"You select a handful of people in your parliament you can trust to keep their mouths shut, and whom the rest of parliament trust to be completely honest and that's the hard part and you brief them into everything they need to know. You have to set up ground rules."

"Ground rules?"

"A baseball term, Sergey. It means the special rules that apply to a specific playing field."

Golovko's eyes lit up. "Ah, yes, that is a useful term."

"Everyone has to agree on the rules, and you may never, ever break them." Ryan paused. He was talking like a college lecturer again, and it wasn't fair to speak that way to a fellow professional.

Golovko frowned. That was the hard part, of course: never, ever breaking the rules. The intelligence business wasn't often that cut and dried. And conspiracy was part of the Russian soul.

"It's worked for us," Ryan added.

Or has it? Ryan wondered. Sergey knows if it has or not well, he knows some things that I don't. He could tell me if we've had major leaks on The Hill,since Peter Henderson but at the same time he knows that we've penetrated so many of their operations despite their manic passion for the utmost secrecy. Even the Soviets had admitted it publicly: the hemorrhage of defectors from KGB over the years had gutted scores of exquisitely-planned operations against America and the West. In the Soviet Union as in America, secrecy was designed to shield failure as well as success.

"What it comes down to is trust." Ryan said after another moment. "The people in your parliament are patriots. If they didn't love their country, why would they put up with all the bullshit aspects of public life? It's the same here."

"Power." Golovko responded at once.

"No, not the smart ones, not the ones you will be dealing with. Oh, there'll be a few idiots. We have them here. They are not an endangered species. But there are always those who're smart enough to know that the power that comes with government service is an illusion. The duty that comes along with it is always greater in magnitude. No, Sergey, for the most part you'll be dealing with people as smart and honest as you are."

Golovko's head jerked at the compliment, one professional to another. He'd guessed right a few minutes earlier, Ryan was getting good at this. He started to think that he and Ryan were not really enemies any longer. Competitors, perhaps, but not enemies. There was more than professional respect between them now.

Ryan looked benignly at his visitor, smiling inwardly at having surprised him. And hoping that one of the people Golovko would select for oversight would be Oleg Kirolovich Kadishev, code-name SPINNAKER. Known in the media as one of the most brilliant Soviet parliamentarians in a bumptious legislative body struggling to build a new country, his reputation for intelligence and integrity belied the fact that he'd been on the CIA payroll for several years, the best of all the agents recruited by Mary Pat Foley. The game goes on, Ryan thought. The rules were different. The world was different. But the game went on. Probably always would, Jack thought, vaguely sorry it was true. But, hell, America even spied on Israel - it was called 'keeping an eye on things'; it was never called 'running an operation.' The oversight people in Congress would have leaked that in a minute. Oh, Sergey, do you have a lot of new things to learn about!