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craggy-faced, with hair the color of steel and eyes the color of coal. He wore a three-piece suit and a starched white shirt. Just looking at him made Sullivan start to sweat—not with fear, exactly, but with a sense of helpless inferiority that he was forever trying, and failing, to overcome. Being in Houghton's presence made him feel his belly bulging out over his belt, made him notice the dandruff on his shoulders, made him conscious of everything he wanted to be and was not. It was infuriating; it was devastating.
    "Well hello, Bill, what have you got for me today?" Houghton asked in his patrician Harvard accent. Houghton's tone was exactly right: without a hint of condescension, but clearly intimating that the clock was ticking, and Sullivan had better not be wasting his time. He gestured for Sullivan to sit.
    Sullivan placed the cable on the desk in front of Houghton and sat. "This came in from Moscow station a couple of hours ago."
    Houghton picked it up and read it. "Give me the background here," he said.
    Sullivan sighed. He had given Houghton the background before, pieced together from the reports he had received and his more informal sources in Operations. And Sullivan wondered, not for the first time, if beneath the three-piece suit and the aristocratic features Houghton was not really very bright. But it made no difference. Houghton had the picture window, and Sullivan had the wilted fern, and it didn't matter how that had happened. "Krieger has been running this guy Osipov for a couple of years," he said. "Osipov is evidently quite the ladies' man. One of his conquests is Doctor Olga Chukova. And she works at the Popov Institute, where her job is to look after Valentina Borisova. Borisova was in action again, so Osipov pumped the doctor to find out what had happened."
    "Of course," Houghton said. "And?"
    "There are two issues," Sullivan said, launching into what he had rehearsed. "What to do about the German, and the larger issue of what to do about Borisova. Obviously we have to tell the BND that their man may have been compromised. As for Borisova, I think she's become too dangerous. We should either get her to defect or, if we can't pull that off, we should blackmail this doctor into killing her. You may recall that I've made these proposals before. I can only emphasize that the damage Borisova is doing could be catastrophic. Delaying would only increase the danger."
    There, that hadn't been too bad. Houghton pressed his hands together in front of his face and swiveled a little in his leather chair to catch a glimpse of the world outside his window. Was he deep in thought, Sullivan wondered, or was this just a pose he had mastered? "As I recall," Houghton said slowly, "our evidence that Borisova is actually doing something is rather tenuous."
    "But there is evidence. And we have proof that the Soviets think she's doing something."
    "Or that they want us to think she's doing something, and meanwhile they're up to something entirely different." Houghton sighed. "And if the doctor kills her, the Soviets will certainly find out she did it, and the doctor will certainly implicate Osipov, and we will have lost an interesting asset. That has been the line of reasoning, hasn't it?"
    "I think the potential benefit is worth the risk to a minor asset like Osipov," Sullivan said. Houghton did not appear to be impressed by what he thought. "Look," Sullivan went on, "Schmidt is head of the BND's Moscow station—we can't allow the slightest chance that someone like him might be turned. And the other people we know about—there was some early evidence of success, if you recall—and there is scientific backing for the hypothesis, as I explained in one of my reports..." Sullivan petered out, realizing he had lost Houghton. There was nothing overt—Houghton was far too polite. It was just something Sullivan could sense. Maybe he was psychic. Anyway, he knew he had reached the end of his five minutes.
    Houghton swiveled back