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By Root 1412 0

reputation or jeopardizing the security accord. It reminded him of the classic conundrum of an explorer traveling through a country inhabited by two tribes. The members of one tribe always tell the truth, the members of the other tribe always lie. The tribe that always lies are headhunters and cannibals. The explorer comes across a tribal hunting party, which quickly surrounds him. However, he is unable to distinguish which tribe they represent, and now he understands his dreadful predicament. He needs to ask two questions: the first is, Which tribe are you from? The second is, Will you eat me? But whichever tribe the men belong to they are going to give the same answer: We’re from the tribe that never lies, and we’re not going to eat you. And yet the outcome will be polar opposites, either the explorer will be safe or he will die a horrible death.

Paull was now facing a similar situation, lethal in the political sense with no room to be wrong. Were Thomson and Benson members of the tribe that tells the truth or the tribe that lies? If he acted on their information and they were in fact lying, he would jeopardize not only Edward Carson’s presidency but the future security of America. But if they were telling the truth and he didn’t act, out of a belief that they were lying, the same terrible scenario would come about.

“Why did General Brandt order a sanction on Jack McClure?” Paull asked.

“We don’t know,” Thomson said, “except to say that Brandt must feel that McClure presents an immediate danger to his private deal with Yukin.”

Now Paull knew he had to tell the president, get the sanction rescinded before Jack was killed. He wished with very fiber of his being that Jack McClure were with him. Jack would unravel this seemingly no-win situation, because he’d be able to see the sides of it Paull could not. But Jack wasn’t here, and Paull knew he’d have to make the crucial decision as to what to tell Carson himself. He racked his brain to find a way out, or at least to swing the odds from fifty-fifty to a percentage that was more favorable to him and the president.

What was clear, what he had hard evidence proving, was that General Brandt had seriously—terminally—overstepped his authority. This fact—the only one Paull had—argued that Thomson and Benson were telling the truth. That conclusion was far from certain, but what in this life, he asked himself, was ever certain? He had to trust these two, but only as far as he could throw them.

“All right,” he said, breaking the lengthy silence, “I’ll call the president.”

TWENTY-SIX

ORIEL BATCHUK sat in the ultrabright, candy-colored confines of the Baskin-Robbins in the Globus shopping center on Maidan Neza-lezhnosti, which rose on one side of Kiev’s Independence Square. He was surrounded by bubbling Ukrainians dressed in Tommy Hilfiger or Pierre Cardin, trying their hardest to be American.

His mind, drifting, returned to the past, to his confrontation with Dyadya Gourdjiev, an encounter he had hoped never to have, but that he saw now, with the perfect clarity of hindsight, was inevitable. Their relationship was bound to end in tears, as the British were wont to say, because it was all artifice, meticulously constructed by the two of them out of lies, fabrications, disavowals, and obfuscation. The truth was they had both made compromises and, yes, sacrifices—not so very difficult for men who lacked a moral compass—in order to live in the world with one another, in order not to tear the other limb from limb. The emotions that ran between them, that bound them together in a private arena, were both lava hot and ice cold, how could it be otherwise, considering the hideous stroke of fate that had befallen them?

But of course now that he looked around the Technicolor store with blind eyes he realized that it was no coincidence that he had ordered the rendezvous here at this particular place, because it was on this very spot, long before Globus was even an idea in the mind of its developer, that he had first seen Nikki. She had been walking with Gourdjiev, he remembered