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at that time. Communications were difficult. When France fell I didn’t hear from him for months. The State Department told me they’d lost contact with him. There was nothing for me to do but go on with my education—and pray. In the fall of forty-one I got a letter from my father which had passed through dozens of hands to get to me. He was alive and well. He was working in some underground organization helping British fliers who’d been shot down over the Continent to get back home.
    “Then came Pearl Harbor and silence. I wanted to enlist at once, but I was persuaded by my father’s lawyer to finish out the few months of my senior year and get my degree. And then came the word I’d dreaded for so long. My father was dead. He had been captured and shot as a spy by Nazi soldiers. All I wanted was to get into the army and get to Europe to fight. But certain people had different ideas. I was whisked off to Washington, to the offices of the OSS. I spoke five languages. I knew Europe like the back of my hand. I could be a thousand times more valuable to my country working for them than as a foot soldier in the infantry. I—I was boiling with patriotism and hate. So I became an agent for the OSS—and later the CIA—along the way, a double agent and a triple agent, all in the line of duty. I was lucky. I lived through the war. But my job didn’t end. Until a year ago I was still in Europe, still working for the CIA. But never, in all that time, was I George Lovelace. I assumed a series of identities, and those identities were so solidly created that I actually became those different people for periods of time. I was Michael O’Hanlon in England, Charles Veauclaire in France…” He glanced at me. “Karl Kessler in Germany, Gregor Bodanzky in Roumania and other iron-curtain countries, and plain John Smith here in America.”
    Chambrun interrupted. “It was in occupied France in nineteen forty-three that I met one Charles Veauclaire in the resistance movement, and came to know him and love him—and eventually to learn his real identity. It is a story for another time, but it explains my connection with Mr. Lovelace.”
    “All of it is a story for another time,” Lovelace said, “I resigned from service a year ago, and for the first time in twenty-five years I became my real self, George Lovelace. Whoever he may be!” His voice was bitter. “And then a month or two after I’d rented a little cottage in the south of France and settled down to recover from twenty-five years of exhausting tensions, things began to happen. Accidents, I thought at first. A broken steering rod on my car; an almost fatal attack of food poisoning; a self-service elevator that fell; a midnight mugging on a dark side street in Rome. And then a direct word from an unknown enemy. I had been a hunter for twenty-five years. Now I was to know what it was like to be hunted. And one day, without warning, the hunter would pull the trigger and I’d die.”
    Lovelace paused, and the office was so still it hurt.
    “I tried to fight back,” Lovelace said, his voice gone husky. “It was—and is—hopeless. There are so many people in so many places who might hate me and want to revenge themselves—and the relatives of people, and the descendants of people, and the members of organizations I helped to smash. People who, individually, I never knew existed. It—it is like looking for a leaf in a forest. And so I stopped fighting and tried running, changing colors and identities like a chameleon. No use. When I arrived here today at noon there was a letter waiting for me showing that someone knew where I was heading—and was waiting for me.”
    He turned away toward the window. Chambrun slid the stack of envelopes across the desk to Jerry Dodd, who glanced at them and passed them along to Ruysdale. Eventually they came to me. The precise script on the note was characterless, almost like printing.
    Chambrun’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I