“What about you? What are they going to do to you and the others.”

“Honestly …”, Vasily said, before his voice trailed off.

“What, Vasily?”

“We’re the enemy now, Sofia. They’ve brought in a new team from Moscow. They’re handing everything over to them.”

“Who are they?”

“They’re from the Fifteenth Directorate. They’re packing up our samples, our methodology, everything, and taking it all back to Moscow.”

“What’s going to happen to you, Vasily?”

“There’s nothing you can do for us, Sofia.”

“Vasily.”

“They’re going to kill us, Sofia. All of us.”

58

Roth was left waiting in the Eisenhower Building’s library for over an hour. As he stared into the flames of the log fire, he began to doze. When someone finally arrived, they had to wake him.

“Roth,” a tall man with tightly curled red hair said. Then louder, “Levi.”

“Oh,” Roth said, rousing himself, “Mansfield. You’re here?”

Mansfield rubbed a finger on the side of his mouth to indicate Roth had been drooling.

Roth wiped his mouth and began to stand.

“Please,” Mansfield said. “Don’t trouble yourself.”

Roth, looking up at Mansfield’s youthful vigor and dashing good looks, suddenly felt very old and very tired. Mansfield was everything Roth was not, and never would be, regardless of how hard he tried. Mansfield had attended all the best schools, knew all the right people, and was a member of all the right clubs. At Princeton, there was a library named after his grandfather. At the Annapolis Yacht Club, he had the best mooring, right next to the clubhouse. And at the Berehaven Country Club, he’d been given an honorary lifetime membership on his seventh birthday.

Roth still remembered the very polite letter he’d received from Berehaven when he applied for membership. That was over forty years ago now, back when he still entertained the possibility of hobnobbing with the local elites. The letter said he was ineligible for membership without specifying why, and despite the fact he’d been on a waiting list for three years, was willing to pay the sixty thousand dollar initiation fee, and had been invited by current member, and then CIA director, David Connery.

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” Roth said.

Mansfield smiled thinly. “Straighten yourself up for the president, Roth,” he said. “You look like a bum.”

There was a crystal water tumbler on the table and Roth poured himself a glass. He was just taking a sip when the president’s foghorn voice preceded him into the room.

“Gentlemen,” he bellowed.

Even now, after all these years, his Maine accent still sounded to Roth like a cross between a pirate and the Beatles.

“I was beginning to worry you didn’t want to see me,” Roth said.

“Of course I wanted to see you,” the president said, butchering the words.