“What about the ladies?” Stone asked.

“They’re in the drawing room nattering away,” Lance said. “If they want us, they’ll hunt us down.” He had brought the decanter with him, and he refreshed Stone’s port glass and his own.

Stone waited patiently for him to begin.

“Stanford Hedger got out of Yale in the early sixties,” he said, “and he went straight into the Company, having been recruited well before graduation by a professor who later recruited me. It was a good time to join up; he was just completing his training when the Cuban invasion came along—hadn’t had a posting yet, so he couldn’t be blamed for what happened at the Bay of Pigs. But a lot of his superiors were blamed, and a lot of them left the Company, leaving an unusual amount of room for early promotion. Stan was good at languages; he had French, Russian, German, and more than a smattering of Arabic. Later he came by Hebrew, which impressed the Israelis. He was still at the military language school in Monterey, California, when the Bay of Pigs invasion came to grief. It’s a wonderful school; they teach you things like perfect military German or Russian, the idea being that when they got ready to put somebody over a border, he’d blend in.

“Stan got put across what was then the East German border, dressed as a colonel—Stan looked a lot older than he was. He wrought havoc on the other side; he’d walk into a military command when the senior officer was out, flash some bogus orders signed by the Soviet commander, issue a lot of ridiculous orders, and it would take them days, sometimes weeks before they’d get everything straightened out again. He was one step ahead of them for three or four months, then, as they were closing in on him, he hit a West German worker on the head, stole his clothes, and rode back into West Berlin on the S-Bahn, the elevated railway that took several thousand essential workers back and forth to the East from the West every day. It was a bravura performance, almost entirely solo, and it brought him to the attention of the higher-ups—got him decorated, it did.”

“Not a bad start for a bright young man.”

“It was a lot better than not bad, and it helped that Stan came out of a background that the agency loved and trusted—Choate, Yale, and half a dozen of the very best clubs. His father worked for Wild Bill Donovan in the OSS during World War Two, and by that time he was the head of an important New York brokerage house. If you’d tossed the two dozen top men at the Company in a room together and told them to design the perfect agent, they would have come up with Stan.”

“What came next for him?”