"The scary part is that he's starting to convince me."

"Why scary, Dr Ryan?"

Jack lit a cigarette.

" 'Cause I know Narmonov. That man could have made me disappear one cold night outside o' Moscow. We cut a deal, shook on it, and that was that. Takes a very confident man to do something like that. If he has lost that confidence, then then the whole thing could come apart, rapidly and unpredictably. Can you think of anything scarier than that?" Ryan's eyes swept the room.

"Not hardly," agreed the head of the Intelligence Directorate's Russian Department. "I think we have to go with it."

"So do I," Mary Pat agreed.

"Ben?" Jack asked. "You believed this guy from the beginning. What he says backs up your position from up at Harvard."

Dr Benjamin Goodley didn't like being cornered like that. He had learned a hard but important lesson in his months in CIA: it was one thing to form an opinion in an academic community, to discuss options around the lunch tables in the Harvard faculty club, but it was different here. From these opinions national policy was made. And that, he realized, was what being captured by the system actually meant.

"I hate to say this, but I've changed my mind. There may be a dynamic here we haven't examined."

"What might that be?" the head of the Russian Department asked.

"Just consider this abstractly. If Narmonov goes down, who replaces him?"

"Kadishev is one of the possibilities, say one chance in three or so," Mary Pat answered.

"In academia - hell, anywhere - isn't that a conflict of interest?"

"MP?" Ryan asked, shifting his eyes.

"Okay, so what? When has he ever lied to us before?"

Goodley decided to run with it, pretending this was an academic discussion. "Mrs Foley, I was detailed to look for indications that SPINNAKER was wrong. I've checked everything I've had access to. The only thing I've found is a slight change in the tone of his reports over the last few months. The way he uses language is subtly different. His statements are more positive, less speculative in some areas. Now, that may fit his reports - the content of them, I mean - but there may be some meaning in that."

"You're basing your evaluation on how he dots his i's?" The Russian expert demanded with a snort. "Kid, we don't do that sort of work here."

"Well, I have to take this one downtown," Ryan said. "I have to tell the President that we think he's right. I want to get Andrews and Kantrowitz in here to backstop us - objections?" There were none. "Okay, thank you. Ben, could you stay for a moment? Mary Pat, take a long weekend. That's an order."

"She's colicky, and I haven't been getting much sleep," Mrs Foley explained.

"So, have Ed take the night duty," Jack suggested.

"Ed doesn't have tits. I nurse, remember?"

"MP, has it ever occurred to you that nursing is a conspiracy of lazy men?" Ryan asked with a grin.