Chapters (20)
- And for all the men who wear dolphins
- THE FIRST DAY
- THE SECOND DAY
- THE THIRD DAY
- MONDAY 6, DECEMBER
- TUESDAY 7, DECEMBER
- WEDNESDAY 8, DECEMBER
- THE SEVENTH DAY
- THE EIGHTH DAY
- THE NINTH DAY
- THE TENTH DAY
- MONDAY 13, DECEMBER
- THE TWELFTH DAY
- WEDNESDAY 15, DECEMBER
- THE FOURTEENTH DAY
- THE FIFTEENTH DAY
- THE SIXTEENTH DAY
- THE SEVENTEENTH DAY
- THE EIGHTEENTH DAY
- Acknowledgements
"You lied to me, Senator," Ritter said. "You promised that you would not reveal what I told you yesterday, knowing all the time you'd tell this man—"
"I did no such thing."
"—who then told a fellow KGB agent," Ritter went on. "Emil?"
Jacobs set his coffee down. "We've been onto Mr. Henderson for some time. It was his contact that had us stumped. Some things are just too obvious. A lot of people in D.C. have regular cab pickup. Henderson's contact was a cab driver. We finally got it right."
"The way we found out about Henderson was through you, Senator." Moore explained: "We had a very good agent in Moscow a few years ago, a colonel in their Strategic Rocket Forces. He'd been giving us good information for five years, and we were about to get him and his family out. We try to do that, you know; you can't run agents forever, and we really owed this man. But I made the mistake of revealing his name to your committee. One week later, he was gone—vanished. He was eventually shot, of course. His wife and three daughters were sent to Siberia. Our information is that they live in a lumber settlement east of the Urals. Typical sort of place, no plumbing, lousy food, no medical facilities available, and since they're the family of a convicted traitor, you can probably imagine what sort of hell they must endure. A good man dead, and a family destroyed. Try thinking about that, Senator. This is a true story, and these are real people.
"We didn't know at first who had leaked it. It had to be you, or one of two others, so we began to leak information to individual committee members. It took six months, but your name came up three times. After that we had Director Jacobs check out all of your staffers. Emil?"
"When Henderson was an assistant editor of the Harvard Crimson, in 1970, he was sent to Kent State to do a piece on the shooting. You remember, the 'Days of Rage' thing after the Cambodian incursion and that awful screw-up with the national guard. I was in on that, too, as luck would have it. Evidently it turned Henderson's stomach. Understandable. But not his reaction. When he graduated and joined your staff he started talking with his old activist friends about his job. This led to a contract from the Russians, and they asked for some information. That was during the Christmas bombing—he really didn't like that. He delivered. It was low-level stuff at first, nothing they couldn't have gotten a few days later from the Post. That's how it works. They offered the hook, and he nibbled at it. A few years later, of course, they struck the hook nice and hard and he couldn't get away. We all know how the game works.