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to know she disapproved of a loose-cannon operative, especially one under the control of a reporter. She knew Irving Fein well, from their student days at City College in New York, a bit of data she was not about to share with this old espionage hand. Irving had protected her on a story when she badly needed a journalistic guardian, and she owed him one. But this was not necessarily the one.
    She knew that Clauson’s suspicion about a sleeper building a fortune in the United States for KGB use had been indulged by her predecessor in his final weeks; if she flatly denied this request for tacit support of an off-the-books probe, it might invite criticism later. But she did not want any sleeper hunt to compromise one of her primary missions, and Dorothy Barclay would be damned if she would let Clauson’s cooperation with Fein get out of hand.
    “If this Irving Fein person,” she said, “who has been hostile to some of the Agency’s covert actions in the past, wants to hire an impersonator, that’s strictly his business. We’re not involved. We cannot recommend one of our contract employees. If they do anything illegal, or get themselves hurt trying to get a big story, it’s their responsibility.”
    She would lock this in with a memo to the DDO, who had expressed a worry about Clauson’s compromising his own indirect monitoring of the sleeper rumor. “All you’re authorized to do,” she told the veteran operative, “is to stay in touch with Fein to see what he comes up with. Your role is strictly passive.” She drove it home: “Which means if some banker calls us to see if an impersonation has our approval, the CIA has no position. Not yes, not no. Understood?”
    Clauson sighed. “Your order to monitor passively is understood, Madam Director. If developments warrant,” he added, “I may ask for a reclama.”
    She had been warned about those reclamas. They were time-consuming appeals to executive decisions that permitted counterintelligence to prevent an executive decision from being recognized as permanent. “Forget the damn reclama, Walter. You should have plenty of other things to do.”
    So did she. As he nodded curtly at his dismissal and left, she consulted a budget summary: $4 billion was being cut out of the intelligence community this year. She was determined the cuts not come out of antiterrorism. Counterintelligence was a likely target for thebudget-cutters, with its function basically having been moved across the river to FBI headquarters on 9th Street. The vestigial CIA mole-hunters had failed to come up with the “Second Man” protecting Ames; as a result, operatives like Clauson were scorned at the Bureau and in the oversight committees.
    Dorothy Barclay was not going to resist Congressional demands for an Agency less mean and more lean. Time for a major Reduction in Force: she had read that in the seventies one such bureaucratic bloodletting was called the Halloween Massacre. It occurred to her that an appropriate time for another major riffing would be in the coming month, on St. Valentine’s Day.

CHICAGO
    As he left the Mercantile Exchange for his studio apartment in Marina Towers, the saying that stuck in Berensky’s mind was “The house is burning and the clock is ticking.”
    With the nonpublic information provided by the KGB over the past four years, he had multiplied the original stake of $3 billion by ten. He estimated it would take $100 billion in equity to finance a destabilization and takeover of the Russian Federation, if that was the political purpose of the Feliks people. He would judge their character and goals later. Now he was under pressure to make major trades to run up the fortune quickly, before his moment of independent action ended.
    The Fifth Directorate had been decapitated by an airline accident. The only remaining member of the KGB hierarchy who knew the sleeper agent’s American identity—his longtime control agent—had blown himself up in Barbados. He