Condley checked his watch. It was ten minutes to nine. They were ahead of Skip Rogers’s schedule by ten minutes but were well within the boundaries of the CIA agent’s suggested time frame. It was important, Rogers had written, to arrive at the apartment after Anatolie Petrushinsky had returned from his daily sojourns but before he drank himself to sleep.

They stood silently for a moment in front of the iron-plated door. The colonel took a deep breath, gathering himself. Then he gave off a little shrug and knocked loudly on the door.

All was silent on the other side of the door. They waited for a full minute, staring nervously at each other. Then the colonel knocked loudly again. Several more seconds passed. They heard a shuffling and after that a scratching on the door itself, as if someone was undoing an inside lock. And finally came a deep, slurred voice, speaking in indecipherable Russian, its tone filled with suspicion.

As he listened to the words, the colonel’s face became filled with the same electric tension as Condley’s. He took another deep breath and answered in Russian, his own voice rich and surprisingly deep and his tone warmly upbeat. The only words Condley recognized were comrade Anatolie Petrushinsky and Viet Nam.

Another pause, as if the man on the other side of the door was measuring the validity of the colonel’s response against the possibility that he was being somehow tricked. Another question from the unknown voice, Condley able to decipher only Viet Nam from the words that drifted through the door. And the colonel giving a long, emotional response, seeming to alternate between pleading and scolding.

Then, with a clarity that shocked Condley as deeply as if he had grabbed on to an exposed electrical wire, the voice behind the door began speaking Vietnamese. “My friend,” the deep voice intoned, suddenly devoid of the rich, slurring Russian tones, “if you have truly come from Viet Nam to see me, speak Vietnamese and tell me why.”

The colonel and Condley smiled to each other, neither hiding his sudden and overwhelming excitement. Then the colonel turned back to the door, as if speaking to the giant curtain that hid the Wizard of Oz.

“I was a soldier in our common cause for many years, and after that I lived in your country for five years, studying the way of the future,” said Pham, now in Vietnamese. “I bring you the greetings of my government. I bring you our thanks for all of your assistance to us, both during and after our glorious war of liberation. I bring you the fond memories still carried in the hearts of many of our people. And finally I bring you a request for help, on a difficult matter that might only be solved with your assistance.”

“You need my help?”