"Don't know," Cahill said, then laughed as if something he'd said was funny. "All these years, I don't know. I don't. "

"But you've met him?" I said.

"Never seen him. Not once, not even in the beginning. Very smart, clever. Paranoid, maybe. Doesn't miss a trick, though. Interpol might have seen him during the transport. Tom Weir? The Brits, maybe. Had him for a while before we got him." We'd already checked with London, but they had nothing substantial about the defection. And there was nothing about a mistake in Paris.

"How long have you been working with him?" I asked Cahill.

He looked for an answer on the ceiling. "Working for him, you mean?"

"Yes. How long?"

"Long time. Sold out early in the game. Jesus, long time ago." Cahill started to laugh again. "Lot of us did—CIA, FBI, DEA. So he claims. I believe him."

I said, "He gave you orders to have Thomas Weir killed. You already told us that." Which he hadn't.

"Okay," he said. "If I did, I did. Whatever the hell you say."

"Why did he want Thomas Weir killed?" I continued. "Why Weir? What happened between them?"

"Doesn't work that way. You just get your job. You never see the whole plan. But there was something between him and Weir—bad blood.

"Anyway, he sure as hell never contacted me. Always my partner. Always Hancock. He's the one who got the Wolf out of Russia. Corky, the Germans, the Brits. I told you that, right?" Cahill said, then winked at us. "This stuff is good. Truth serum. Drink the grape juice, boys." He looked over at O'Connell. "You, too, Dr. Mengele. Drink the fucking grape and the truth will set you free."

Chapter 96

Had we gotten the truth out of Joe Cahill? Was there anything to his drug-induced ramblings?

Corky Hancock? The Germans, the Brits? Thomas Weir?

Somebody had to know something about the Wolf. Where he was. Who he was. What he might be up to next.

So I was on the road again, tracking down the Wolf. Joe Cahill's partner had moved out to the central Idaho Rockies after he had taken early retirement. He lived on the outskirts of Hailey in the Wood River Valley, about a dozen miles south of Sun Valley. Not a bad life for a former spook.

As we drove from the airport to Hailey we passed through what the Bureau driver described as "high desert." Hancock, like Joe Cahill, was a hunter and fisherman, it seemed. Silver Creek Preserve, a world-famous catch-and-release fishing area, was nearby.

"We're not going to bust in on Hancock. We'll keep him under surveillance. Try to see what he's up to. He's off in the mountains, hunting, right now. We'll run by his place. Let you have a look," said the local senior agent, a young Turk named Ned Rust. "Hancock is an expert shot with a rifle, by the way. Thought I'd mention that."