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

frontier where the top of her stocking fastened to the strap of a garter belt.
    "Item number one," began Miss Sipp, her voice vibrating with suppressed musicality. (She had actually signed on as Torriti's Night Owl in order to pay for singing lessons at the Berlin Opera, which ended when her teacher informed her that she had almost as much talent as his rooster.) "The listening post at Berlin Base noticed an increase in radio traffic between Moscow and Karlshorst, and vice versa, eighty-five minutes before the defector and his family were due to show up at the safe house."
    "Bastards were getting their marching orders from Uncle Joe," the Sorcerer snarled.
    "Item number two: The sister of the cleaning woman who works at the hotel near Karlshorst called her contact in West Berlin, who called us to say the Russians were running around like chickens without a head, i.e., something was up."
    "What time was that?" Jack, leaning against a wall, wanted to know.
    "D-hour minus sixty minutes, give or take."
    "The fuckers knew there was going to be a defection," figured the Sorcerer, talking more to himself than to the eight people who had crowded into his office for the wake-like postmortem. "But they didn't get ahold of that information until late in the game."
    "Maybe Vishnevsky lost his nerve," Jack suggested. "Maybe he was perspiring so much he drew attention to himself."
    The Sorcerer batted the possibility away with the back of his hand. "He was a tough cookie, sport. He didn't come that far to fink out at the last moment."
    "Maybe he told his wife and she lost her nerve."
    Torriti's brow wrinkled in concentration. Then he shook his head once. "He'd thought it all through. Remember when he asked me if I had a microphone running? He was testing me. He would have tested his wife before he brought her in on the defection. If he thought she'd lose her nerve he would have skipped without her. As for the kid, all he had to know was that they were going to see a late movie."
    "There's another angle," Jack said. "The wife may or may not have gone to bed with the rezident—either way she was probably afraid of him, not to mention ashamed of the trouble she'd brought down on her husband after he confronted the rezident. All of which could have given her enough motivation to defect with Vishnevsky."
    "There's smoke coming out your ears, sport," Torriti said, but it was easy to see he was pleased with his Apprentice. The Sorcerer closed his eyes and raised his nose in the direction of Miss Sipp. She glanced down at the log sheet balanced on her knees.
    "Oh dear, where was I? Ah. Item number three: The Rabbi reported in from the German-Jewish Cultural Center to say that East Germany's Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung troops were mustering next to vehicles parked in the courtyard behind the school in the Pankow district. That was D-hour minus thirty-five minutes."
    "The time frame would seem to suggest that the Russians were the ones who were tipped off, as opposed to the Germans."
    All heads turned toward the speaker, a relative newcomer to Berlin Base, E. Winstrom Ebbitt II. A big, broad-shouldered New York attorney who had seen action with the OSS during the last months of the war, Ebby, as his friends called him, had recently signed on with the Company and had been posted to Berlin to run emigré agents into the "denied areas" of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He had spent the entire night in the base's radio shack, waiting for two of his "Joes" who had parachuted into Poland to come on the air. Curious to hear about the aborted defection, he'd drifted into the Sorcerer's office when he learned there would be an early morning wake. "My guess is the Russians probably brought their Germans in at the last moment," Ebby added, "because they don't trust them any more than we trust our Germans."
    The Sorcerer fixed a malevolent eye on the young man with long wavy hair and fancy wide suspenders sitting atop one of the office safes and toying