So it was that just after LePin had settled down with his twelfth cup of café au lait and the crossword puzzle from Le Monde, the PTT manager in charge knocked timidly at his door to inform him that the Olivetti computer had printed something out in a code that he didn’t understand.

Languorously, LePin followed the PTT manager into the main computer room to accept the message. What he found snapped him immediately to attention. The intercepts that his KGB control officer—still a true believer in a country with no clear political direction—had instructed him to program into the computer six months before had borne fruit. Trying to control the shaking in his hands, LePin took the message back to his office. The message was in book code. Like all codes based on published books, it was decipherable only to the person who knew which book had been used, and he was that only person.

By the time he got back to his little office, his fear had transformed itself mostly into exhilaration. After a lifetime as a common trade unionist, he would now be able to truly serve the cause of socialism. He folded the paper carefully and put it into his pocket. He couldn’t wait to get home and pull the book from its shelf and start translating the code. He smiled when be thought of his clever irony in using Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to encode his messages.

Less than ten minutes after Jacob Yost’s son gave him the message from the American, the old man shut himself away in his office and placed a long-distance telephone call to Munich, West Germany. Yost’s call sounded in the dim corridor of the Jesuitresidenz, located in an old stone baroque building that faced the Sparkassenstrasse in the old quarter of Munich.

The old quarter’s hodgepodge of medieval, Renaissance, and baroque buildings crowd shoulder-to-shoulder, eaves-to-eaves with each other around the narrow winding cobblestone streets and alleys. The old quarter is barely fifteen hundred meters across, yet more than a dozen churches crowd themselves in among the beer halls, private residences, and government buildings. The most prominent of the churches is the Dom und Pfarrkirche Unserer Lieben Frau—the Cathedral and Parish Church of our Lady—known locally as the Frauenkirche. Founded in 1271 as a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary; the Frauenkirche has become the trademark and symbol of old Munich. The church’s twin towers, which are topped with curious cupolas that resemble skullcaps worn by Roman Catholic clergy, have appeared in more tourist brochures and snapshots than any other Munich landmark save the famous glockenspiel.

But besides serving as a postcard landmark, the Frauenkirche serves as a cathedral and major place of worship for Munich’s faithful. Its status as both cathedral and parish church warrant a greater than ordinary staff, many of whom live at the Jesuitresidenz.

The telephone rang twice before being answered by the residents most junior novice. He answered politely and requested that the caller please be patient while he summoned Father Morgen.