"It's a better joke," replied Peter, his head angled down into his chin, a mischievous smile on his lips. "One's a nun in New Delhi, and the other's president of her own public relations firm in New York and uses better Yiddish than most of her colleagues in the profession. A couple of years ago she told me they stopped calling her shiksa. She loves her life; so does my other sister in India."

"Yet you chose the military."

"Not 'yet,' Alex. ... And I chose it. I was an angry young man who really believed this country was being dumped on. I came from a privileged family-money, influence, an expensive prep school-that guaranteed me-me, not the black kid on the streets of Philadelphia or Harlem-automatic admittance to Annapolis. I simply figured I had to somehow earn that privilege. I had to show that people like me didn't just use our advantages to avoid, but instead to extend, our responsibilities."

"Aristocracy reborn," said Conklin. "Noblesse oblige-nobility imposes obligations."

"That's not fair," protested Holland.

"Yes, it is, in a very real sense. In Greek, aristo means the 'best,' and kratia is the word for 'rule.' In ancient Athens such young men led armies, their swords up front, not behind, if only to prove to the troops that they would sacrifice with the lowliest of them, for the lowliest were under their commands, the commands of the finest."

Peter Holland's head arched back into the top of the velvet seat, his eyes half closed. "Maybe that was part of it, I'm not sure-I'm not sure at all. We were asking so much ... for what? Pork Chop Hill? Unidentifiable, useless terrain in the Mekong? Why? For Christ's sake, why? Men shot, their stomachs and chests blown away by an enemy two feet in front of them, by a 'Cong who knew jungles they didn't know? What kind of war was that? ... If guys like me didn't go up with the kids and say, 'Look, here I am, I'm with you,' how the hell do you think we could have lasted as long as we did? There might have been mass revolts and maybe there should have been. Those kids were what some people call niggers, and spics and the foul-ups who couldn't read or write beyond a third-grade level. The privileged had deferments-deferments from getting soiled-or service that damn near guaranteed no combat. The others didn't. And if my being with them-this privileged son of a bitch-meant anything, it was the best gig I ever did in my life." Holland suddenly stopped talking and shut his eyes.

"I'm sorry, Peter. I didn't mean to rough up past roads, I really didn't. Actually, I started with my guilt, not yours. ... It's crazy how it all dovetails and feeds upon itself, isn't it? What did you call it? The merry-go-round of guilt. Where does it stop?"

"Now," said Holland, sitting up in the seat, straightening his back and shoulders. He picked up the limousine telephone, punched two numbers and spoke. "Drop us off in Vienna, please. And when you've done that, go find a Chinese restaurant and bring us back the best they've got. ... Frankly, I'm partial to spare ribs and lemon chicken."

Holland proved to be half right. The first hearing of Panov's session under the serum was agonizing to listen to, the voice devastating, the emotional content blurring the information, especially for anyone who knew the psychiatrist. The second hearing, however, produced instantaneous concentration, engendered without question by the very pain they heard. There was no time to indulge in personal feelings; the information was suddenly everything. Both men began taking copious notes on legal pads, frequently stopping and replaying numerous sections for clarity and understanding. The third hearing refined the salient points further; by the end of the fourth, both Alex and Peter Holland had thirty to forty pages of notes apiece. They spent an additional hour in silence, each going over his own analysis.

"Are you ready?" asked the CIA's director from the couch, a pencil in his hand.

"Sure," said Conklin, seated at the desk with his various electronic equipment, the tape machine at his elbow.

"Any opening remarks?"

"Yes," replied Alex. "Ninety-nine point forty-four percent of what we listened to gives us nothing, except to tell us what a terrific prober this Walsh is. He hopscotched around picking up cues faster than I could find them, and I wasn't exactly an amateur when it came to interrogations."

"Agreed," said Holland. "I wasn't so bad either, especially with a blunt instrument. Walsh is good."

"Better than that, but that doesn't concern us. What he pulled out of Mo does-again with a 'but.' It's not in Panov's recapturing what he revealed because we have to assume he revealed almost everything I told him. Instead, it's in what he repeated having heard." Conklin separated several pages. "Here's an example. 'The family will be pleased ... our supreme will give us his blessing.' He's repeating someone else's words, not his own. Now, Mo isn't familiar with criminal jargon, certainly not to the point where he would automatically make a connection, but the connection's there. Take the word 'supreme' and change it by removing one vowel and inserting another. 'Supremo'-capo supremo, hardly a heavenly supreme being. Suddenly, 'the family' is light years away from Norman Rockwell, and 'blessing' is interchangeable with a reward or a bonus."

"Mafia," said Peter, his eyes steady and clear despite a number of drinks that had obviously been burned out of his system. "I hadn't thought that one through, but I marked it instinctively. ... Okay, here's something else along the same lines, the same lines because I also picked up on the unlike-Panov phrases." Holland flipped through his legal pad and stopped at a specific page. "Here. 'New York wants it all.' " Peter continued slapping over the pages. "Again here. 'That Wall Street is something.' " Once more the DCI progressed through his legal pad. "And this one. 'Blondie fruits'-the rest is garbled."

"I missed that. I heard it, but it didn't make any sense to me.

"Why should it, Mr. Aleksei Konsolikov?" Holland smiled. "Underneath that Anglo-Saxon exterior, education and all, beats the heart of a Russian. You're not sensitive to what some of us have to endure."

"Huh?"

"I'm a WASP, and 'blondie fruits' is but one more pejorative description given us by, I must admit, other trampled-upon minorities. Think about it. Armbruster, Swayne, Atkinson, Burton, Teagarten-'blondies' all. And Wall Street, certain firms in that originally WASP financial bastion, at any rate."

"Medusa," said Alex, nodding. "Medusa and the Mafia. ... Holy Christ."

"We've got a telephone number!" Peter leaned forward on the couch. "It was in the ledger Bourne brought out of Swayne's house."

"I've tried it, remember? It's an answering machine, that's all it is."

"And that's enough. We can get a location."

"To what end? Whoever picks up the messages does it by remote, and if he or she has half a brain, it's done from a public phone. The relay is not only untraceable but capable of erasing all other messages, so we can't tap in."

"You're not very into high tech, are you, Field Man?"

"Let's put it this way," replied Conklin. "I bought one of those VCRs so I could watch old movies, and I can't figure out how to turn off the goddamn blinking clock. I called the dealer and he said, 'Read the instructions on the interior panel.' I can't find the interior panel."

"Then let me explain what we can do to an answering machine. ... We can jam it externally."

"Gee willikers, Sandy, what's next for Orphan Annie? What the hell is that going to do? Other than kill the source."

"You're forgetting. We have the location from the numbers."

"Oh?"

"Someone has to come and repair the machine."

"Oh."

"We take him and find out who sent him there."

"You know, Peter, you've got possibilities. For a neophyte, you understand, your current outrageously undeserved position notwithstanding."