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the pecking order at the Soviet Embassy in London in ‘sixty-eight and ‘sixty-nine. His cover was counselor for culture and sports, mostly to do with sports; he never showed much interest in the opera or ballet. Harry’s right, we never tied him to any operation. He seemed to spend most of his time learning to be an Englishman. He went to the movies all the time; he had suits made—at Huntsman, no less; shoes, Lobb; shirts, Tumbull Asser.
     
    He made it to Ascot, he shot grouse in Scotland, he sailed at Cowes Week. He passed himself off as a Polish aristocrat quite successfully, more English than the English. He went down well. His single known intelligence coup was that he crashed the Carlton Club for lunch nearly every day for the last three months of his tour in London.”
     
    “Isn’t that the Tory club?”
     
    “Right, and they never nailed him. Everybody thought he was a member. One of our people, though, was asked to lunch there one day and nearly choked on his soup when he spotted old Roy. Firsov actually gave him a broad wink. Our man never told his host.”
     
    “That’s terrific,” somebody said, with genuine admiration.
     
    “After ‘sixty-nine we didn’t pay him much attention. He turned up at the Munich Olympics in ‘seventy-two as the deputy manager—really the political officer—of the women’s gymnastics team. He came there directly from the sailing Olympics at Kiel, where he had won a bronze medal in Starboats.”
     
    “Gee, why doesn’t anybody from the agency ever win at the Olympics? Why does the KGB get all the medals?”
     
    “Firsov turned up again at the U.N. for about a year, in ‘seventy-three-seventy-four, where, in contrast to his London service, he kept a low profile. He was in Stockholm for eighteen months in ‘seventy-four-‘seventy-five, again as cultural officer. In neither New York or Stockholm did we ever tag him with anything.” She quickly flipped through other slides taken at these locations.
     
    “Then he went home, we reckoned for more training, and dropped out of sight until he was spotted at Andropov’s funeral, wearing the uniform of a navy captain first grade, or commodore. He would have gone unnoticed then, except that he was the only person seen at the funeral, aside from Mrs. Andropov, who shed an actual tear. crocodile or otherwise.”
     
    “Now that’s interesting,” somebody said.
     
    “Anything on him since then?”
     
    Rule ignored the question and switched off the projector.
     
    “I don’t have a photograph for the other name. None exists.” She returned to her seat.
     
    “The other name is Viktor Sergeivich Majorov.”
     
    There was a stirring in the room.
     
    “A deputy director of the KGB,” somebody offered.
     
    “Chairman of the First Chief Directorate—foreign operations,” Rule said.
     
    “Anything else, anybody?”
     
    “He seemed to lose out in the shuffle when Andropov succeeded Brezhnev,” somebody said.
     
    “I got the impression he was out of favor. Apart from that, we seem to know even less about him than we knew about Andropov.”
     
    Rule flushed slightly. Her section had been made to look like idiots in the press when Andropov had come to power. Although Rule had had a good file on Andropov for years, the administration had somehow furthered the notion that nobody knew anything about the man. All those news stories about how he liked American novels and Glenn Miller records hadn’t helped, either. But today, she figured to make up lost ground.
     
    “We know a bit more, now,” she said.
     
    “A couple of years ago, an Italian computer expert named Emilio Appicella had a visit from a Russian at his workshop in Rome. Appicella had a White Russian grandmother and grew up speaking the language at home. He’s more than just an expert in computers, he’s a pirate. He specializes in stealing computer software and making it run with previously incompatible hardware, without, of course, paying