“I speak it at home all the time.”

Rogers nodded. Then something else occurred to him. “Tell me — I understand there are a number of regional Italian dialects. Could you tell which one he was using?”

“It sounded pretty usual. You might call it American Italian.”

“As if he’d been in the country a long time?”

“I guess so. He sounded pretty much like anybody around here. But I’m no expert. I just talk it.”

“I see. You don’t know anyone named Barbara? I mean — a Barbara who looks a little like you, say?”

“No…no, I’m sure I don’t.”

“All right, Miss DiFillipo. When he spoke to you, you screamed. Did anything else happen?”

“No. He turned around and ran into the alley. And then a car followed him in there. After that, one of you FBI men came up to me and asked if I was all right. I told him I was, and he took me home. I guess you know all that.”

“Yes. And thank you, Miss DiFillipo. You’ve been very helpful. I don’t think we’ll need you again, but if we do we’ll be in touch with you.”

“I’ll be glad to help if I can, Mr. Rogers. Goodbye.”

“Good-bye, Miss DiFillipo.” He shook her hand again, and watched her leave.

Damn, he thought, there’s a kind of girl who wouldn’t get upset if her man was in my kind of business.

Then he sat frowning. “Barbara — it’s I — the German.” Well, that was one more thing to check out.

He wondered how Martino was feeling, holed up in his room. And he wondered how soon-or long-it would be before they came upon the kind of evidence you could put on record and have stand up.

The interoffice buzzer broke in on him again.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Rogers? This is Reed. I’ve been running down some of the people on the Martino acquaintance list.”

“And?”

“This man, Francis Heywood, who was Lucas Martino’s roommate at MIT.”

“The one who got to be a big gun in the ANG Technical Personnel Allocations Bureau? He’s dead. Died in a plane crash. What about him?”

“The FBI just got a package on him. They pulled in a net of Soviet people in Washington. A really topnotch bunch, that’d been getting away with it for years. Sleepers, mostly. When Heywood was in Washington for the American government, he was one of them.”

“The same Francis Heywood?”

“Fingerprints and photos check with our file, sir.”

Rogers let the air seep out between his lips. “All right. Bring it here and let’s have a look at it.” He hung up slowly.

When the FBI file came in, the pattern it made was perfect, with no holes anyone couldn’t fill with a little experienced conjecture, if he wanted to.

Francis Heywood had attended MIT with Lucas Martino, sharing a room with him in one of the small dormitory apartments. Whether he was a Soviet sleeper even that far back was problematic. It made no significant difference. He was definite]y one of them by the time he was transferred out of the American government into the ANG. Working for the ANG he was hired to assign key technical personnel to the best working facilities for their specific purposes. He had been trained for this same kind of work in the American government, and was considered the best expert in the specialty. At some point near this period, he could have turned active. The natural conclusion was that he had been able to maneuver things so that the Soviets could get hold of Martino. Heywood, in effect, had been a talent scout.

He might, or might not, have known what K-Eighty-Eight was. He was supposed to have only a rough idea of the projects he found space for, but it would certainly have been easier for him to make specific guesses than for most people. Or, if it was felt he ought to take the risk, he could have taken steps to find out. In any case, he had known what kind of man, and how important a project, he could deliver over the border.

That, again, was secondary. What mattered most was this:

A month after Lucas Martino had disappeared over the border, Francis Heywood had taken a transatlantic plane from Washington, where he had been on a liaison mission that might actually have been a cover for almost anything. The plane had reported engine explosions in mid-ocean, sent out a crash distress call, and fallen into the sea. Air rescue teams found some floating wreckage and recovered a few bodies, Francis Heywood’s not among them. The plane had crashed — sonar mapping found its pieces on the bottom. And, at the time, that had been that. Simple engine trouble of some kind. No report whatsoever of Soviet fighter planes sent out to create an incident, and the radio operator sending calm, well-trained messages to the last.

But now Rogers thought of the old business of dropping a man into the water at a prearranged spot, and having a submarine stand by to pick him up.

If you wanted to vary that so the man wouldn’t be missed, then you could crash a whole commercial flight — who’d think it strange to miss one body? — and the submarine could make sure only that one man didn’t drown. It was a little risky, but with the right kind of prearranged crash, and your man set for it, it was well within the kind of chance you took in the business.

He looked at Heywood’s dossier statistics:

Height: 6 feet. Weight: 220. He’d been a heavyset man, with a dark complexion. His age was almost exactly the same as Martino’s. While in Europe, he had learned to speak Italian — presumably with an American accent.

And Rogers wondered just how much Lucas Martino had told him, through three years in the same room. How much the lonely boy from New Jersey had talked about himself. Whether he might not have had a picture of his girl, Edith, on his desk. Or even of a girl called Barbara, for Heywood to have seen every day until it was completely soaked into his memory. Maybe Heywood could have explained what Angela DiFillipo had heard last night on MacDougal Street.

How good an actor was their man? Rogers wondered. How good an actor do you believe a man can be?

God help us, Finch, he thought.

CHAPTER TEN

Young Lucas Martino came to Massachusetts Tech convinced there was something wrong with him, determined to repair it if he could. But as he went through registration, drew his classroom assignments, and struggled to fit himself into a study routine like nothing he had ever met before, he began to realize how difficult that might be.

Tech students were already handpicked on the day they entered. Tech graduates were expected to fill positions at the top. A thousand projects were piled up on the world’s schedules, waiting for men to staff them. Once they were implemented, each project had a thousand other schedules waiting for its completion. Plans made a dozen years ahead of time were ready, each timed, each meshed to another, each dependent on the successful completion of each schedule. If a man were to some day endanger that structure in any way, his weakness had to be located as early as possible.

So Tech instructors were people who never gave a doubtful answer the benefit of the doubt. They did not drive their classes, or waste time in giving any particular student more attention than the next. Tech students were presumed capable of digesting as much of the text as was assigned to them, and of knowing exactly what it meant. The instructors lectured quietly, competently, and ruthlessly, never going back to review a point or, in tests, to shade a mark because an otherwise good student had slipped once.

Lucas admired it as the ideal system for its purpose. The facts were presented, and those who could not grasp them, use them, and fit themselves to the class’s progress, had to be eliminated before they slowed everyone down. It was a natural approach for him, and he had a tendency to be mildly incredulous when someone in the next chair turned to him helplessly, already far behind and with no hope of catching up. In the first few weeks of school, he established himself among his classmates as a cold, unfriendly brain, who acted as if he were somehow better than the rest of them.