The Company: A Novel of the CIA by Robert Littell Page A

below. The Sorcerer, gingerly stabbing the air with his foot to locate the next rung, climbed down after them.

    The three of them squatted for a moment, listening to the icy wind whistling over the rooftops. With the adrenalin flowing and a pulse pounding in his ear, Jack asked himself if he was frightened; he was quite pleased to discover mat he wasn't. From somewhere below came guttural explicatives in German. Then a door leading to the roof was flung open and two silvery silhouettes appeared. The beams from two flashlights swept across the chimneys and illuminated the wooden ladder. One of the silhouettes grunted something in Russian. From a pocket the Fallen Angel produced an old 9 mm Beretta he had once stripped from the body of an Italian fascist whose throat he'd slit near Patras in Greece. A subsonic handgun suited to in-fighting, the Beretta was fitted with a stubby silencer on the end of the barrel. Torriti scratched Silwan II on the back of the neck and, pressing his lips to his ear, whispered, "Only shoot the one in uniform."
    Bracing his right wrist in his left hand, the Fallen Angel drew a bead on the taller of the two figures and pulled back on the hairpin trigger. Jack heard a quick hiss, as if air had been let out of a tire. One of the two flashlights clattered to the roof. The figure who had been holding it seemed to melt into the shadow of the ground. Breathing heavily, the other man thrust his two arms, one holding the flashlight, the other a pistol, high over his head. "I know it is you, Torriti," he called in a husky voice. "Not to shoot. I am KGB."
    Jack's blood was up. "Jesus H. Christ, shoot the fucker!"
    The Sorcerer pressed Silwan II s gun arm down. "Germans are fair game but KGB is another story. We don't shoot them, they don't shoot us." To the Russian he called, "Drop your weapon."
    The Russian, a burly figure wearing a civilian overcoat and a fedora, must have known what was coming because he turned around and carefully set his flashlight and handgun on the ground. Straightening, he removed his fedora and waited.
    Moving on the balls of his feet, the Fallen Angel crossed the roof and stepped up behind the Russian and brought the butt of the Beretta sharply down across his skull over an ear—hard enough to give him splitting headaches for the rest of his life but not hard enough to kill him. The Rumanian deftly caught the Russian under the armpits and lowered him to the roof.
    Moments later the three of them were clambering down the dimly lit staircase of the apartment building, then darting through a corridor reeking of urine and out a back door to an alley filled with garbage cans piled one on top of another. Hidden behind the garbage cans was the fertilizer truck. Without a word the Fallen Angel vanished down the alley into the darkness. Torriti and Jack climbed up into the compartment under the false roof of the vehicle and pulled the trap-ladder closed after them. The engine coughed softly into life and the truck, running on parking lights, eased out of the alley and headed through the silent back streets of East Berlin toward a Pankow crossing point and the French sector of the divided city beyond it.

    Even the old hands at Berlin Base had never seen the Sorcerer so worked up. "I don't fucking believe it," he railed, his hoarse cries echoing through the underground corridors, "the KGB fucker on the roof even knew my name" Torriti slopped some whiskey into a glass, tossed it into the back of his throat and gargled before swallowing. The sting of the booze calmed him down. "Okay," he instructed his Night Owl, "walk me through it real slow-like."
    Miss Sipp, sitting on the couch, crossed her legs and began citing chapter and verse from the raw operations log clipped to the message board. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard over Tito Gobbi's 78-rpm interpretation of Scarpia. It was an indication of Torriti's mental state that he didn't seem to catch a glimpse of the erotic