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By Root 805 0

always rational, and they'd take chances, because the bigger the risk, the greater their reward. Ego-driven agents were touchy and troublesome. Revenge was never a pretty motive for doing anything, and those people were usually unstable. Conscience was almost as good as ideology. At least they were driven by a principle of sorts. The truth of the matter was that CIA paid its agents well, just out of the spirit of fair play if nothing else, and besides, it didn't hurt to have that word out on the street. Knowing that you'd be properly compensated made for one hell of a tiebreaker for those who had trouble making up their minds. Whatever your baseline motivation, being paid was always attractive. The ideological needed to eat, too. So did the conscience-driven. And the ego types saw that living well was indeed a pretty good form of revenge.

Which one are you, Ivan? Foley wondered. What is driving you to betray your country? The Russians were a ferociously patriotic people. When Stephen Decatur said, "Our country, right or wrong," he could well have been speaking as a Russian citizen. But the country was so badly run—tragically so. Russia had to be the world's unluckiest nation—first too large to be governed efficiently; then taken over by the hopelessly inept Romanovs; and then, when even they couldn't hold back the vitality of their nation, dropped screaming into the bloody maw of the First World War, suffering such huge casualties that Vladimir Ilyich lyanov—Lenin—had been able to take over and set in place a political regime calculated to do destruction to itself; then handing the wounded country over to the most vicious psychopath since Caligula, in the person of Josef Stalin. The accumulation of that sort of abuse was beginning to shake the faith of the people here…

Your mind sure is wandering, Foley, the Chief of Station told himself. Another half hour. He'd leave the embassy on time and catch the metro, with his topcoat open and loose around him, and just wait and see. He headed off to the men's room. Occasionally, his bladder got as excited as his intellect.

* * *

ACROSS TOWN, Zaitzev took his time. He'd be able to write on only one message blank—throwing one away in plain view was too dangerous, the burn bag could not be trusted, and he could hardly light one up in his ashtray—and so he mentally composed his message, then rethought the words, then rethought them again, and again, and again.

The process took him more than an hour in full, and then he was able to write it up surreptitiously, fold it, and tuck it into his cigarette pack.

* * *

LITTLE EDDIE SLID his favorite Transformers tape into the VCR. Mary Pat watched idly, behind her son's rapt attention on the living room floor. Then it hit her.

That's what I am, she realized. I transform myself from ditsy blonde housewife to CIA spy. And I do it seamlessly. The thought appealed to her. She was giving the Soviet Bear a peptic ulcer, hopefully a bleeding one that wouldn't be fixed by drinking milk and taking Rolaids. In another forty minutes, Ed will find out if his new friend really wants to play and, if he wants to play, I'll have to work the agent. I'll hold his hand and lead him along and take his information and send it off to Langley.

What will he give us? she wondered. Something nice and juicy? Does he work in their communications center, or does he just have access to a blank message pad? Probably a lot of those in The Centre… well, maybe, depending on their security procedures. Those would be pretty stringent. Only a very few people would be trusted with KGB signals…

And that was the worm dangling on the hook, she knew, watching a Kenworth diesel tractor turn into a two-legged robot. This Christmas, they'd have to start buying those toys. She wondered if Little Eddie would need help transforming them.

* * *

THE TIME CAME. Ed would leave the embassy door exactly on time, which would be a comfort to his shadow, if any. If there was, he'd notice a green tie again, and think that the earlier one was not all that unusual—not unusual