The Matarese Circle by Robert Ludlum Page A

subjects studied.,
    He might have failed had it not been for an incident that changed his life and gave him the motive to excel. It had been provided by animals—American animals.
    He had been sent to East Berlin on a training exercise, an observer of undercover tactics at the height of the Cold War. He had formed a relationship with a young woman, a German girl who fervently believed in the cause of the Marxist state, and who had been recruited by the KGB. Her position was so minor her name was not even on a payroll; she was an unimportant organizer of demonstrations, paid with loose Reichsmarks from an expense drawer. She was quite simply a university student far more passionate in her beliefs than knowledgeable, a wild-eyed radical who considered herself a kind of Joan of Arc. But Vasili had loved her.
    They had lived together for several weeks and they were glorious weeks, filled with the excitement and anticipation of young love. And then one day she was sent across Checkpoint Kasimir. It was such an unimportant thing, a street corner protest on the Kurfürstendamm. A child leading other children, mouthing words they barely understood, espousing commitments they were ill-prepared to accept. An unimportant ritual. Insignificant.
    But not to the animals of the American Army of Occupation, G2 Branch, who set other animals upon her.
    Her body was sent back in a hearse, her face bruised almost beyond recognition, the rest of her clawed to the point where the flesh was torn, the blood splotches of dried red dust. And the doctors had confirmed the worst. She had been repeatedly raped and sodomized.
    Attached to the body—the note held in place by a nail driven into her arm—were the words:
Up your commie ass. Just like hers.
    Animals!
    American
animals who bought their way to victory without a shell having fallen on their soil, whose might was measured by unfettered industry that made enormous profits from the carnage of foreign lands, whose soldiers peddled cans of food to hungry children so as to gratify other appetites. All armies had animals, but the Americans were most offensive; they proclaimed such righteousness. The sanctimonious were always the most offensive.
    Taleniekov had returned to Moscow, the memory of the girl’s obscene death burned into his mind. Whatever he had been, he became something else. According to many, he became the best there was, and by his own lights none could possibly wish to be better than he was. He had seen the enemy and he was filth. But that enemy had resources beyond imagination, wealth beyond belief; so it was necessary to be better than the enemy in things that could not be purchased. One had to learn to think as he did. Then out-think him. Vasili had understood this; he became the master of strategy and counterstrategy, the springer of unexpected traps, the deliverer of unanticipated shock—death in the morning sunlight on a crowded street corner.
    Death in the Unter den Linden at five o’clock in the afternoon. At that hour when the traffic was maximum.
    He had brought that about, too. He had avenged the murder of a child-woman years later, when as the director of KGB operations, East Berlin, he had drawn the wife of an American killer across the checkpoint. She had been run down cleanly, professionally, with a minimum of pain; it was a far more merciful death than that delivered by animals four years earlier.
    He had nodded in appreciation at the news of that death, yet there was no joy. He knew what that man was going through, and as deserved as it was, there was no elation. For Taleniekov also knew that man would not rest until he found his own vengeance.
    He did. Three years later in Prague.
    A brother.
    Where was the hated Scofield these days? wondered Vasili. It was close to a quarter of a century for him, too.They each had served their causes well, that much could be said for both of them. But Scofield was more fortunate; things were less complicated in Washington, one’s