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one page from a longer letter. There it was, in Paul’s handwriting.
    What to say to all this? What did she want?
    She said, “I’d like to help you. I speak Arabic. I know you do, too, but not the way I do. I grew up with Arabs. I don’t always understand them, but I know them, and I have a lot of friends among them. And I know things that you might not know about my father.”
    I doubted this. This must have shown on my face, because after an icy moment she decided to explain herself. “My father made a project of telling me everything he remembers about his life.”
    This amazed me. Paul opening his emotional files, even to his own daughter? “Paul never seemed the oral history type to me,” I said.
    “He’s not,” Zarah replied. “But for whatever reason, he wanted to make this transfer of knowledge to me, and he did. In theory, at least, I know everything and everyone my father ever knew.”
    “Everything?”
    “Wouldn’tit be out of character for him to leave anything out after he said he wasn’t going to do that?”
    “Yes.”
    They must have spent days locked up together. No wonder Stephanie hated this young woman.
    I said, “You took notes?”
    “That wasn’t necessary. The material is impossible to forget.” “And you’d share all this with me?”
    “All of it? No. The parts you need to know, yes. For example, I know the name of a man who worked in the Vatican in the thirties and forties. He was a friend of my father’s. This man’s assignment was to deal with Nazi officials during World War II.”
    “And?”
    “He’s still alive,” Zarah said. “At least he was three days ago, when I checked. Very old, but lucid. He’s in Salvator Mundi hospital in Rome.”
    “Okay. But how does he fit in?”
    “He saw my grandmother in Prague in 1942,” Zarah said.

9

    The Old Boys arrived at my house precisely at five in the afternoon. This may sound like an insecure meeting place, but the fact is we were pretty much alone on my block. This was a street on which the near-mighty lived, and at five in the afternoon our privacy was protected by the triage of Washington existence. As twilight fell, my neighbors were all in meetings or having a drink with somebody or stuck in traffic, and my guests would melt into the darkness before they got home. Jack Philindros, dressed like the secretary of state, resembled the time-warp Hellene that he was—olive skin, dense hair slicked back, thick eyebrows that grew together. Charley Hornblower, hearty and long-boned and in need of a shave, was a Falstaff who for many years had been working on his red nose and his connections to people who knew things. Ben Childress and Harley Waters might have been cousins—Yankee faces, Yankee economy; both wore frayed blazers, faded polo shirts and rumpled khakis and drugstore watches. David Wong was his usual self, oldest of the Marx Brothers—bodhisattva smile, quick tongue, quicker brain. He was the only one among us who showed no sign of being the worse for wear. Philindros, a teetotaler, refused the Laphroaig I was offering, but the others did it justice. It was a treat to hear the voices of men and to smellwhisky in the house where I had been all by myself for such a long time.
    That afternoon I had bought five satellite phones at $498 each, including one year’s access for each to communications satellites in 130 different countries. I distributed the phones. Everybody got an index card listing the others’ satellite phone numbers. No code names necessary; we would recognize one another’s voices.
    Philindros, always the security nut, said, “Do you think these phones are secure?”
    “No, but they’re the best way to keep in touch.”
    “You don’t mind having half the world on the party line with us?”
    “What difference does it make?” I asked. “This operation will either succeed within the month or fail miserably in less time than that. If it succeeds we go off the air forever. If it fails and Ibn