. Then, within a few weeks of her arrival, she heard about a chubby Russian asking a lot of questions."

"Chubby?"

He looked down at his thin frame. "I didn't worry enough in those days."