Extraordinary Powers by Joseph Finder Page B

know) a fitness fanatic, I had known him since my early Agency days. He was a bright, extremely well-informed, impressively well-connected fellow, and I listened closely to what he had to say.
    “Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we,” he was saying from CNN’s Washington studio. “The so-called neo-Nazis who are behind all this violence are just plain old Nazis. I think they’ve -been waiting for this historical moment. Look, the Germans finally, after all these years, establish one unified stock market, the Deutsche Borse, and look what happens—it teeters and then collapses, right?”
    I had met him during my assignment in Leipzig, having just graduated my training at the Farm. I was lonely: Laura was back home in Reston, Virginia, trying to sell our house so she could join me. I was sitting alone in the Thuringer Hof on Burgstrasse, a pleasant, bustling little beer cellar in the Altstadt, and I was probably looking bent out of shape, nursing a large mug of beer.
    I noticed someone standing over me, clearly a Westerner. “You look bored,” the man said in a British accent.
    “Not at all,” I said. “Drink enough of this stuff, and everybody seems interesting.”
    “In that case,” Miles Preston said, “may I join you?”
    I shrugged. He sat at my table and asked, “American? A diplomat, or something?”
    “State Department,” I answered. My cover was as a commercial attache.
    “I’m with the Economist. Been here long?”
    “About a month,” I said.
    “And you can’t wait to leave.”
    “I’m getting a little tired of Germans.”
    “No matter how much beer you drink,” he added. “How much longer here?”
    “A couple of weeks. Then Paris. Which I much look forward to. I’ve always liked the French.” “Oh,” he said, “The French are just Germans with good food.”
    We hit it off, and saw each other, for drinks or dinner, a number of times before I was transferred to Paris. He seemed to believe my State Department cover, or at least didn’t question it. He may have suspected I was with the Agency, I don’t know. On one or two occasions when I was dining with Agency friends at the Auerbachs Keller, one of the city’s few decent restaurants and popular with foreigners, he walked in, saw me, but didn’t approach, perhaps sensing that I didn’t want to introduce him. This was something I liked about him: journalist or not, he never tried to pry for information or ask intrusive questions about what I was really doing in Leipzig. He could be blunt-spoken to the point of crassness—a source of much humor between the two of us—but at the same time he was capable of extraordinary tact. We were both in the same line of work, which may have been what drew me toward him. Each of us was hunting and gathering information; the only difference was that I was doing it on the shady side of the street.
    Now I picked up the bedside phone. It was after one-thirty in the morning, but someone answered at CNN’s Washington office, no doubt a young intern, who gave me the information I needed.
    We met for a very early breakfast at the Mayflower. Miles Preston was as hearty and charming as I remembered him.
    “Did you ever remarry?” he asked over his second cup of coffee. “What happened to Laura in Paris, my God, I don’t know how you ever survived it—”
    “Yes,” I interrupted. “I’m married to a woman named Martha Sinclair. A pediatrician.”
    “A doctor, eh? Could be trouble, Ben. A wife must be just clever enough to understand her husband’s cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.”
    “She may be a little too bright for my own good. How about you, Miles?
    As I recall, you had a rather steady stream of women.”
    “Never did the dirty deed. Ah, well, if only you could fall into the arms of a woman without falling into her clutches, hmm?” He chortled quietly and signaled the waiter for a third cup of coffee. “Sinclair,” he murmured. “Sinclair … You didn’t marry the